Dr. Laurie Santos
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that, too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
There's a guide for that, too. The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
There's a guide for that too. The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I was going to say redistribution of jobs. That's right, exactly.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I'm exercising like I'm doing all this stuff in a big list of, hey, if you do these things scientifically, seems like you'll feel better. And now I'm doing those and I'm feeling better. So it kind of makes sense.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's also something wonderful about being the happiness professor, because, you know, I have a whole host of students and podcast listeners who, you know, if I'm not doing the right thing, will probably call me out. You know, my students see me. Oh, how's it going? Like, oh, I'm so frustrated. You know, it's such a and they're like, oh, you know, my my students call me head of college Santos.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So it's Hawk Santos. It's what it's abbreviated to like Hawk Santos. Are you supposed to be practicing gratitude? You know, it's like, oh, OK, yes, you're right. You know, so I will get called out if I'm not practicing this stuff.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. You know, I think my friends are my friends, right? You know, they don't necessarily see me as a happiness expert. You know, if anything, I think the happiness expert thing can become a little bit, you know, annoying at times of like, well, you know, I have a podcast on that. You know, it's like, no, they just want me to be their friend. Yeah. And so try to separate the two a little bit.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, you know, there's different kinds of categories of them. You know, one whole set of categories are there's a whole host of things that make us happier that are about connecting with other people. Right. Literally being around other people is considered a necessary condition for high happiness in a lot of studies. And that's true even for introverts.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So just literally connecting with and being around other people, super useful for happiness. But another way that you connect with other people is to focus on what makes them happy. Lots of evidence that doing random acts of kindness, spending money and time on other people, that makes us feel happier.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And in some cases, especially with spending money, you're happier spending money on others than you even are spending on yourself. So this attitude of social connection and doing for others, a powerful set of practices to make us feel happier. Another set of practices really has to do with our mindset.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, do we have a mindset of kind of griping and complaining or are we focused on things we're grateful for? You know, are we paying attention to the negative things in life or are we focused on delights? Are we present enough to savor some of the good things and just, you know, present in general to notice our emotions and notice things?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's evidence suggesting that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. So just the act of a mindset of being present can be really powerful for happiness.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And then there's just a whole host of things that I think we kind of know are good for our physical health, but we forget can be so important for our mental health. You know, things like taking time to exercise, taking time to sleep, which is a huge one, and just having like some time off.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's lots of evidence that something called time affluence, the subjective sense that you have some free time, is much more critical for happiness than we realize. And so... You know, all of those things as I say them, you know, we can go through the scientific studies and so on. And, you know, your listeners might be thinking like, well, I kind of know that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And what I like to say is it's, you know, it's common wisdom, but it's not common practice. You know, how many of those things that I just rattled off?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
aren't things that you're doing right now you know that and then that's why i think it's really critical to know the science because as you hear the science of say nutrition you think like oh maybe i should eat healthier i think as you hear the science of how things like social connection and exercise work you start thinking oh maybe those are things i really do need to get in more of you know i kind of knew it but now that i see the evidence this does seem really important
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, super frustrating. Like the mind is designed in like a really stupid way. We knew this, you know, from other evolutionary studies, but definitely when it comes when it comes to happiness, that's the case. And in one of my upcoming episodes of the Happiness Lab, I talk about this really stupid design feature of the brain where
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's just a different, like a whole different brain system that codes for what we like, you know, so the things we really enjoy versus the things that we want, the things that we're motivated to go after or that we crave. The simplest example is like, you know, sometimes when I'm having a bad day at work, I just like exercise.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
crave like plopping down and watching Netflix or like eating a cupcake or having like a huge glass of wine. But like, if you actually look at how much I would like that, the Netflix is going to make me apathetic and the cupcake is going to give me the jitters and the wine, I'm not going to sleep very well.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Like ultimately the liking has this disconnect from the wanting and you get it in the reverse direction too. Like I don't, after a long day at work, crave a really hard Peloton ride. or a really hard yoga class or taking a long walk with a friend. I don't have the same motivation I have for that that I do for the cupcake or the boring, relaxing thing or a hit of social media.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But even though I don't have the wanting, if I actually engage in that practice, I'll feel so much better. And so this is a dumb way to design a brain. You think that wanting would kind of go with liking, but it just sort of doesn't. And that means we spend a lot of time craving and easily going after things we won't really like.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And it means we don't have mechanisms, except very kind of rational, you know, push ourselves. We don't have these kind of low-grade craving mechanisms to go after things that really will benefit our happiness, but we don't realize we want them.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, there's you know, there's two ways to do it. You know, one is this very rational force yourself way, which which I harness a lot, which is like, OK, even though I don't really feel like calling anyone right now, I know the science. And if I talk to someone, I'll feel better. Right. You know, so you kind of the force yourself approach. Right.