Dr. Laurie Santos
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 162
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 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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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 165
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'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.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Finally, we could get to space where we could really evolve the microbiota.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We talked about too few studies of dog and primate cognition, way too few studies of microbiota cognition, unfortunately.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And now the picture seems to be, well, the slope might go up a teeny tiny, like negligible bit, but it doesn't go up as much as, say, getting an extra 10 minutes of exercise in or another 20 minutes of sleep or scribbling the things you're grateful for, all those things. will impact your happiness much more than like quintupling your income. And so do your resources affect happiness?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And they probably don't have the capacity to do the other two. So it's not like they're not doing it and kind of missing out. They kind of have brains that don't let them notice they're missing out. But we, unfortunately, have brains that would feel – Like we were really missing out if we just had the sensory experiences, you know, without the good stories.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think you're sort of pointing to this idea that sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. The with your life part has the kind of medium timescale stories, but also the really big ones, right? You know, is my life, am I doing anything really meaningful with my life? Am I finding purpose and so on?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The funny thing, though, is to get to that big time scale to find a sense of purpose and stuff like that, sometimes it pays to do stuff at the local level, at the medium and shorter term time scale.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And one of the things researchers have found is that if you're engaging in activities at the short term time scales that kind of fit with your values or what these positive psychologists have often called your strengths, Um, that can be a way to sort of achieve purpose. So, so what are strengths?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So researchers do this thing where they want to look at like all the valuable things people can do out in the world. Right. And so what are the things that you value? Um, and folks like Chris Peterson and colleagues have come up with this list of what they call different character strengths.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, if you ain't got any resources, you definitely will feel happier if you can get them. But if you have a lot, getting more really isn't going to help.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And there are things that like, you know, you can actually, if you Google online character strengths, you'll get the big list that often people talk about there being 24. But they're just universally good things like being brave, you know, citizenship, humor, like, you know, social intelligence, love of learning, right? You know, kind of empathy, fairness, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
These kind of sets of values that we have. People differ in how much they value one or the other. You know, so I could ask you, Andrew, like what's better, like bravery or humor? Probably both pretty high for you, I would imagine. But like about prudence versus love of learning, I have a guess.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
More humor. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, the point is there are individual differences in this. And there are formal tests you can do online. If you Google the VIA character strengths test, you'll see these 24 and you can do one of these very systematic kind of tests to do it. But really just trying to think about, like, what are the values that you value?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And the ones that come to mind as being particularly about you, the ones that you resonate with, are what somebody like Chris Peterson would call your signature strengths. They're the ones that when you execute them, you kind of feel like things are meaningful and purposeful and so on.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so the idea is that one recipe for a purposeful life at the local level is trying to engage in behaviors that allow you to use more of these values or strengths effectively.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And one of my favorite pieces of research that looks at both the power of this and how even though if it seems like that those are hard things to bring in, like you should bring them in more, is some work by this woman, Amy Resninsky, who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And she does these studies on what she calls job crafting, which is a practice where you take your normal job description as whatever your job is. and figure out ways that you can infuse your signature strengths into them. So as a podcaster, if your signature strength was bravery, you could bring in guests that made me feel a little bit intimidating to you, probably like me, I imagine.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Or you could take on topics that are a little bit harder, that kind of push you a little bit. If your signature strength was humor, you'd add more company or make more jokes. If it was love of learning, you'd pick topics that you didn't know anything about, but you kind of dive in. You take whatever your normal job description is and you find a way to build in your strengths.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And the reason I love Amy's work so much is that she studies signature strengths not in academics like us who have very flexible jobs or podcasters. She studies signature strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers who are, you know, these are people who are cleaning the linen in a hospital room or mopping the floors and stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Not a job where you think there's lots of flexibility or you could build in things like, you know, humor and love of learning and this stuff. But she finds, interestingly, that like around a quarter to a third of these janitorial staff workers say that their job is a calling. They love it. They get a lot of purpose from it.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And they're the ones that are naturally building in their signature strengths. And she tells in her work, she tells these lovely stories. There's a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward. And if you've been unlucky enough to have cancer and had to have chemotherapy or know someone who did, you know that people tend to get really sick because the
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
a big part of this guy's job was like cleaning up vomit basically. But he said, you know, my job isn't to clean up vomit. My strengths are like humor and social intelligence. And what I do is I make a joke. This is somebody who's having a really crappy day and I'm going to do something that's going to make them laugh. And if I do that, then I won. It's not my paycheck.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I guess he had a standard joke, which was like, oh my God, let's play a big pile of vomit overtime like for me. And like, you know, you're laughing. Listener's probably laughing. He's like, that's my job. I talked to another worker who worked in a coma ward. So this Um, individual couldn't talk to the patients because they're in comas, but her strength was creativity.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so every day she like moved the artwork and the plants around, you know, just kind of created some changes. And she thought maybe that would pop people out of their coma. I don't know if that's medically plausible, probably not, but it doesn't matter. To her, she felt like she was executing her creativity.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so the moral of this job crafting work is no matter what your job is, there's probably some room to build in some more purpose if you take some time to think about, like, what are the strengths? What are the things that get you going? If you need a tip, you can kind of Google these things. But then how could I infuse that into my normal job description?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And there's probably a lot more flexibility than you think. You don't need to quit your job and become a podcaster to like get this flexibility. Probably whatever you do, there's some window where you can build that in.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The values in action is viacharacterstrengths.org. So I can share the link and you can stick it in your show notes. But yeah, people can go on there for free and
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
do one of these kind of you know formal psychometric tests where you measure your strengths see what they are and it's a fun website too because you get to kind of they give you some suggestions because some of these you know values are like prudence is one of them's like how do I exercise prudence and they'll have you know these are different things
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They also make the suggestion, and this is a homework assignment I give in my happiness class, of suggesting you do this with a good friend or a romantic partner. Have each of you do this and find strengths that you share together.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And then you can go on what researchers call a strength state, where if you both have bravery, then that means you guys should do the obstacle course or do some really scary hike. If you both have humor, now you go to a a comedy show. If you both love learning, now you go to a museum or something. So you find the thing that's like your convergent strengths and you do something that exercises them.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So that means you can use your strengths to get purpose, not just in your work, but in your leisure too. And I think this is another spot where we get stuff wrong. I think a lot of us have work that tends to use our strengths. We tend to gravitate towards careers, many of us, where we can use our strengths. A lot of folks aren't that lucky. But in our leisure time,
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think in the original Kahneman data, he found that it doesn't, right? I mean, how much stress you report on a daily basis was literally one of the measures they were using for happiness. But I think you're right. The risk around it can buffer it, right? I think if you're at a certain set of means, you know that if a bad thing happens, you're going to be okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We don't often do that so much, right? Often our leisure time is like plop down, you know, watch Netflix for a lot of folks. Like if you think about how you can build your strengths into your leisure time, it gets even more exciting. So, you know, you're talking about working with your hands and doing all this stuff, like, you know, build the bravery and the humor into that somehow.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And now you get your leisure time doing double duty for giving you a sense of purpose and meaning too.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up this idea of doing for others because we haven't talked about that. But this is another behavioral hack that's huge for happiness. And I think one that we get wrong as a culture in the U.S. but kind of broadly. There's all this talk about self-care or treat yourself. If you look at any kind of article about happiness, maybe not so evidence-based.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Talk about self, self, self, self. If you look at happy people, though, happy people don't spend a lot of time on themselves. They tend to be very other-oriented. So controlled for income, happier people donate more money to charity than not-so-happy people.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Controlled for about a free time, happy people tend to volunteer for others, broadly construed, whether it's helping formally or kind of donating time.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
like they tend to help more than not so happy people um that again correlation it could be happy doing nice stuff for others helps you become happy it could be that if you're happy you do nice stuff for others and for sure that link is true there is this thing called the feel good do good effect um but lots of experiments have sort of forced people to do nice stuff for others and found that it winds up making them happier one study by lara aknan and colleagues did this study where they
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Walk up to people on the street and hand them 20 bucks. It's an awesome study to be in if you're some undergrad walking around campus like, oh, cool, 20 bucks. But then you'll be told how to spend it. You either have to spend the 20 bucks to treat yourself, do something nice for yourself, or spend the 20 bucks on someone else, do something nice for other people.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And people at the end of the day, even kind of at later timescales, report being happier when they spend the exact same amount of money on someone else versus themselves. And I think this has a big message because sometimes if you're like you, if you're having a bad day, it's like I'm going to treat myself for something.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I might buy something or spend some money on myself, buy myself a kind of cool experience. But if you gifted that experience to your brother or your good friend, your coworker, your spouse, it might actually make you happier than having that experience yourself, which is really counterintuitive. But it's what the data show.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Here's another hack you can do to help others, oddly, is to ask for help, which is something we forget is quite powerful. Think about the last time somebody asked you for advice, advice that you could give. probably felt pretty good. It probably made you feel a little competent and whatever. Probably liked helping that person. You get the happiness boost from helping that person.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We forget that asking other people for help, especially when we know they can kind of do it, can be a way to sort of give them a little gift and make them happy. This is one that can be hard for me because I like to, you know, think about my competence all the time. I don't want to be a burden on people. I don't like being vulnerable. Self-sufficiency.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So it can allow you to make riskier decisions. It can allow you to do things that you might not do if you're right at that boundary where losing some money might pop you back down. I think the problem is that one of the ways we evaluate our financial situation, but pretty much every situation, I think this goes back to the neuroscience, is that we don't do it objectively. We do it relative.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But it turns out, especially if you're a particularly self-sufficient person, when you ask people for help, it can be really useful. So that's another one, you know, because I know some folks listening right now might not have the financial means to be donating money or the, you know, time affluence and wherewithal to be doing gifts and these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But remember that asking for help can be a gift to someone else and it's a little social connection too.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, Tinder is going out of business if we start doing these strength dates like that. So yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And when you think about your relative financial status, there's lots of other folks around to whom you're comparing yourself. I think one of the reasons that rich folks don't necessarily think they're less stressed when they have very high levels of wealth and so on is because they're looking around and everyone's doing much better than them.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Thanks so much. It was a blast.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Definitely.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And this is just a fundamental feature of the way we evaluate stuff, right, is that we don't evaluate in objective terms. We evaluate relative to these reference points. And honestly, as you get richer, you're kind of going up this sort of logarithmic scale where the reference points are getting even further away from you.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think that that can have a huge hit on people's perception of their own happiness and their perception of their stress levels, right? Because they're working towards a goal that's probably not going to make them that much happier, right? but they haven't kind of abandoned this intuition that more money will make me happy.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
On my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I had this guy, Clay Cockrell, who was really fun. He's a wealth psychologist. So he's a mental health professional that only works with the 0.0001%. And already we should say, well, If wealth made you happy, he should be out of a job. But no, he's lots of clients, lots of, I guess, very well-paying clients. He looked like he was doing well for himself.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But he talks about how those folks haven't abandoned this notion that more money will make them happy. They set some standard, like, as soon as I get 50 million, I'll be happy, or as soon as I become a billionaire. But then they get to that point. They're not feeling any more positive emotion. They're not feeling less stressed.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And rather than saying, well, hang on, maybe that hypothesis was wrong. More money doesn't work. They say, ah, the hypothesis, it's all right. More money will make me happy. It wasn't $50 million. Now it's $100 million or whatever it is. And so I think that that's a lot due to the fact that folks are comparing their wealth levels against others.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Our comparison system sucks because we constantly compare ourselves against others, but we never pick people that are doing worse than us. We always pick people who are doing better than us.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, it fits completely with what a lot of the happiness research suggests, right? Which is that it's much less about our circumstances. than we think when it comes to who's happy and who's not, right? You know, we often think, you know, if I could get more money or if I could get more accolades at work or if I could get a new partner, if I could move somewhere, I'd be happier.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But exactly what you're saying, if you look at people with all those different life circumstances, both the good version and the bad version, you find some happy folks and some not so happy folks. Now what researchers are starting to think is that it actually doesn't involve our circumstances as much as we think. Again, I like would bracket it, unless those circumstances are really dire.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
circumstances don't matter as much as we think. It tends to be the kind of stuff that's much more under our control than our circumstances, right? It tends to be how we behave, what thought patterns we use, the emotions we seek out, the social connection we experience. Those things matter much more.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so I think, you know, your experience with the happy and not so happy rich folks and the happy and not so happy poor folks kind of bear out what we think, which is like, it's just not your circumstances that doesn't matter as much as you assume.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, we just talked about the thing you're not supposed to do. You don't have to change your circumstances. And that's great because quintupling your income is tricky. Moving is tricky. Switching your life around all over the place is hard, right? And the good news is design shows you don't have to do that. That doesn't work as well as you think.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But you can hack your behaviors and your thought patterns and your feelings to get some good results, right? Let's take behaviors, right? One of the biggest behavioral changes you can make to feel happier is just to get a little bit more social connection. Like psychologists do these fun studies where they look at people's like daily usage patterns.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So how much time are you spending sleeping or exercising or at work or whatever? And the two things that predict whether or not you're happy or not so happy is is how much time you spend with friends and family members and how much time you're just physically around other people. Like the more of that you do, the happier you're going to be. And, you know, that's just a correlation, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So your savvy listeners are thinking right now, like, well, is it that hanging around with other people causes you to be happier? Or do you tend to like hang out with other people more if you are happy? Like which direction does the causal arrow go? And here we have these lovely studies by psychologists who do these kind of funny experiments where they
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
offer people a $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody. Usually talk to a stranger that they don't know on the train. Some lovely work by Nick Epley and others have done this. You force people to get social. And what people predict, especially with strangers, is like, ooh, that's going to feel awkward and kind of weird.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But what you find across the board, and this includes in introverts and extroverts, is that talking to somebody actually feels good. It increases your positive emotion. It gives you a sense that your life is going better. You feel less lonely. It just has these positive outcomes that we don't expect.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the reason why social connection matters so much is it's building off this basic neural circuitry, right, for seeing faces and so on. I think that gives us a real insight into the kinds of social connections that work best, right, which has been characterized in the field as sort of in real time social connection, right, which we're kind of moving away from.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So what do I mean by in real time? You know, you and I are sitting in a studio right now chatting and we're kind of chatting in real time. I can see your face. We're live. But we might have been able to do this like over some sort of video chat. Wouldn't be as good, you know, but it's pretty good. And the reason it seems to be pretty good is we're doing it in real time, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Our auditory system, our visual system, all these systems that are used to as primates processing things with other folks around you, it works reasonably well. What doesn't work so well is how we often communicate, which is like over Slack, over text. I text you, vroom, a few minutes later, vroom, it comes back.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like our primate brain is just like – that's just not the way communication is set to work. And so I think sometimes when I bring up social connection, people think like, oh, I got to see people in person and my friend is going to live far away and I'm like at work all day.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's like, no, no, no, you can connect not necessarily live and in person, but as much as possible, try to do it in real time. And I think that's in part, and if possible, try to do it with video, I think, for the reason that you were just talking about, is faces activate us. But, you know, we're primates that are also really good at language and paying attention to the voice.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think it's one of the reasons that like an old school phone conversation, no video chat with your friend can be some of the most emotional, connective conversation, sometimes better than Because when we're a person, we're pulling out our phones and checking and paying attention to other stuff. But we've got to get back towards in real time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The other stuff just doesn't have the same psychological oomph.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, there's not great evidence for it, but my intuition is that the way it works is almost like it's texting sort of the NutraSuite of social connection, right? I was feeling this motivation for social connection and I did it and I got something that was sort of social. I got some information, but like psychologically I'm missing the like nutritious part of it, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So it kind of fakes you out into thinking that it's social connection, but it kind of doesn't really work. And I worry that that's what we're all getting a lot of right now, right? It's just so much easier to participate in the NutraSuite version of social connection because as political scientists and sociologists and others have pointed out, it's harder to meet with people in real life.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We don't have these so-called third spaces where we can get together easily anymore, right? There's so many draws of just being on your screen, being alone inside. I think we're kind of missing out. And so a lot of us are kind of starving nutritionally when it comes to social connection because we're going for the wrong stuff.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Or in real time, right? You know, call that friend that you haven't talked to and recognize, because this is clear from the psychological research, that your brain is not telling you to do that. Probably even when you're listening right now, you're like, yeah, I guess that would be helpful for me. But you're not kind of having a craving to talk to your friend.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think this is the problem with a lot of the behaviors that map on to happiness is that if you think of the evolutionary pressures for those behaviors, natural selection never had to build in like the goal of feeling social because we were just like in these small bands. It was really easy, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Natural selection had to build in a kind of craving for sweet, fatty food because those were hard to find. Didn't have to build in the craving for like, you know, a bunch of greens because they were everywhere. I think the same thing is true with social connection. We just don't have a strong motivation to
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
to seek people out because it was just kind of there and so I think our motivation our reward systems don't cause us to kind of crave it but in the modern day where there's so many substitutes and we're kind of more isolated I think many of us are kind of experiencing the negative effects of loneliness but then when we think well what could I do to get out of it there's not this like I'm starving for connection we don't have this sort of motivational goal to go out and get it
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so what that can lead to is people making the prediction in their head of like, you know, I just heard Laurie say that this is a good idea, but like, I don't know, probably not for me or maybe not as important. I think we just don't have systems that tell us to go out and get this stuff. So even if your brain is saying, oh, it's not that important, try it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Do your own personal experiment and get a little bit more information. in real time social connection and just take a moment to notice immediately after how it made you feel. And I bet it'll be like, you know, all the kind of fitness hacks and nutrition hacks that you talk about on the show where you're like, oh my God, that made me feel so much better than I really expected it to.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We stopped doing it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, you know how the dopamine system works, right? Like it has these mechanisms to crave stuff that's quick, quick hits, right? Our instant, you know, when we go on Reddit or go on Instagram and scroll through a feed, we're getting these kind of quick hits. Another thing that is rewarding is new information.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, your Stanford colleague, Jamil Zaki, has done these lovely neuroscience studies that just finding out some interesting social information feels rewarding, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And kind of for the first time, we've been able to separate the reward value that comes from interacting with live human people and faces and social rewarding information that comes at us quickly at this dopamine hit that we crave a lot. But we don't have the craving mechanisms for the in real life connection. And, yeah, I think that's causing a lot of problems.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And it means we're kind of building more tools. to do just that. I had the musician David Byrne on my podcast. Talking heads. Talking heads, David Byrne, who cares a lot about these issues. He wrote this really cool article called Eliminating the Human, where he made the claim that pretty much every technological invention of the last 20 years has been...