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But the force yourself approach works best if it's paired with the second practice, which is forcing yourself to notice what you like. Because the wanting system can update. It just doesn't do it naturally. But after a really hard yoga class or after calling that friend when you didn't feel like it, take time to notice, like, does this feel good? And you're like, yeah, this actually feels nice.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I had this, you know, pre-COVID when I was going to a yoga studio, this wonderful yoga instructor at Right at the end of a hard class would have you take this moment like, OK, now take a moment to notice. Notice how you feel after this class, like notice how this made you feel. And after you're like, damn, that was great. Like, I want more of this feeling, you know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But we tend not to be present. We tend not to mindfully notice. And that's true for the stuff you really crave, but you might not like after you like open the fridge four times and grab that thing to eat that you didn't really feel like. Take a moment to be like, am I satisfied now? Not really. Want to grab something else.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And once you notice that your wanting system can be like, OK, kind of duly noted. Got it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
got it let's take note of that for next time so kind of forcing yourself to ignore your wanting system and just act through this very rational path but then also mindfully noticing what you really like those things can start to update your craving system at least a little bit but the systems are always going to be disconnected unfortunately it's just our minds are not really designed that well for wanting all the things that we like
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, one another dumb feature of the way our minds work when it comes to happiness is the fact that we don't necessarily think of the good things in our life in objective terms. We think of them in relative terms. And that means that seeing ourselves on social media, seeing what's going on with other people on social media. that can really affect our happiness in some dumb ways.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Take your body image, for example, right? You know, you might objectively think you have a certain body that's good or not so good or whatever, but we don't necessarily think in terms of our objective sense. We think relative.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And so as soon as you go on Instagram and you look at, you know, the bikini pictures of someone else or take your objective sense of how good your vacation was or how rich you were, how nice your house is, then, you know, you watch the celebrity, you know, TikTok feeds and you're like, oh, Like my house isn't that good or my vacation sucked and things like that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We're really susceptible to social comparison when it comes to evaluating anything in our life, our abilities, our amount of money, our salary, our house, whatever. And that means that we can easily start feeling bad even when we're in objectively a good situation. My favorite extreme example of this was a study that looked at the emotions of different Olympic medalists.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So probably gold medalists probably feeling pretty happy, like, you know, makes sense. They just want a gold medal. Yeah. But what about silver medalists? You know, maybe slightly less happy. But what researchers find is that if you look at the emotional expressions that silver medalists show on the stand.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
They're not just slightly less happy. They're actively feeling awful. They're showing signs of extreme sadness, contempt, anger. It's not just slightly less happy. It's actively negative. Wow. If you think about what I just said, it sort of makes sense, right? Because the silver medalist isn't thinking, I'm objectively the second best in the world.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I objectively beat the other 7 billion people in whatever my sport is. They're just thinking about one reference point that makes them feel awful. The gold. They were almost there and they didn't get it. So they feel like a loser. But what's striking is if you look at the bronze medalist, you see something completely different because their reference point isn't the gold. Right.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Like they were, I don't know, like, you know, 30 seconds off or they like lost two matches or something. Their reference point is like, if I just messed up a little bit more, I would go home completely empty handed. Right. Like I wouldn't even be on the stand at all. Right. Right. And so they're showing signs of true ecstasy.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
In some cases, they're showing expressions that are even happier than the gold medalist because their reference point is like, phew, look how lucky I am. I almost totally screwed up.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And I love this metaphor because, you know, it shows us that it doesn't matter what's going on objectively. It matters who we're comparing ourself against. And that means sometimes we can be an objectively a really good spot, but feel kind of awful about it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So, you know, we could think about the chemicals were dealt in a couple of ways. Often we think about it in terms of, you know, our kind of genetic lottery. Right. You know, are you naturally a happy person? Are you naturally a kind of down in the dumps person? And just like circumstances, what we find is that there is a genetic component to happiness.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, so there you know, if you're born from a long line of overly optimistic people, you're more likely to be overly optimistic. But the amount of that heritability is tiny. What? You know, it's probably tinier than something like height or weight in the U.S. And especially with like weight, we know that that's something that obviously your environment can shape a lot.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And so while there is some heritable component to happiness, it's much tinier than we think. And this is really good news, right? You know, it would suck if you're like, hey, you're just born to be happy or born to be not so happy. And that's it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
What the science is really telling us is that there's some heritable component, but there's a lot of action that we can take through our mindsets, through our behaviors to change things around. And that's great because, you know, putting this all together, it means our genetics don't predict our happiness that much and our circumstances don't predict our happiness that much. Like we don't.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