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
you know, dealing with actual people is kind of frictiony, so let's just get rid of them, right? We'll, you know, have Uber or Lyft or a car company where I don't have to talk to the driver, I just plug it into the phone. We don't have to have a conversation, we go away, right? We have music and streaming mechanisms.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I don't know, Andrew, you're like my age, so you probably remember that you used to have to go into a record store to flip through CDs or tapes even, if you're really old school, to figure out music. And often when you do that, you'd run into humans or talk to the cashier guy or somebody would see you flicking through like, oh, you like talking heads? I like talking heads.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Now we just go to an algorithm, right? From food delivery apps to kind of education, right? I have an online course where students don't have to sit in a real classroom with other students. They could watch it directly. So many of our technological innovations are assuming that what we want to get rid of is the friction part. That's what we're kind of motivated to get rid of.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But ultimately, we're getting rid of the human in these interactions. And our primate brains are left with the little NutraSweet dribbles of connection when what we really need is something in real life and in real time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, the diabolical part is It's having a real consequence for our happiness. It's certainly having a real consequence for loneliness. You look at rates of loneliness in young people who've grown up with these technologies and you see things like, you know, young people today report being lonely at rates of like 70, 75%, right? More people are lonely, extremely lonely than not right now.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, your point is well taken, right? If anything, they grow up lonely. So if they're self-reporting being lonely now, it might be even worse than it might be kind of getting worse over time. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's all self-report data, right? So people, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how lonely are you feeling? But the fact that 75% of people are saying, yeah, I feel extremely lonely.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
That's sad. I mean, our primary ancestors, if they could look at us, would be like, what? These wonderful social brains.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The problem is I think what loneliness is a recognition of is you know you kind of don't like this state. But I'm not sure that loneliness is causing people to seek out more social connection or Or if it is, you're seeking out the thing that is the easiest, fastest social connection you can get.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think this is a problem with social connection, but I think it's a problem generally with the kinds of things that make us happier because, like, we just don't have mechanisms to seek those things out. They just kind of don't code in our reward system in the same way as, you know, the NutraSweetie stuff of the world.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But I think that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have easy outs for all these cravings, right? I mean, take processed food, right? You probably have a craving for certain nutritional requirements, right? You want to get vitamins or healthy stuff, but that stuff's easy. It's frictionless, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, I run to McDonald's and that's much faster than cooking up a really healthy vegetable-filled meal. I think the same thing happens with social connection, right? Like you're a lonely person at your house sitting on the couch. You have this negative bodily state. You feel lonely. Maybe it kind of manifests as a craving, but what's the fastest thing for you to do?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I'm going to scroll through my friends' Instagram feeds. Or I'm going to get a kind of little mini hit of social connection that's not as nutritious. Honestly, I mean, not to diss our respective fields, but I actually think this is one reason that people love podcasts so much, right? It's a frictionless way to feel like you're part of this interesting conversation.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But ultimately, it doesn't work as well as picking up the phone and calling a friend, connecting with someone in real life. I think we have too many outlets for things that kind of feel socially but don't give us social nutrition. And it's true. I mean, we should be honest.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like, really connecting with actual people in real life takes more friction than pulling out your phone and scrolling through your Instagram feed. It's just the Instagram feed doesn't work as well ultimately when it comes to what's really going to end up being rewarding. And I think this is true for just like a lot of the way the reward system works.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The things that we have craving for, that we seek out, that like we have really strong mechanisms to go after, sometimes those things don't work to get us towards real likability. You know, drugs of addiction are a real obvious answer to this, right? You know, if you have a kind of heroin problem, you're going to really seek out that drug. But ultimately, it's not bringing you towards something.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, it will maybe feel good in the moment, but it's, you know, no, you're not neutral, sweetie, but it's not getting you towards something that evolutionarily would be really awesome for your survival and reproductive success.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, probably way more than you think you should. We have good data on what people predict, which is that people predict social interaction is just not going to be that fun. It's not going to be worth it. This seems to be a spot where our predictions about how good something is going to be don't necessarily match how good it ultimately will going to be.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I put it in the context of like the reverse of something like processed food where I think for a lot of people you predict this is going to be amazing and you taste it and you're like, no, I feel kind of gross.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Processed food, right. That's a case where your prediction is like, ooh, this is going to be awesome, but your actual likability is like, eh, I feel kind of yucky. Where social connection I think we predict will be all right, but maybe not that good. But when we get it, we feel really great.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley has this term he uses, under-sociality, where he thinks we just kind of don't get the right reward benefit of social connection writ large, right? He talks about examples of expressing gratitude to people, giving somebody a compliment, even things like asking for help, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
All these domains where we can kind of connect with another person, we sort of like, yeah, it may be net good if I was rating it on some scale, but it winds up being way better than we predict in all these contexts. He does these studies where he has people, you know, predict how good something will be. You know, giving a gift to somebody brings – he's in Chicago, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So he's like, here's a hot chocolate. How good will it feel to like, you know, give that guy over there a stranger the hot chocolate? And people say, you know, I don't know, three out of ten. But then they do it and then they feel, oh, it's like more like a six out of ten. It was much more rewarding for me, the giver, than I thought.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Same thing with compliments, expressing gratitude, calling a friend you haven't talked to in a long time, reaching out to somebody that you care about but you haven't connected with. All these spots are ones where our predictions are off. It's not the valence that's off. We know it will be good, but we just don't realize how good.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And his argument is that if we don't realize how good, then we never seek it out. So it's kind of the opposite of what you might think of as the processed food problem where our prediction is like – Oh, my God, that cupcake's going to be so good. We have all these mechanisms that are like, go get it, go get it. But then we actually get it. We're like, that wasn't as good as we thought.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think that the problem is that we have all these things that work like the processed food, that interfere with social connection, going on the Reddit feed, plopping down and watching Netflix, just kind of being by yourself, right? There's all these alternative behaviors that we're predicting are going to feel nice. But then we get there, they feel kind of yucky. They just –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, this is a problem in the happiness space where I know you talk a lot about the reward system. But the happiness space is one where the cravings we have, the rewards we seek out, the predictions we're making about what feels good, we're often just really wrong with them. You know, my podcast, we talk a lot about like our mind lies to us when it comes to happiness.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, we go for more money. We go for accolades. You know, we go for the quick dopamine hits without any work. But really, it's more like social connection. It's all these things that we kind of don't expect are going to feel good. And so I actually don't know what that means evolutionarily.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like my theory is like you didn't need to build in craving mechanisms because the things that really matter for our happiness, we just kind of got for free in the evolutionary environment. but it means it's hard to go after them. You mentioned introverts and extroverts, and just to get back to your longer question, this is something that's been studied in them.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So introverts versus extroverts is typically thought of as a personality distinction, often thought of as sort of something that's built in, although there's lots of evidence that over time you can sort of change these things around. You can become a little bit more extroverted if you're introverted. But introverts tend to value...