necessarily get to control whether we're born into complete luxury or born into poverty. We don't necessarily get to control what our genetic heritage is, but we all can completely control our mindsets and our behavior. So it's good news. The bad news is that changing those mindsets and behavior, as you probably guess, takes a lot of work.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, I think I'm glad you brought this up because I think this is really important. You know, so many of the hacks, you know, we are talking about today are ones that really can improve your well-being. But, you know, there's some points when you need a hack and there's some points where you need something that's much deeper.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
The analogy like to use is, you know, imagine you go into your doctor and you say, hey, doctor, I have high blood pressure. You know, what should I do? Your doctor might say, hey, you know, get on the treadmill and exercise a little bit more, you know, eat, you know, eat these fruits and vegetables every day or something.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But if you walked into your doctor's office, you're saying, doctor, you know, I'm having chest pains. I'm having acute cardiac arrest right now. Your doctor wouldn't be like, well, get on the treadmill. You know, like for a half hour a day, like your doctor would, you know, an emergency intervention would take place. And I think it's worth recognizing that our mental health works the same way.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
The kinds of things I'm talking about are in some sense preventative medicine. You know, they're there so that you don't wind up in a state of kind of acutely feeling clinically depressed or suicidal or something worse. Right. You know, you they're there so that you can protect your mental health so you don't get to that point.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But if you're experiencing true depression, you know, hard for you to do your daily activities or anxiety so powerful that you're experiencing panic attacks, that's a sign that you might need professional help. All the hacks I mentioned are good.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, once you get out of that acute state, just like the heart attack person, as soon as you get out of experiencing cardiac arrest, the next step is going to be to go back to some of those preventative measures once you kind of get out of the hospital. And I think the same thing is true for clinical parts of these diseases.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You might also want to go back to experiencing gratitude and meditating in these things. But it is important to get acute care if the mental health situation you're in is acute.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the nice things about this being all of this stuff being evidence based is that It allows you to kind of do your own experimentation. Right. The answer of how much meditation you, you know, particular podcast listener need might depend on all kinds of things. Right. And so the key is to sort of try it out.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
One thing we know, though, is that sometimes it takes less than you really expect. Take something like gratitude. There's evidence that just scribbling down three things that you're grateful for every day, that can be enough to significantly boost your well-being in as little as two weeks. Like, it doesn't take that much time.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's evidence, for example, from Hedy Kober's lab at Yale that even as little as 10 minutes of meditation a day can really start to improve your well-being and some mental health symptoms, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And so it doesn't take long. What it takes is some consistency. And so my instinct is like because sometimes we hear these tips like, all right, I'm going to drop everything and do, you know, like 70 hours of meditation. It's like, no, no, no. Just start really small. Allow yourself to do these baby steps and test it out. How are you feeling? Are you feeling better?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Is it making is it making things better? Is it making things worse? And so allowing ourself the self-compassion to engage in these baby steps, I think, is really important.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think, you know, we're not good at understanding the amount of self-compassion we need to motivate ourselves. I think, again, this is a spot where I think our minds get it wrong.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We think the right way to motivate ourselves is to become these horrid drill instructors and like yell at ourselves in our head in a way that we'd never speak to a friend or a child or someone we cared about, hopefully. Right. But that's And it just doesn't work. That convinces us that it's not good to try. We end up setting our standards lower. We end up procrastinating more.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Self-compassion, it turns out, can actually allow you to engage in new habits better and more effectively and with less procrastination. That's not our theory. We go for the drill sergeant approach. But we'd be better off kind of mindfully paying attention to what's going on and recognizing that we're just human and giving ourselves a little bit more of a benefit of a doubt.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And we're like, you know, the dickiest of dicks is often the person in our head. Right. You know, it's like, wait, I would never say, you know, that that thing I just said to myself in my head, I would never say that to another human. Why am I talking to myself that way?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, the term positive psychology began when scientist Marley Seligman, who kind of invented the field or thought that the founder of the field, you know, really had this intuition that so much of psychology is about, you know, what he called kind of below baseline, right? Like I'm trying to cure depression. I'm trying to cure anxiety or something like that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But he realized that we didn't have, as he called it, a good science of kind of going above baseline. You know, there's baseline and then there's feeling like you're flourishing. You know, then there's getting social connection in life, feeling really present, experiencing joy. And so he really christened this name of this field, positive psychology, in order to focus on those things.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But I think positive psychology gets the wrong rap. I think there's this idea that like, well, you have to only be positive. But, you know, if you look at what this research is really showing, there's a lot of evidence that a real, true, happy life, a successful life, a healthy life involves experiencing negative emotions, allowing those, not running away from them.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There's lots of evidence suggesting that there are different techniques you can use to navigate those emotions and sort of feel them without getting like destroyed by them. And so I think, you know, when you hear these terms, positive psychology, positivity, they can kind of feel a little cheesy and get a bad rap that it's like positive, positive, positive all the time.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But that's not really when you dig into the field what it's showing. My sense is that, you know, the whole goal is to get to