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
deeper, close conversations, one-on-one kinds of things, and a lot of alone time. They get a lot of benefit from alone time. Whereas extroverts tend to be more energized by being around other people, especially bigger crowds of people. And so introverts tend to be a little bit more deliberate, a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more kind of want to have my own personal chill time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Whereas extroverts tend to like people. And so you might think that everything I've just said applies to extroverts, but not to introverts. Folks have gone out and tested this. And what they find is there is a big difference between introverts and extroverts, but it's in that prediction error. You know, extroverts predict social connection. We are right. Not that great.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Introverts predict it's going to be terrible. It's going to be awkward. I'm going to hate it. But when you actually force people, as in these studies where you say, hey, $10 Starbucks gift card, you got to talk to somebody. When you force the introverts to be social, what they wind up doing is self-reporting a level of happiness that's like better than they expected.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So the problem seems to be that introverts have a prediction error. I'm going to say this. I promise you because I've said this on my podcast. Tons of hate mail. Lots of the comments will be like, not me, not this introvert.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's usually negative.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Although the one kind of update to the framework that you just presented that I'd add is that you said, you know, well, you go to the restaurant, you predict it's going to be not that good and you go and you're like, oh, it was all right. I think the problem with introverts is they so predict that social connection is going to be awkward that they don't engage in it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And now this becomes a learning cycle, right? You predicted it was going to be crappy. You never got any evidence, oh, maybe I was wrong. And so you keep doing that over time. And so I think that this can lead to cycles of loneliness in introverts. And there are these lovely accounts of introverts who try to become a little bit more extroverted.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I had this lovely woman, Jessica Pan, on the show who has this book called Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come, colon.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I know. I'm with you. I'm with you. But dude, sorry I'm late. I didn't want to come. Colin, An Introvert's Guide to Extroverting. So she did this year where as a super hardcore introvert, she – Talked to people, joined an improv comedy group, like went to these social networking kind of businessy, nasty social connection events, just did all this stuff. And what she found was two things.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
One is that she actually did enjoy it a lot more than she thought. At the end of the year, she was much happier than she expected. But she also watched her habits changing too. And this is a thing I think that we also get wrong about introverts and extroverts is we assume I'm born that way, you know, never going to change. And it is true that there are predispositions towards this stuff.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But the data suggests that if you can maybe like update your reward value of this as an introvert, try a little social connection. Don't go to like the hugest party ever or jump into improv comedy. Just try – Call a friend that you haven't talked to in a while, right? Notice how that felt. Like, oh, that was a prediction error, right? It actually felt better than I expected.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And you might update your prediction and get – and so you can kind of update your introversion in part by trying things out and noticing the reward value you get. I think the thing that is different for introverts is, like, you definitely need your alone time, right? So you want to balance any social connection you get with a little bit of time by yourself, but –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But the research really shows that if you're predicting right now, like, I just don't like the social connection, you might actually like it more than your prediction is suggesting.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I think it might be all of the above. I mean, I think what we know about introverts is that they often self-report being better in these sort of one-on-one kind of things. So as an introvert, it's like you're going to have a coffee date with your friend. That often doesn't cause as much social anxiety as the dinner party with a bunch of people, right? And so that's the claim.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's not like, well, jump into the dinner party with a bunch of people or join an improv comedy group or talk to everyone on the street. It's like, just a one-on-one little mini conversation can be great. And not necessarily great, but much better than you expect. And will kind of have this happiness benefit that kind of sustains you over time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Nick Epley, who does all this work, talks about your happiness. The best metaphor for happiness is that it's kind of like a leaky tire. Like it sort of goes out a little bit. And each one of these little conversations, whether it's chatting with the barista or calling a friend, giving someone a compliment, whatever, kind of fills up the tire and then it kind of goes down.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So you can sort of use these little mini micro doses of social connection to boost your happiness tire.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think more than you're doing now. If you're not feeling so happy, add some in. And again, as you mentioned before, these are all kind of trade-offs, right? You don't want to add so much in the now. You're not sleeping or exercising or all that other stuff. But like one more interaction than you're getting now and check how it feels over time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, if you want to ask yourself a question that can highlight good memories, I recommend the one that the journalist Catherine Price uses a lot. She does a lot of studies on fun. Ask yourself the question, what were three times that you just had the most fun? The last three times you would describe as, oh, my God, that was the most fun, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And this is a helpful question because usually the answer, my guess is at least two out of three, probably all three will have someone else in it. Like they'll be, you'll have like another person involved or a dog, sometimes some other agent of being, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It probably didn't involve a screen, right? And so that's kind of like – Definitely not. And that actually gets back to your road trip, you know, talking about – I think the social part was really important. But it seems like that road trip also tapped into a sort of thought pattern that we know is really good for happiness, which is presence, right? Just being kind of mindful.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're paying attention to the dog flopping on you. You're seeing the scenery, right? You're not in a rush to do something. So your mind could kind of be on that drive and how it felt, right? And we know so much about how kind of these moments of mindfulness, really paying attention to your sensory experience, how much that matters for happiness.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And one of the biggest hacks you can use to get more presence is to do exactly what you accidentally did driving through these parts of the world where you don't get phone receptions, which is to get rid of our phones. You know, our phones are just like the biggest attention stealers ever. And it makes a lot of sense because what grabs our attention?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Things that are really interesting and provide a lot of quick dopamine hits, right, or just kind of scream at us with information and announcements and so on. This is what our phones do really well. And our brains aren't stupid. Our brains know that on the other side of our phone is like such rewarding content. And it becomes, you know, really distracting.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
My colleague, Liz Dunn, has this kind of analogy she uses. You know, imagine, you know, instead of this kind of conversation we're having right here, maybe I'll do with my husband at a dinner party where I'm sitting with my husband at dinner and we're chatting. I have my phone out. And my husband is a philosopher. He's a very smart guy. We have great conversations. But
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I know on the other end of that phone is like really interesting stuff. And Liz said, imagine the comparison is instead of having your phone there, I had this big wheelbarrow next to me and my husband at our dinner table. And in that wheelbarrow was photo albums of every photo I've taken since 2016.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
physical printouts of my emails and news articles and stuff that I could get, you know, like videotapes of cat videos and porn and everything, just like piled up really high in this wheelbarrow. If we were trying to have a conversation and that wheelbarrow was there, I'd be like, oh, I just want to take a quick look at the photo or do something. It'd be so distracting. It'd be so interesting.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Your brain's not stupid. Your brain knows, even though your phone is much tinier than that wheelbarrow, that all that interesting, dopamine-rich, exciting stuff is on it. And it makes it hard to pay attention to my husband. Again, an interesting philosopher. We have great conversations.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so there's lots of evidence showing that even the act of having your phone out is subtly stealing your attention from other people, from the tasks that you're doing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
One of the biggest pieces of advice I give my college students is to study without your phone near you because Princeton studies have looked at this where you have somebody do, say, a math test or a studying test with your phone there versus a phone in the other room. And you see, like, double-digit increases in performance just to have your phone away.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And you might ask, like, well, why would that be? It's like, well, part of your frontal lobe is like, no, no, no, don't look at the phone. Don't look at the phone. Don't look at that big wheelbarrow of delicious, interesting stuff. Stay on task. And that's this kind of constant moment of multitasking where we're kind of yanking our brain back onto task.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
A big hack if you want to be more present is to find ways to do activities without your phone. I guess if we go back to that fun question, if I said, you know, those three times you're having the most fun, you weren't in the middle of it pulling out your phone to like look at your Instagram feed. You were just there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, when you dive deep into the effects of having your phone around you, they're striking, especially when getting back to social connection, especially social connection. Liz Dunn has this paper where she puts two people in a room, just kind of a waiting room together, and you either have your phone or you don't. You're not allowed to look at it. It's just present.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And she finds that there's 30% less smiling at the other people in the waiting room when your phones are present, 30% less. I mean, I actually think of this when I think of the you know, the loneliness crisis. You know, I walk, I was a head of college on campus, which as a faculty member at Yale meant that I lived on campus with students.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And you walk through the courtyard and everybody's walking through the courtyard, but they're not looking at you. They're looking down at their phone, right? There's these like subtle interactions that we're missing because our phone is stealing us. That's the social case. But I think there's a real performance case too, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, I'm glad you started there, actually, because the very definition of happiness, I think, as social scientists tend to think about it, includes both of these parts, right? So I think social scientists tend to think about happiness as being happy in your life, and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is sort of the emotion side, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If you want to pay attention and learn something, if part of your brain is inhibiting that urge to look at all the interesting stuff on your phone, which we don't notice, then that's going to be affecting your performance. It has good benefits, too. There's this lovely finding that people are buying less gum and less candy in checkout aisles now.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The national worldwide sale of gum has gone down, and it's gone down on the same slope as the iPhones have gone up. So as the number of iPhones in pockets goes up, sales of gum in checkout lines has gone down. And you can see why that is. They're not looking around as much. You're not looking like, ooh, that, you know, like double mitt looks really good.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're staring at your phone and looking at your Instagram.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And those are the ones that really influence our happiness in the world, right? You know, one of the great ways to increase your presence in addition to kind of getting rid of your phone is to just go back to your senses, right? What are you looking at right now? What do you see right now? I'm in this room. There's like really nice kind of cool black lighting and I'm sitting there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I'm hearing your voice. There's like a subtle hum in the room that I hope the podcast is not picking up that I hear in the audio, right? It's a little cool. that grounding, I can watch my breath completely change around. It's like a quick way to just kind of be embodied.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