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
you know this idea of eudaimonia this rich meaningful life and you do that not through you know putting blinders on and being a pollyanna and like you know trying only to experience happy happy happy no matter what you do that by having a full life which is rich with lots of emotions and experiences yeah that's that's such a good point about letting yourself feel those negative emotions but not necessarily like succumbing to them you know not letting them win all the time
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think we, you know, we get that wrong. Like, I think our instinct, again, is this idea that while there's some negative emotion, I should run away from that or the right move would be to sort of suppress it, you know, stiff upper lip.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But there's evidence from James Gross at Stanford that the act of suppressing our emotions can lead to things like increased cardiac stress or even can cause us to have some problems with memory and decision making. You do worse on a memory test when you're trying to suppress some negative emotion. Hmm. So it has negative costs.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We're much better off if we can find ways to regulate and allow those emotions, right, to experience them, give them some time and then be self-compassionate and nurture ourselves through them.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
All the time. I mean, you know, as we've been talking about, like our minds lie to us all the time about this stuff. I mean, the biggest one, the one that my students fall prey to so much is that happiness is about circumstances. You know, that happiness is about money in particular.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
My Yale students were all thinking about what job they want to get when they get out of this Ivy League university and what salary they're going to get and things. Now you tell them that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
after a certain reasonable middle class income money doesn't matter for happiness anymore and they want to fight you on it they're like well you know what if i spent it differently or what if i went on vacation to these places over and over again you're like nope doesn't count like or at the very least it's not so much that money doesn't matter for happiness it's just there are so many other things you could focus on that matter much much more you know maybe yeah you know if you go up like that minuscule amount if you put all this work in and all this time in to earn more
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Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Maybe you get a teeny bump, maybe, maybe not. But like if you just wrote down three things you're grateful for, that would work way more effectively. Like we know that empirically.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, there's also different spots online where you can do that. In fact, Marty Seligman, who we mentioned, this founder of positive psychology, has a website called Authentic Happiness. If you kind of Google the Authentic Happiness test.
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You know, you don't need a fancy test. It's really kind of all things considered. How happy are you with your life? I mean, this is the beauty. There's not for better or for worse. There's not a thermometer that we can use for happiness as scientists where we put it in like, boop, you're 98.6, you know, happy. You know, you just have to answer it for yourself.
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And that kind of feels, you know, a little bit not as legit scientifically. But in practice, that's what we're really trying to get at. We're trying to get at your own perception of how things are going. And if things are going well, then they're going well.
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You'd think. I'm inclined to be honest because one thing the happiness science shows is that being honest about our negative emotions is important, too. So when things are tough, I'm like, you know, it's tough. But, you know, today's been a good day.
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Yeah, it's really hard to ask animals about their happiness because, you know, I can do the self-report measure with you. It's harder to do that with a banana slug or a bonobo or something. Physiologically, we know they go through a lot of the same states as humans, but it's hard to know for sure if those physiological states correlate with this subjective state.
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I only know that you have the subjective state because you tell me. And so even though everything we can objectively look at, like suggest that it, you know, we're feeling the same thing subjectively, it's really hard to know for sure.
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I think anxious people can definitely be happy. I think there are a lot of strategies we can use to regulate and allow our anxiety. I think part of the problem with anxiety is that we try to run away from it, that we try to avoid it at all costs. But that's yet another emotion that I think we can kind of sit with. feeling really anxious right now. It's an eight out of 10.
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You can sort of surf that anxiety urge and get to the other side and then do some work to sort of nurture yourself. So I think you can be anxious and happy, just like you can be sad and happy and you can be angry and happy. You know, to have a truly happy life requires experiencing all those emotions, but finding ways to kind of navigate them so they don't take over.
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There's a lot of feedback that we get from other people's emotions, from our own feedback, from our own actions. You know, so pretending you're happy, acting like you're happy can often put you in a happy state, in part because it puts the people around you in a happy state. And we know that there's a lot of evidence for what's called emotional contagion. Right.
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Just like if I'm around happy people, I'm just going to catch the emotions of that happy person and the reverse. Right. If I'm around those negative Nellies like that's going to I'm going to catch that, too. And so there is a kind of fake it till you make it. There's associate with the people who have the emotions that you want to experience.
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It's a powerful way to kind of use your situation, your social environment to build in well-being.
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Yeah, I think, you know, the way to do it, I think, really is to try to bring some of these practices in naturally. Right. I mean, first of all, give that friend some social connection. Right. Just the very act of you talking to them, being around them, spending time with them is going to improve their well-being. I think you can also bring your attitudes of that are positive. Right.
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Sure. I'm Laurie Santos and my pronouns are she, her.
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You know, if you're expressing things that you're grateful for, you know, if you're savoring things and feeling a little bit present, you know, that that kind of thing is naturally going to rub off on them because of emotional contagion, because of behavioral contagion.
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But the biggest thing you can do is, I think, check in, you know, check in and allow yourself to be present and be there for someone who needs you. Really powerful way to use your happiness to positively affect others.
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Yeah, great, great question. And it's something that we don't have that much good data on yet. You know, everything we know suggests that microbiome affects all kinds of stuff. It would be surprising, I think, in some ways if it didn't affect our well-being and our happiness.
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But, you know, this is just a new area of work where we're learning new things all the time and we don't really have a great verdict yet. But, you know, if you want to throw research money onto something that I think will be really telling in the next 10 years of happiness science, I think microbiome might be a spot to do that.
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Let's ride this thing to the top. Poop samples from very happy people.
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It's UED. Oh, sorry. Yes. Eudemology, maybe. Eudemology. Yes. Like eudaimonia is the word. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, there are actually some strong evidence that happiness seems to affect our longevity in super interesting ways. One of the most famous studies on this looked at a group of individuals that had really similar lifestyles. Because if you think about it, this is a hard study to do, right? We want to ask, like, are happier people living longer?
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But of course, there's lots of things that affect whether you live longer. And so the researchers tried to find a population that had like reasonably low risk factors and a really similar lifestyle. And they hit upon studying nuns. The way they did this was that they went back to nuns journals that they had in their 20s.
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I guess nuns, at least in one of these convents, kind of did some journaling when they first joined the nunnery.
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So you go back when the nuns are in their 20s and you look at their journals and you do like a text analysis, like, you know, you run the text of their journals through something that pulls out all the happy words and pulls out all the kind of negative words or just like any emotion words whatsoever.
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And then you use those textual analyses to predict how many of the nuns live into their 80s and 90s. And what you find is that the happier nuns are just living surprisingly longer, you know, in some cases like decades longer than the nuns on average who are just sadder, which is really quite striking. It suggests that happiness might really be affecting like how long we live.
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So, yeah, important to focus on, not just because happiness feels good, but it might make you live longer, too.
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Yeah. On average, the data really suggests happier. There's some interesting like lifespan work on happiness. You know, you're kind of happy when you're young. And then as you become like an adult in middle age, especially after you have children, in fact, you know, happiness tends to dip.
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But then as soon as you kind of go back to empty nesting, you know, when the kids go off to college, then the slope of happiness kind of goes back up. And so it's something to look forward to as you age. On average, older people tend to be happier.
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Yeah, I think this is one of the spots where those two constructs of happiness can be so powerful, the sort of happiness in your life and happiness with your life. Lots of evidence that kids kind of boost the happiness with your life. You know, you get the sense of meaning and so on. But if you look at people's time budgets in terms of what they spend their time on, you
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The thing that often feels the most miserable is spending time with your kids, like in your life, you know, when you're picking up, you know, the toys and dealing with the dirty diapers and things. That is the thing that people seem to, on average, enjoy kind of the least.
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It ranks up there with like commuting and like shopping for groceries, you know, not like a heavy endorsement. But that's kind of complicated. I think that's one of these reasons that, you know, these constructs are kind of helpful. There are certain things that you do for meaning that in the moment don't feel great, but they wind up giving you meaning.
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And I think the tips are powerful, too, because they're hacks you can do to enjoy your time more with your kids. Right. If you have strategies for managing stress and negative emotions, that can probably make your time with your kids even happier. Right.
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And I think you're doing it right because there's a lot of evidence that the furry babies, especially dogs, there's more research on dogs, really do have a significant effect on happiness. But again, that research is interesting because it's not the dogs per se. It's kind of the benefits that we get from dogs. So dogs get us out exercising. Dogs allow us to make more social connections.
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They are a social connection, but then they also let us socially connect physically. with people. They make us more present. You know, when you're with your dog and you're playing fetch with your dog, it's hard to like be distracted or checking your email. Right.
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And so it seems like dogs don't necessarily inherently make us happier, but they make us do a lot of the practices I've mentioned that lead to higher happiness.
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Yeah. I mean, when you think about technology, it's worth remembering we can do technology for we can use technology for all kinds of things. Right. You know, we could use technology to scribble in a gratitude journal or I could pick up a phone and call my mom. Right. And have a social connection. Often we're not using our technology in ways that boost happiness. We could, but often we're.
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checking social media, getting this sort of NutraSweet social connection, but not real stuff. I'm distracted and not paying attention to the real things in life. I could be present looking at the trees or talking to the people around me, but I'm scrolling through some dumb thing on the internet. And so it's not that technology in and of itself is bad. It's just that the way we use it often is bad.