A decent number of positive emotions, maybe slightly less negative emotions. Like you existing in your life feels good. That's kind of an emotional part, right? But then there's also kind of how you think your life is going. Do you have purpose? Are you kind of happy with how things are going? It's how you think about your life, which is sort of a cognitive thing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think so often we're just not doing that as much, you know, in our discourse, but definitely like even when we're by ourselves, you know, we just wind up distracting ourselves from the very sensory experience that like literally is the experience that we have of the world. We're just not noticing it as much.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, I think it's, you know, there's, there's some nuance there, right? You're talking about your craft in a very embodied way. Even as you're talking to me, you're describing how Your hands are moving in these motor ways as you're doing it. You're talking about kind of what it felt like. It felt like you – your senses were activated for the physical stuff you were doing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But you also mentioned that your mind was wandering and maybe you were ruminating and stuff like that. So it sounds like what you did was have a really nice emotion regulation strategy of like – You could kind of fill your head with something so that you can work on the physical stuff. But it didn't impede your experience of the physical stuff. The way you described it shows that you were there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You were present when you were doing it. I think the problem is when it impedes our presence doing it. And I think it kind of depends on the activity we're doing, right? You know, take driving. Probably some of you who are listening right now are sitting in your car as you're driving, doing this other interesting motoric activity.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And that's one where it's like, you're not missing out on that much on the drive by like listening to us. It's probably a positive kind of experience that you're having, learning something and so on. But, you know, you wouldn't want to listen to podcasts in some physical situations, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If you're ballroom dancing, for example, you wouldn't want to necessarily be listening to a podcast then, right? You know, if you're really experiencing art and sort of engaging with art in an art gallery, you wouldn't want to also be listening to a podcast at the same time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so even the earliest social scientists who started thinking about happiness, at the time they call it subjective well-being. So I think psychologists were like, oh, happiness sounds too wooey. Like, we'll call it something else. But it means exactly the same thing. It means subjective well-being, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think the thing to think is, you know, are you listening to this in a way that you're missing something in the real world that your presence of it would matter, make you feel really good? Or are you kind of just like, you know, killing some other free time and maybe using this as a nice emotion regulation strategy to stop what would otherwise be a really ruminative drive?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Now you get to listen to me and Andrew and that's probably better. Yeah. But there's nuance there. I think our tendency is to move away from the rumination, is to run away from it. And I think if you find yourself kind of avoiding your thought patterns altogether, that probably might be the pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think it's important here to remember, like, what are our natural evolutionary patterns towards thought patterns? Because some of them aren't necessarily built for our happiness. You know, take what's a kind of common evolutionary thought pattern, which is a negativity bias, right? We're just built to notice all the scary stuff, all the bad stuff, all the potentially risky stuff.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
When they started thinking about subjective well-being, they divided it into this sort of affective emotional part, which is like how you feel in your life, but also this cognitive part, how you think your life is going. So that basic dichotomy has been there since the very beginning of folks studying happiness scientifically. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Our brains instantly go there. And that makes fabulous evolutionary sense. Like if there's a possibility that there's a tiger that's going to jump out or some sort of risky thing, you want your brain to lock onto it. Not as evolutionary beneficial to notice all the blessings in life, just all the good things.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It doesn't really give you that much of a survival benefit to notice, hey, there's the absence of a tiger. We don't really know. There's no tigers around, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But I think you're making a really critical point, right? Which is like, if we're noticing the negative, if we're noticing the bad stuff, we tend to fix it. But also if we're craving, if we're wanting, if we're kind of constantly in search of something, we get off our butts and go do stuff.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Right. And it makes great evolutionary sense. Doesn't make as good happiness sense, right? What's one of the best ways to be happy? To just appreciate what you have, to notice and appreciate the blessings out there. But we've got to push against this natural negativity bias to do this. So how do we do that?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, it turns out that this is a spot where harnessing attention in the way we were just talking about can be really helpful. just taking time to notice the blessings, notice kind of all the good stuff. It's often talked about in terms of a gratitude practice, although gratitude sounds kind of cheesy. I don't know.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
My friend Catherine Price, who I mentioned earlier, she has this practice that she calls a delight practice. We just notice delights in the world.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, I walked in your studio, you had a picture of your bulldog, and I was like, that's a delight. That's so cute.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And we can train our brain to notice them, right? You can literally have a practice where, you know, put in your notes app on your phone, like list of delights, or even better, pick a friend like I have with Catherine where you can just like text them delight, you know, at the end of this, you know, text like saw a really cute dog, delight, or heard this really funny song, delight.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Then you get the social connection and the gratitude. But what that does is if you have this practice where you got to write down the delights, your brain starts to automatically be on the lookout for them. It becomes rewarding because you get to write this thing down.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Now all of a sudden it can be a practice that you're sort of shifting your negativity bias to notice more of the good things that are out there. And there's so much evidence suggesting that people who naturally notice the blessings in the world are happier. If you do one of these kind of gratitude or delight practices, you wind up happier.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Sonja Lubomirsky has this lovely study where you scribble down three to five things you're grateful for, three to five delights. In as little as two weeks, you significantly improve your overall satisfaction with life.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, three to five things you're grateful for. I'm not sure if the number really matters, but it's committing to kind of noticing the good things in life and really trying to take a moment to notice how they felt, right? Yeah. So if I look at – I do delight practices sometimes or gratitude practices and it's things like my husband, these big things in life.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But then sometimes it's like my morning coffee or like probably seeing your cute dog. Like it's funny to see the picture. For folks that don't know Andrew's studio, it's a picture of his dog on a microphone. It's just very funny. It's a giant microphone.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I invite listeners to pause right now and notice what's happening to their face as you hear Andrew say that. Probably you're just smiling, right? You didn't even see this really cute photo, but you're also smiling. That's the power of delights, right? Not just noticing them yourself, but potentially sharing them too.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so this is another thought pattern practice that we can engage in, which is like, just train your brain to find these things. And what you'll find is that there's a limited ratio of the stuff we can focus our attention on.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If we start shifting towards the delights from the hassles and the yucky stuff in life, now we're just kind of filling our brain with stuff that gives us a little more positive emotion.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Gratitude sounds cheesy. It sounds a little hippy-dippy, I got to say.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think it's really sensory, you know, in the way we were talking about before, right? It gets you back into being present. Most of these delights are something you taste or you experience or you see that's funny. There's a really lovely book by the author Ross Gay called The Book of Delights.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And he used a delight practice where every day he not only had to find a delight but write a short essay about it because he's an author. And it's just hilarious. It's like one of my favorite books. And you just kind of go – and it's really strange things. It's like when does he, you know, notice the flowers? He notices lilacs and he has this whole –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
idea of one delay is purple flowers why are there so many purple flowers there's purple flowers everywhere he also has a delight in music he really likes the 80s band el debarge you know from the beat of the room so it's like and he talks about his love of debarge and you can kind of have this connection with other people's delights and and it's silly they're just silly things but the fact that we've noticed them i mean again there's a listener's probably experiencing right now if you pay attention
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
A little bit of positive emotion, right? If you're driving around your car, feeling a little stressed out in traffic, you can kind of take a breath. And so that's the power of the practice. You're shifting your emotions because you're noticing these good things. You're noticing the good things, which is great because you're sort of training your attention to get there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And you're sort of forming this habit to shift that negativity bias that's sort of built in but isn't really making you as happy as you could be.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, I think ideally it'd be nice to do both, right? And I think there are moments when these things dissociate, right? So, you know, you interact with lots of interesting rich people out here in California. I think a lot of them have, kind of in their life, feels pretty good, right? They have lots of hedonic pleasures, they're drinking nice wine, hanging out at the beach.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Why? Look, the horror movie industry would not exist if we didn't like fear, right? Honestly, like Twitter X, whatever we're calling it now, would not exist if we didn't like outrage, right? These are kind of complicated negative emotions that have some positive benefit to us. And I think that this is something that people get wrong when they hear my line of research.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, I tell people like, oh, I teach this class about happiness at Yale. And people will say like, oh, you just want everybody to be happy. You sort of embrace this toxic positivity. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Toxic positivity. Yeah, it's this idea. I mean, you kind of see it in our culture right now. It's the sort of good vibes only, right? It's this idea that anything that feels, you know, mildly frustrating or like hard to do, it's like, oh, no, no, don't do that. It's like good vibes only, right? And there's this idea that if you're experiencing negative emotions, if you
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
feel sad or you feel a little lonely or you feel a little upset at politics, whatever it is, that something's wrong or you got to take a pill or you got to do something to fix it, right? I think that's a really dangerous idea, right? Because it's getting rid of this signal that we've been built to experience evolutionarily that's really important, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If you're experiencing outrage that's telling you something super crucial, if you're experiencing kind of frustration, overwhelm is a big one. If you're kind of feeling I'm so overwhelmed at work and I'm burned out. That's a really useful signal about behavioral changes you should make. In class, I often tell my students that negative emotions are like that dashboard on your car.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You go in your car and sometimes you're driving and the tire light comes on or the engine light comes on. And that's a pain in the ass, honestly, because you're like, well, I got to deal with it. So it's not fun when these lights come on, but it's super useful information that if you actively ignore it for months and months is going to cause a much bigger problem later on.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think this is how all of our negative emotions work. If you're feeling that negative emotion of loneliness, it means you need more social connection. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it means probably We've got to take something off your plate before you burn out or get sick.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If you're feeling sad, like that's probably because of some, you know, stimulus that matters that is like kind of you're not there anymore. If you're feeling grief and so on, I think too often we just like want to get rid of those. We don't like them, so we want to suppress those emotions.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But suppressing our emotions is giving up useful evolutionary information that probably means we can take action to fix and feel better. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, that's interesting.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
5, 14 p.m. crowd.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So this is the question is, is this sort of cognitive part the like third person part or is it the reporting part? And I think when the psychologists are thinking about it, they really think about it as the reporting part, right? And this gets tricky, right? Because, you know, I see folks having their nice glass of wine on the beach and I'm thinking like that's coming with lots of positive emotion.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, totally. And I think you're bringing up something that I actually worry about a lot, right? Which is, is that hypothesis correct? Is it the case that if you're feeling happy, you just ignore the woes and all the terrible stuff in the world? Because then I'm creating a whole generation of Yale students who are going to not fix the bad problems of life.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so it turns out there's a researcher at Georgetown, Konstantin Kuchlev, who's tested this. He actually asked the question, is it the case that people who are experiencing more positive emotion, more satisfaction with life, do they ignore the problems of the world and not act? Or are they the ones kind of going out and doing stuff? And so he did this in a couple of different contexts.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
He looked for social justice causes. I'll tell the climate version. So he looked at how many people are taking climate action. So do you go to a protest? Do you put solar panels on? Are you donating money to climate causes? And he finds that the people who are really climate anxious, they tend to have less positive emotions. You're really worried about climate change.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You tend to be more on the depressed, anxious side. But if you're doing stuff about it, then you tend to have more positive emotion. I think he assumes the causal arrow goes in the other way, that like if you're happier, if you're experiencing lots of delights and positive emotion, you kind of have the bandwidth to do stuff, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You can go to that protest where if you're super depressed, you're just going to like lie in bed with your duvet. You don't have the bandwidth to do this stuff. And so this whole kind of like Pollyanna-ish hypothesis about happiness, it makes complete intuitive sense.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But if you look at the data, it's actually the opposite, which is a good thing because I think it gives us a mandate not to stay depressed about everything in the world, pissed off about what's happening. Yes, those negative emotions are good to notice and experience and act on. But like we can take care of ourselves and it's okay. It doesn't mean we're going to stop doing good stuff in the world.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like I bet if I tested them and could have a direct look at their sensory experience, it'd probably be pretty positive.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, pura vida, yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's like the good life, you know, chill life.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think you're getting at a really important issue, right, which is, like, do we have a happiness set point? And kind of if we do, where does it come from, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
in your example you know kind of growing up cynically and having these cynical messages it could be that that was some sort of you know maybe epigenetic thing right you're around all these people that are cynical and you learn how to do it right but it could be more of the like genetic side maybe there's some pre-programmed you know sense of your negativity bias or something
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We don't have great answers to those things, but it's definitely true that our place really shapes kind of a lot of our tendencies that matter for happiness. We know this from some of the like local kind of place things that you said. I think my in-laws are from the Midwest. I'm like, yeah, totally. They're just like great, decent, kind, happy people if they're listening right now.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like, I don't know. I'm trying to train to be like you.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But we also know from like even more macro level, right? So for now, for decades, the World Happiness Report in collaboration with the Gallup survey has been surveying happiness of people across the world, right? And they come up with these like really consistent country level differences in happiness. The U.S. for a very wealthy country is like not very happy. We're pretty low on the scale.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And in fact, in the most recent world happiness report, we dipped like below like the top 10. Like we kind of had this major kind of dive for the first time. We're the happiest. Scandinavians. So it's usually Denmark, Norway.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So they tend to be happy. And so we can ask the question, what's the difference? Maybe it's, you know, the great Scandinavian genes. Probably not. it's actually a lot of their cultural practices which build on the sorts of things we're talking about. You know, take social connection, right? There's a lot less work hours so people can go home and hang out with their family.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
There's a huge culture of clubs, for example, in Denmark where people go off and do sporting things. A lot of fitness, right? And the structure is to kind of get that fitness, right? Like nobody expects you to be at work so you can go, you know, ski or work out or hang out.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
No. And I think in part, it's a different attitude towards work, that there's a time for work, but you don't let your work eat kind of like leak into other things. There's this woman, Helen Russell, who wrote a book about the happiness in Denmark or the Danish path to happiness, I think is the name of the book. And she had this quote of like, she was talking to people in Denmark.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And there's often a thing that will happen where your manager has to talk to you at work and give you feedback. And it's in part because you're not leaving work on time. You're there over time. And they want to have a conversation with you. Like, what's your problem? Why can't you finish your work in the allotted hours? Which again, to American ears is like, what? Your manager would never say that.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But that's the social thing. But country level happiness is also affected by some of the thought patterns we talked about. The Scandinavians, even though it's cold and dark and nothing like it's here in California with you right now, they take joy in these tiny moments, this idea of hygge, right? H-Y-G-G-E, hygge, where you notice the warmth of your coffee or have these candles or things.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's a society that's really focused on presence in a really rich way.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, it's such a hard question. It's such a hard question. And I mean, I think it's one that every dog owner has really wondered about, right? I mean, I've thought about this question actually more in the monkeys, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Who, you know, we can fight about dog neurobiology and they've got some of the stuff, but like they're kind of distinct, like tiny, you know, walnut brains rather than like primate brains.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And if you look at what the brain's doing, a lot of it is sensory. I mean, a lot of it's olfactory, right? It's not the ruminative thinking about stuff that we kind of have expanded a lot in the primate brain.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They're limited. And if you think about what that real estate does, you know, it can kind of do that shush, you know, it can take you out of the moment. But they're kind of related parts of, you know, kind of cortex close by that's doing a lot of the work of thinking about past episodes, thinking about what other people are thinking, thinking about counterfactuals. This is what humans are doing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
This is what humans are doing, like the human big version of this, right? And this is the kind of stuff that gets us into trouble when it comes to presence. I think the dogs walking around, it's like... I don't know what it's sniffing, like hydrant, hydrant, hydrant, dog, dog, person, person.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think it's there because it doesn't have as much circuitry to be like, well, this hydrant's not exactly as good as the other hydrant I smelled before. What would Bob, the other dog, be thinking of this hydrant right now?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And a lot of our rumination is us thinking about the other information that people have about us, right? When in fact we have no idea what people are thinking. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, I often think about this. So in Buddhist circles, there's this discussion of the monkey mind, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
by which they mean the part of your mind that when you're trying to be present and focus on the moment, especially in practices like meditation, kind of runs off somewhere. That's your monkey mind running off and you need to kind of yank it back by the tail or something.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I've always thought that was a real kind of unnecessary diss to monkeys because my sense is at least the rhesus monkeys, which is a species I worked with, they seem a lot more like dogs than humans. I work with this group of monkeys in a field site called Cayo Santiago. It's this island off the coast of Puerto Rico and it's home to a thousand free-ranging rhesus monkeys.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So we can do our studies and just kind of walk around with these monkeys who are kind of living freely. And you see them and they just, you know, I'll sometimes sit near a monkey who's like sitting there looking out into the ocean and just sitting there. And I'm like, I bet what's going on in his head is not that human Buddhist version of the monkey mind where he's like, what about this ocean?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
When do I have to go home? I have to cook something. Oh, what did my husband say to me? It's not that. I think the monkey's version is just like ocean. Yeah. Ocean. It's just there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, no, I think this is true, right? You know, so much of our happiness is made up of the happiness of other people, right? Both kind of how they're doing and how we think they're doing cognitively, but literally just emotionally, right? You know, if you've ever been around a family member or a spouse who was – incredibly pissed off, really sad.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But it's so sad if you're a monkey. Like I think if monkeys had frontal cortex and talked to us, we'd be like, don't blame us for your – Exactly. It's the human brain, part of the brain that – Well, it's like bird brain.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Don't get me started on corvid cognition. These guys are the smartest. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I think there could be a big distinction between what chimpanzees are doing. I mean, they're our closest, you know, tied with bonobos, our closest living relative. You know, that was what, like 30 million, you know, like it wasn't so long, right? Whereas rhesus monkeys are- Pretty far off, right? I think there could be a lot of things that happened in between.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And we know that not necessarily from the neurobiology because it's hard to ask kind of functional neurobiology questions with animals. You can't kind of put them in an fMRI where they're doing behavior as easily as you can with a human.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But we know it from cognition studies that look at things like, you know, how good are, say, rhesus monkeys at perspective taking, at kind of taking on someone else's beliefs, knowing, oh, somebody's thinking something.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Theory of mind, yeah. Thinking something different than I'm thinking. And they're not so hot at it. They really use their own perspective to make judgments pretty well. Same thing when we look at cases of counterfactual thinking. Do you have regret over an outcome that you didn't get? Something that rhesus monkeys find kind of hard. So it seems like
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
they're very good at sophisticatedly planning in the present moment, right? You know, you and I are talking here right now, if you're watching the video, you can see I have a cup, like I might be planning to pick up the cup, right? But the cups here, everything, I'm not simulating, what if this was a lovely martini, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
That's the kind of thing that probably a human can do really well, but a monkey can't. So they can kind of plan and take next step actions when there's around the world that they experience, but they can't simulate worlds that are totally different. And that includes the kind of complicated stuff going on in somebody else's head.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's incredibly hard not to catch those emotions yourself. And we as psychologists know how these processes work, right? These processes are emotional contagion where you're literally catching the emotions of other people.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, yeah. I mean, the bane of every animal researcher's existence, this is whether you test dogs, monkeys, rodents, whatever, is what are called side biases. What's a side bias? It's you're giving an animal a choice between A and B. A's on the left, B's on the right.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And rather than think through these complicated things you want them to think through, they're just like, whatever, A, left, I'll go left, left, left, left, left, left. And you're like, no, I know you get rewarded 50% of the time, but I had this really creative question I wanted you to pay attention and they just don't care.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They don't care – well, they're – Or they're getting rewarded enough at 50% that you have to do something like what researchers in the field – I mean, now we're getting really in the trenches called breaking a side bias. We're like, no, I'm going to give more reward at B. If you're only going to left, then I'm going to give more reward at right.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We move them and stuff, but it does often seem to be the case that the monkeys are training us more than we're training the monkeys, so –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I'll share one study that kind of gets at this sort of perspective taking and how good they are. They are good when it's kind of what's in the here and now, right? We were doing these studies on the island which involved showing monkeys some food, and we had these eggplants in a box that we were making the monkeys look at for various reasons. We couldn't find a monkey to test.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so oftentimes the things that you most worry about to be happy yourself is focusing on the happiness of the people around you because that literally becomes your happiness at a very fundamental level.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