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Yeah, well, I've been a psychologist, you know, forever. I think I've always been interested in the human mind and how it works and things. But, you know, before I got into the study of happiness specifically, I was really interested in the origins of cognition. So the origins of how we think. And I studied that by looking at non-human animals. I studied how monkeys and dogs think about the world.
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And it's kind of built to make it harder for us to use it well. You know, every app is in some ways competing for your attention, right? They want to notify you of stuff and have the dings that sort of give you a little burst of reward every time you get some new piece of information.
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And that means that our apps and our technology is kind of constantly competing with real life, you know, for our attention. Sadly, I think there's domains in which the technology is sort of winning, you Which makes sense.
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You know, at my podcast, I talked to the University of British Columbia researcher Liz Dunn, and she had this lovely quote where she's like, you know, imagine if to your next, you know, like dinner date with your husband, like you took a big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow it was, you know, DVDs of every movie you've ever seen, you know, a big pile of CDs of every song in the universe, like
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Printouts of every family reunion ever, like, you know, printouts of all your emails, like, you know, big piles of porn. Right. Like, you know, if there was a wheelbarrow with all that stuff next to you, you'd be distracted. You'd want to be going through it the whole dinner. I'd be like, oh, let me go back to my family reunion. Yeah. But like what she says is like your brain isn't stupid.
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Like your brain knows that on the other side of your iPhone is all that stuff. Yeah. So there's something constantly in your brain that has to be like, no, no, no, no. Pay attention to this conversation because. Don't check your email. Don't check your email. And that kind of is constantly a little bit depleting. It's definitely distracting, but it's a little bit depleting as well.
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I mean, when you think about what's on the other, you know, like weather, you know, like printouts of weather predictions. Oh, yeah. Every TikTok video in the history of the Internet. Right. I mean, it's a huge, huge slot machine. And sadly, you know, I mean, I love my husband. We have some great conversations.
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But is every conversation with my husband more interesting than literally everything on the Internet? Right. You know, not necessarily. And what that means is we're so tempted by that stuff over in real life social connection, even though we know that the in real life stuff is going to make us so much happier.
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Yeah, well, I think, again, you know, if we're really going for true happiness, my guess is that those cases are occurring probably less often than you think. And by that, I mean what, you know, the real happiness seems to come from doing acts of kindness for other people. Real happiness seems to come from focusing on kindness. the happiness of others, right?
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And that was kind of my day job until I took on a new role on Yale's campus where I became what's called a head of college. And so Yale's kind of like one of these weird schools like in Harry Potter where there are like colleges within a college, you know, like kind of Gryffindor, Slytherin sort of thing. I'm head of Silliman College, and that means I live on campus with students and students.
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You know, so already, you know, we're kind of in a bind of like, well, if other people aren't happy, then that's probably going to mean we're not happy, right? Because we've talked about happiness doesn't seem to come from our circumstances. So it's not like we're trying to beat other people or go after these accolades, right? Happiness comes from being grateful and present from what you have.
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And so my guess is that more often than not, if you're pursuing happiness correctly, right, you know, based on what the science suggests, You're just not going to run into situations where you're sort of competing or hurting other people's happiness because other people's happiness is part and parcel of getting true happiness.
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That's interesting. I don't know of any data that have looked specifically at IQ and happiness. My guess is there's probably not the relationship that you're looking at. But there is definitely a relationship between happiness and optimism, obviously. I think optimism is sort of part of our general happy life.
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And the good news, based on this question, is like you can, in fact, learn these kinds of things. You know, the fastest thing to do is really try to just train your brain to pay attention to good things out there. Our minds are naturally tuned to negative things, you know, the yucky stuff out there, the griping. But we can tune our minds towards positive things.
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You can focus on what you're grateful for. Another practice that I've been into lately, which I talk about on the podcast, is focusing on delights. Sometimes gratitude can feel sort of cheesy, but you can just focus on like things that are delightful out there, you know, like You know, the sunshine, like that's delightful. The fact that coffee exists, that's delightful.
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You know, I don't know, some funny video on the Internet. That's delightful. Right. Like training your brain towards things that you really enjoy that kind of cause delight.
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When I started the role, I was expecting it to be, you know, like, you know, rainbows and parties and just like happy students all the time. But when I got there, you know, I was really seeing the college student mental health crisis up close and personal, you know, with so many students reporting feeling depressed and anxious.
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again your brain is going to focus on whatever you give it data for so if you give it data about things that you're feeling really grateful about or that are really delightful that's what your brain is going to start noticing i love that you just are you're constantly filling evidence folders for like things are shitty and things are good it's like what what are you putting in your evidence folder pretty much
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And it's not just like, you know, what you're picking. It's like you're you're training your brain to look for that stuff. In my podcast, I interview this fantastic guest, Ross Gay, who's a poet and an essayist who has this book called The Book of Delights. And he decided that for every day for a year after his birthday, he would write an essay about something that delighted him.