On this island, you have to kind of hike around until you find a monkey who's kind of chilled out and whatever. And we hiked around the whole island. It was taking forever. We get back to our starting location and there's an eggplant that's sitting there. We're like, where'd that eggplant come from? And it's got bite marks out of it. We're like, how did that?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And it was like, wait a minute, somebody must have stolen my eggplant. And we're like, well, how did that happen? We were paying attention to the monkeys the whole time. We realized like, no, no, no, they must have stolen it when we were, like we probably put it down for a second and like they took it, like we didn't drop it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It was like, and so it was like, we realized like, oh, not only are they good at stealing, but they can tell like if we're looking at it. But looking is something that, you know, all animals pay attention to gaze. Like, you know, this is the kind of thing that even, you know, insects pay attention to, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
That's why they have these kind of markings that look like eyes so that birds won't eat them and stuff. Gaze following is really robust. But that's different than that monkey thinking, I bet that person's not looking. It's probably like, no eyes, I can grab it, right? But if you look kind of more sophisticatedly, they're not good at it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But this was another case of realizing like, oh, the monkeys are actually a lot smarter than we give them credit for and maybe us too. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But what they can't do is simulate all these various situations. I mean, the amazing thing about being a human is I could, you know, I could imagine any scenario. Imagine like 700 podcast listeners jumped on this table right now. You know, imagine if the table was orange. Like imagine if you were I don't know, another podcaster. You're Malcolm Gladwell or whatever. More hair. More hair, true.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, I can simulate all these infinite different things to try to program that so hard. But it comes to us as humans in seconds. It's so fast. And it's the kind of thing that we use all the time. Honestly, it's the basis of a lot of our happiness. Look at the fiction that we engage in, right? We're constantly paying deep and close attention to fictional worlds.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I've cared more about some fictional worlds than I've cared about my own family members. Sorry, family members, but it's true, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like you're reading a novel and you're like, I'm crying, I'm bawling, I'm cheering for these people that I know are completely made up because our brains just kind of dive into these sort of fake worlds, these alternative worlds so easily and so quickly, so powerfully.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They're basically dogs.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. They don't have great data on it, but my sense is it gets back to the unconditional love idea. If you're the kind of person who craves the unconditional love, you wind up being more of a dog person. Yes. But if you like the... What was it that your... Was it your niece?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
What was it that your niece said?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
She used to hold her finger up. Cats are a lot more no push me.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You might like cats because cats are a lot like no push me. And I think this is – Oh, no.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, I think the like removal of the sort of no push me might be one of the last stages of evolution and domestication of dogs. And I know this because in my dog work, we also did some very fun work with dingoes, which are the Australian wild dogs. And we don't fully know their history.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Our sense is like those dogs kind of like got pretty close to humans, pretty tolerant of humans, but didn't go like all the way to Costello in terms of the bond. And one of the amazing things, we interacted with this group at a sanctuary for dingoes out in Australia, one of the only sets of genetically pure dingoes in the world with this wonderful privilege to work with.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But we kind of had to like do our keep at these field stations. So we kind of went in and helped cleaned up with the dingoes and so on. And every morning you'd go out and you'd give the dingoes their food, which are these big kind of chickens. And they would just – I mean, they're just kind of raw chickens, not live chickens. But they'd just like chomp it in one gulp, just like bones and all.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And you're like, whoa. And then right after that, they'd want to be kind of, oh, come on, nudge me. Be nice. It was like a cat in its best move. But then at a certain point, they were just like – no, like I'll stop. They just had like such their own will in this really amazing way. And it just felt incredibly cat-like. I'm like, you look like a dog, but your behavior is so much more cat-like.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So I don't know. No great studies on this. It'd be great to kind of figure it out. But my sense is distinction between dog people and cat people might be the unconditional love, no push me ratio of what people like.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, it's like such an enormous billion dollar industry to have dogs. And it raises a question that kind of gets us back to some of the happiness work, like, which is, is that a good idea, right? All these people are investing their time, their energy, their spaces in dogs. You know, you could ask the question, do they make us happier? And I know they do. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I'm not going to break everybody's heart. We've killed the cat people and the toy dog people. No, pet dogs in particular, but pets in general wind up making us happier. Pet owners are statistically happier. And I think it's for a couple of reasons based on the stuff we just talked about. You know, take the behavioral pattern that matters, social connection.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
For sure, dogs provide that social connection themselves. You know, we just talked about they tap into your caregiving system and so on. But as you talked about in your interactions with like, you know, bulldog pleading, you know, like bulldog, you know, what was the phrase you used? When you see a bulldog and you say bulldog something. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Let me go back.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So you do the bulldog text and you have this nice social connection with the bulldog. But my guess is, because you're using verbal language, you also get connected with the person. You probably say, oh, my gosh, what's his name? Oh, when did you get him? Blah, blah, blah. That's chatting with the priest at the coffee shop, right? That's doing the Nick Epley experiments we just talked about before.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
pets wind up bringing us social connection. And one of the pieces of advice if you're feeling lonely is get an animal, not just so that the animal will give you some comfort, but, you know, particularly with a dog, you get to walk that animal and then people talk to you. It's much easier to connect with people when you have dogs. So social connection is huge.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Second thing is, you know, particularly again for dogs, what are people doing? They're getting out and walking, right? So we're getting some people who never had a lot of physical exercise before are at least getting the kind of walks they need to do in for the dog. And even if they won't choose to do it for themselves, they often choose to do it for their dog.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So you get exercise in, which is good for physical health and we haven't talked about, but is enormously good for happiness. Meta-analysis showing a half hour of cardio exercise a day is as good as an anti-depression medication for reducing symptoms of depression. So just that walk with your dog is great. But beyond that, I think they help our thought patterns, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And this is true for dogs, I think, and cats, right? Where, you know, as you were saying, we're wondering what they're doing. Sometimes if they're sitting there and we're just petting them, what we're doing is we're sitting there and we're petting them.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So they give us these wonderful sensory experiences, and I think they cause us to be a little bit more present, especially when we're kind of interacting with them. You know, when we're interacting with our dogs, unless you're taking the Instagram pictures of the dog, but usually when you're playing with the dog or whatever, you're just there. You're not on your phone.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're just kind of mindfully experiencing things. life with your dog. Kind of like when you talked about your road trip, you know, part of what probably brought you into the present moment, especially if your girlfriend was working, was like that the dog was interacting with you. So the dogs help us not because they're inherently kind of happiness inducing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They help us tick these boxes of better behaviors for happiness, better thought patterns for happiness, and they're kind of a delight. So they kind of give us some positive emotion too.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. It also gives you another behavior that we know is really important for happiness, which is time. There's a lot of social science research on this phenomenon that's called time affluence, which is a sort of subjective sense that you feel wealthy in time. You kind of just have a break, right? You get a... Like a smoking break is one of these, right? You get a break.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And often people, you know, back in the day when smoking was allowed, one of the ways that you got your breaks, often in not so great workplaces, was like you could... ask for a smoke break. My mom talks about this. She was a teacher educator for a super long time where you don't get a lot of breaks. But, you know, back in the 70s, if you're a smoker, they'd let you go outside for 10 minutes.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And that was a sort of break. Right. So I think this other unhealthy habit kind of gave us the opportunity to take breaks, which we know are great for happiness and so great for happiness that if you don't have any of this so-called time affluence, this sense that you have some free time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
If you experience what researchers call time famine, where you feel like almost starving for time, it's a huge hit on your well-being. If you self-report in these surveys being time famished, so I don't have time to meet up with my friends, I never have time for the stuff I want to do, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Listeners, if you have a job and you lost it tomorrow, you'd probably think of that as a big hit on your happiness. Just not having any time for the little breaks in life is as bad. Wow.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And this gets back to our earlier discussion about money and happiness, which is researcher Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School has kind of pushed the idea that what's going on with these low-income folks who have a real hit on happiness, right, not having a high income hurts your happiness. Her theory is a lot of that actually has to do with time because if you have a really low income –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You don't have a car to get to work, so you're taking the bus and it's taking you forever. You're working multiple jobs, right? A lot of the reason that money affects happiness and not having money affects happiness is that it co-varies with not having time. And the real hit on our happiness is just the time part more so than the money part.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I think that this term kind of time affluence and what researchers mean by it is helpful here, right? It's the subjective sense that you have some free time. It's not I objectively go into your calendar and you show me how many open blocks there are. It's your sense that you have a break. And this provides an interesting hack that we can use to get more of it, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Which is that we can kind of just frame things as having more time. You know, because sometimes when you get a break that you don't expect, it can feel like a lot. I teach this class about happiness on Yale's campus and I talk about time affluence. It's one of the topics in my class. And I always felt that was really ironic because our young people today, especially at, you are so time famished.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They're running from thing to thing and have a million extracurriculars and so on. So I feel like I'm going to lecture them for an hour on time affluence and tell them all these studies. And so what I did was in the syllabus is that there's a lecture on time affluence and they come to class and I have my teaching assistants that are handing out little flyers that say,
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