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And he talks about how at first he was, like, really worried, like, am I really going to find things that really delight me? And he said that, you know, even just a week in, like, he kind of tuned his mind to find these things. You know, so walking down the street, he'd be like, oh, that dude's T-shirt is delightful. Like, oh, that, like, cat on the street is delightful.
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Like, he just kind of shifted his perception. and tuned his mind more towards the good things than the bad things. Our brains evolutionarily are naturally tuned towards the bad things. Makes sense. You want to see the tiger that's going to jump out at you. But we can control that tuning.
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And just by, you know, like taking some explicit work to pay attention to the things we're grateful for, to the things that delight us, to the good stuff out there.
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And, you know, even if they weren't, you know, at clinical levels of mental health dysfunction, they were just kind of feeling stressed and sort of fast forwarding their life, you know, and just feeling overwhelmed and really busy. And so I kind of wanted to do something about it.
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How do we do it? Yeah. Yeah. Tough. I mean, this is like a really real one. Right. Because there's a lot of bad stuff out there right now. You know, structural racism, horrible global pandemic, you know, like the list goes on.
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So, I mean, I think one thing that helps me is recognizing that if if I want to be the kind of person who's an ally for all that stuff, all the yucky stuff in the world who wants to have the resilience to fix it.
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i'm not going to be able to do that if i'm incredibly anxious and overwhelmed and burnt out i'm going to be able to do that best if i'm really in a happy state if i'm really kind of feeling good like if i kind of have put my own oxygen mask on first right and in fact there's evidence that so many of the things we were talking about that are parts of a happy life help for doing hard things.
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My favorite one is that people who are grateful are better at what's called self-regulation. They're better at, you know, doing the hard thing today to help their future self, whether that's, you know, saving for retirement or eating healthier or, you know, putting work into hard, scary problems like that just require a lot of hard, scary work.
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And so for me, it's made me feel like if I want the world to be a better place, I can't afford to be down in the dumps freaking out about it. I really need to put energy into doing these practices for myself so that I'll be hopefully one of the people that has the bandwidth to help with some of this stuff.
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So far from feeling guilty, I feel like we might want to feel guilty for the opposite thing, right? You know, do what we can to kind of fix things. It really does require not just working on these structures, but working on our emotions so that we have the bandwidth to fix those structures that might be messed up.
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You know, I didn't like being in this culture where so many students were stressed and depressed and just kind of not enjoying their time in college. And so I thought, well, let me, you know, figure out what my field of psychology says about this. And psychology gives us so many tips that we can use to feel better. And so I thought. All right, great. I'll, you know, I'll do what professors do.
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There's lots and lots of good things. But, you know, if I have to shift towards negativity, you know, I would say the hardest thing is that, you know, one of the things I really try to pay attention to is this phenomenon of time affluence, the subjective sense that I have a lot of free time.
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And being a happiness guru, especially in an age where there's a lot of bad stuff going on in a global pandemic, it keeps me pretty busy because, you know, a lot of people want advice, a lot of people want help. And that means I have to put a lot of work in to protect my time. So the hardest thing is protecting my time in the midst of everything else going on. I can totally understand that.
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And that's hard, right? Because, you know, I get into my inbox. I'm like, oh, that listener has this really cool thing to say or that student has this really cool question. But I also know that if I answer all those, that means I'm not spending time with the people I care about and I'm not just having time to meditate and exercise. So it's hard prioritizing the right stuff.
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But time affluence is definitely something I need to work on prioritizing.
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Oh, man, there's so many best things. I mean, I honestly think the best things are my students. I love them so much. I love interacting with them. They teach me so much and I'm so privileged to get to work with them. That's great.
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I'll make a whole class on this. So, you know, I prepped this class that I christened psychology in the good life and, you know, slapped it together thinking, you know, 30 or so students would take it. And you can imagine my surprise when a quarter of the entire campus enrolled the first time I taught it. Yeah, we couldn't we couldn't fit the class anywhere.
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We had to teach it in a concert hall on campus because that was the only place it would fit. But, you know, that showed me students are voting with their feet. They don't like this culture of feeling so overwhelmed and stressed. And I think they really wanted, you know, science based strategies they could use to feel better.
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Exactly. And, you know, I mean, I think, you know, what one of the things that's interesting is we learn as you look into the science, you learn that, you know, some of those ancient pieces of wisdom were quantified. quite accurate. Some of the platitudes we see are quite accurate, but some not so much. And I think that's why we need an empirical approach.
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We can just ask scientifically, okay, if we find happy people, what are they doing differently? What are their strategies? How are they spending their time? And then We can let the not so happy people copy that and really test. Are they feeling happier? Are they feeling less depressed?
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And, you know, these days we have almost, you know, two decades worth of scientific work that's done that in this field of positive psychology. And, you know, we've learned a lot. There's lots of evidence based tips out there for what you can do to feel better.
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Well, it's interesting. The work I was doing with dogs and monkeys was more kind of figuring out, you know, how they decide what they know about the world.
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But there was a rich similarity, which is that when you start looking into the happiness science work, you quickly realize a big way that we get things wrong, which is that we have some really bad theories about the kinds of things that make us happy.
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You know, I talk to my students and on my podcast, I often say, you know, our minds are lying to us about the sorts of things that will make us happy. You know, we think it's money and changing our circumstances and, you know, getting the perfect accolade or the perfect grade. But those things seem not to work. And that tied really nicely to some of the work we were doing yesterday.
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in animals where we showed that some of the deepest irrationalities we have in our species might be evolutionarily old. They're kind of built in. And I think the same thing about some of the things we get wrong about happiness, like even knowing these studies, it's hard for me to change my intuitions. You know, I still think, well, if I hit Powerball today, oh, man, I'd be so much happier.
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Or, you know, if it just wasn't raining today, I'd be so much happier. If, you know, we could change my circumstances drastically, that would really improve my well-being. But I know the scientific work that suggests that's probably not the case.
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Yeah, it's a few of all of those things. I mean, I think one thing in terms of our circumstances, you know, it's worth noting that if you're in really dire traumatic circumstances, yes, getting different circumstances will really improve your well-being. You know, if you're living below the poverty line or if you're in an abusive relationship, you do want to change those circumstances.
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But for many of the people privileged enough to listen to this podcast who can, you know, put food on the table, you know, has a roof over their head and so on, you know, changing your circumstances might not affect your happiness as much as you think. For many of us, changing our circumstances isn't the fastest path to feeling a little bit happier.
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Often it's more about changing our mindset, which incorporates a lot of the things you mentioned. You know, it's about changing the way we see the world, changing the way we see our circumstances, changing the extent to which we're present with our circumstances and our emotions. And it's also, you know, tapping into things that give us meaning in life, you know, giving us a sense of purpose.
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So all of those things seem to matter a lot more than what our salary level is. Or for my students, you know, the last grade they got on their midterm and things like that. Backing up a little bit.
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Yeah, tricky. I mean, we could take, you know, many, many podcasts, you know, fighting over a definition of happiness. You know, social scientists tend to try to be simpler than philosophers. So they go for a definition of happiness that's pretty easy to measure. And so most social scientists think about happiness as sort of being happy in your life and with your life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And so, you know, being happy in your life is just having Lots of positive emotions, right? You know, like you have experienced joy and laughter and fun and less often things like sadness and anger. Not that those aren't there at all, right? Because a full and complete life includes some negative emotions. But, you know, the ratio is pretty good. That's sort of being happy in your life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Being happy with your life is that meaning, that sense of purpose. It's the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied am I with my life? And those two constructs are ones that scientists measure separately. And it's worth noting that they do sometimes dissociate. You know, I think if you go on Instagram, there are a lot of people who are happy in their life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
They're eating these hedonistic meals on some plane somewhere. But, you know, if you look at how they're feeling with their life, I bet they're feeling pretty empty. And you can also have cases of the opposite. My dean, who I live with here in the college, you know, she and her wife recently just had a baby and newborn baby. You know, you're really happy with your life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Oh, my God, this rich sense of meaning being a mom. But in your life, dirty diapers and not sleeping. And so they can dissociate. But best case scenario is that you're feeling pretty high on both of those.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, it kind of depends. I think, you know, we and sometimes scientists, philosophers, you know, all of us, you know, we can get really kind of tied up on the specifics, right? You know, is joy a subcomponent of happiness or is it bigger than happiness? What about contentment and things like that? I'm more of the opinion of you kind of know them when you see them, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, I want a construct that's easy enough that if I give people some sort of self-report measure that they can tell me about it. But beyond that, I don't want to get into a big fight about, well, is it joy? Is it contentment? Is it 45 percent or is it 50 percent? You know, I think you kind of know it when you see it. But but we could probably dig in. I mean, there's nuance there.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, the kind of calm contentment feels different than a kind of manic, excited happiness than, you know, a deep sense of joy. You know, these these are different constructs and maybe importantly so. But overall, what we're going for is as many of those as possible.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, it's definitely like statistically speaking, made me much happier. You know, I'm a nerd, right? So I take these surveys myself about, you know, how satisfied are you with your life on a scale of one to 10 and stuff like that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And, you know, on most 10 point scales of both kind of happiness in my life and happiness with my life, I've gone up at least a point since focusing on this stuff. But it's not like magic, right? It's in part just because I'm I'm doing the things that I keep telling my students to do. You know, I'm practicing gratitude. I'm improving my social connection. I'm meditating more.