today's, you know, like lectures about time affluence and to teach you what that is, I'm going to give you some. No class today. So you didn't know. You walked to class. Now you got a free hour and a half. And it just happened to be one of these unusually warm, you know, like California-esque days in New Haven where it was like sunny out.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So kids, you know, got a bubble tea with their friend or some of them went on a hike near like local, you know, state park and One of the students I remember burst into tears when she got this form, and she said, this is the first free hour and a half I've had for like the last three months. Wow. They're that stressed. They're that stressed.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But what I find interesting about this is like I didn't give them a month off vacation. I gave them an hour back unexpectedly, and it felt like it was huge. And, Andrew, I don't know your schedule, but sometimes my schedule can be so overwhelmed and so packed that there's a half-hour meeting that gets canceled. I'm just like –
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
oh and like the relief I feel like I could learn a new language I could you know like you just feel like but it's a half hour right and I think this is a hack we can use for ourselves right you know listeners right now go on your calendar a few months from now and just like you know take like you know months months away pick an hour period and just write in like a Huberman lab time affluence and just don't put anything in that and my guess is when you get to that hour that you've scheduled months later you'll just be like oh my gosh this feels great we can kind of gift ourselves these little windows of time um
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Another hack we can do is to make good use of the free time we do have. And this is kind of a puzzle, something that I found unexpected when I saw the data on this, which is that it turns out we actually have more free time now than we did like 10, 15 years ago, if you add it up. Not just kind of post-COVID, but in general, we've been getting more free time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
However, the free time we have is cut up differently. It's in smaller chunks. It's like five minutes when that Zoom meeting ends a little earlier, 10 minutes if your kid falls asleep early or whatever it is. And we don't think it's that much, so we just kind of blow it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think there's a real danger of these kind of extrinsic rewards, as you might call them, all the stuff outside, the grades, you know, the performance measures and so on, literally stealing your intrinsic rewards. There's this funny phenomenon in psychology where if you have something that's intrinsically rewarding, so let's say exercise, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But if you add it up, it winds up more than people in past decades have had and probably like good time that we could use for stuff. And so these little chunks of time are what the journalist Bridget Schultz calls time confetti, which I think is such a great image of it. It's this little, you know, five minutes here and there. But you can do a lot with those minutes if you add them up.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We just have to use them a little bit more intentionally, right? And that could be, you know, for some of the stuff you talk about in this podcast a lot, like use that – do the seven-minute New York Times workout, you know, do the kinds of things we're talking about. You know, that's the time you text your friend and have a delay or – Get some sunlight.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Problem is what do we do when we get the time confetti? I mean, what do I do when I'm in a bad moment? Pull out our phone, check our email, scroll through. It's like, again, this sort of NutraSweet dopamine hit that's not being effective.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So if you feel really overwhelmed and you objectively don't have a lot of time, remember that the time confetti that you already have, it's already sitting there. It can be really valuable if you use it well.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like I want to go out, you know, and like run like a bunch, right? I love running. I get this intrinsic reward from running. Now I get some sort of tool, whether it's my watch or something I'm scribbling down in a phone app and I have to like log my running, now it becomes a sort of extrinsic reward. It's not just like the feeling of running, but it sort of takes on this extrinsic idea.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, I think it does. I mean, you're giving a neurobiological explanation for what psychologists in this field of positive psychology have referred to as what's called hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying – we get used to stuff.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, you like grab the, you know, delicious ice cream cone, or I know we're Cuban, we do a delicious salad, really healthy, but it's tasty, healthy, tasty salad, right? Start eating it. First bite is like, this is awesome. I'm so into it. It's great. Bite number two, a little bit less awesome, a little bit less awesome.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
By the 10th bite, it's not because you're full or you're like, you know, feeling disgusted. It's just like that sensory experience, you've gotten used to it, right? It's just no longer as interesting.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, exactly.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, which is great. I mean, you wouldn't maybe want to be firing, your neurons would get all exhausted and stuff, but it's in one way terrible for happiness, another way very good for happiness, but in a major way terrible for happiness, which is the following. Every good thing in life, if it sticks around, becomes kind of boring over time. You're just kind of used to it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I use the example sometimes of, you know, the last time – the first time your partner said, I love you. Or if you had a kid, the first time your kid said, mommy or daddy. That feels – amazing, right? But like, you know, last week, my husband said, I love you. It's like, whatever, I'm just used to it, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, last week when your kid was like, I love you, mom, like, you know, mommy, like, you don't care, right? The most amazing thing in life, if it gets repeated, just becomes boring. And that sucks because, you know, you like the most amazing things in life to kind of keep being awesome. It's pretty sad that we don't have it, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
This has a flip side, though, which is very good for happiness, hedonic adaptation, which is the most terrible thing in life can happen. And over time, you get used to that, too. You know, so your partner breaks up with you. You find out you have a chronic disease, right? Just something like really bad happens day one when you find out that piece of information. It is awful, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But day two, yeah, it's still awful, but that's just your life. And then over time, it kind of gets better. There's a very famous study in the field of happiness science that tried to look at this with people who experienced a really great event in theory, winning the lottery, and people who experienced really bad events, real events in life, becoming paraplegic.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And then what happens is sometimes we end up going for that reward Anyway, the fiction writer David Sedaris has this wonderful article called The Fitbit Life where he talks about how he wanted to get fit. It's intrinsic reward of exercising more. And he got the Fitbit, and then it was all about the Fitbit. And he would set the level higher and set the level higher.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So you used to be able to walk, and now you've lost the use of your legs. You survey happiness in people who haven't had these experiences, and you ask, predict how bad it would be to have this. And people say, you know, day one of winning the lottery would be really great. And, you know, a year from now, a year from that point, winning the lottery would still be just as great.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It would be awesome. Same thing with paraplegic. The moment you become paraplegic, that day is a really crappy Thursday, but a year from then is still just as crappy. And what you find is people, on the day you become paraplegic or the day you win your lottery, that's a big shift in your contrast. The day you win the lottery is an awesome Thursday. They become paraplegic is terrible.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But a year from then, it turns out your happiness is no different from baseline from the day before that event happened, right, statistically. And that is shocking, right? Like I know these results. I can quote the paper. But like if you told me today, Laura, you walk out of the studio, you get hit by a car, you're paraplegic, how would you feel in 2026? I'd be like, my life is still really crummy.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But statistically, that's just not going to happen. What does that mean? That's kind of good news about hedonic adaptation for happiness. That means the worst thing possible could happen to you and you have all these processes that are just going to get used to it over time and it's going to be okay. And I think this is an important aspect of our psychology that we forget.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think sometimes we have opportunities to do things in life that are a little risky, something we might try out that we might screw up or fail at or that we'll be bad at at first. And we don't do it because we're scared. We're making a prediction like, oh, well, if I failed or if I screwed that up, you know, I'd just be unhappy.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But actually, all these mechanisms that we have of hedonic adaptation means those things aren't going to affect you for as long as you think. So I think the contrast hypothesis about happiness is real. Good things don't stay good things over time. But the bad things don't either. And so... But we still want the good things to stay good over time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so that raises a question of how we can do that. And Liz Dunn, whose work I've mentioned before, she likes to use this phrase that scarcity engineers happiness, right? One thing we can do is space out the good things in life. You know, so if I was having that really delicious, healthy salad with the avocado and whatever, if I had that every day, it would stop being good.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But if I had it very, very infrequently, it would still be good every time I come back to it. And so sometimes, oddly, the way we make ourselves happier is to kind of remove positive experiences, especially extreme positive experiences, kind of space them out so we can kind of come back to them over time.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And he himself was miserable and no longer enjoying running to the point that at some point he just would walk around shaking his arm just to get up to those final steps, right? That's a really terrible case where your extrinsic reward – winds up taking over.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's interesting. To my knowledge, people haven't studied hedonic adaptation in dogs, but it's a really good question. But we are not like that for most things. And this sucks, right? I mean, it's also the case that in addition to kind of getting used to stuff over time, It's also showing a different feature, which is a sort of more particular contrast feature you're talking about.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So over time, we kind of habituate. That's one sort of neural mechanism. But another is the one that you mentioned, which is about the contrast, right? And that's what you see kind of – you see both of them, say, in the light perception, right? If I show you the same light over time, you're going to habituate. That's hedonic adaptation.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But that gets to maybe what I would think of as different. So hedonic adaptation is the same stimulus over time, like almost like habituation. There's a different thing that happens when you get what you might call a contrast. And there's all kinds of visual illusions that sort of function on this. If you've ever seen the one where it's like, you know, is it the same color over here, over here?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We could throw this on your show page to show people. And it's like, oh, it looks different. It's like, no, no, no, that's because of the kind of contrast between the two things. You see something that's really bright over here, it makes something else look a little darker, right? That's a different negative effect on our happiness a lot of the time. This is the comparison effect, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But so many of the cases you just talked about are ones in our real life where that comes up much more insidiously than with like a Fitbit or something like that. You talked about play and mammals, the easiest thing that little kid animals do all over the place. Little kid humans don't do that as much anymore because even from really young ages, they're
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
This is like my $50 million seems kind of crappy because I hang out with people who have $100 million. Objectively, I have a tremendous amount of money, but I feel bad because I'm kind of comparing against something else. And so oftentimes when we're evaluating different rewards, we're kind of comparing them against what other people had or what we've had in the past.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And that means that being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if you just have somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation. My favorite example of this actually comes from the sports world. So researchers asked this interesting question, like, how happy are you when you win an Olympic medal, right? You're on the stand, you won an Olympic medal.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And also, who's happiest? So... Gold medalist is up there, best in the world. You might assume they're the happiest, right? And they are. They're smiling. Researchers analyze this by looking at facial expressions and kind of code the muscles and so on. But it turns out they're not the happiest, right? Who's the happiest? Well, let's look at the silver medalist. Are they happiest? No.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
In fact, actually, if you code their facial muscles, they're showing expressions like contempt, deep sadness. This is the same expression you'd make like if your parent died or like, you know, a real terrible grief moment.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Because the idea is like who's your major comparison point if you're in silver? 0.2 seconds or something, you would have gotten gold. And you're not feeling objectively like you're the second best on the planet. You beat all but one of billions of people on the planet. No, you just feel terrible. So that's silver medalist. What's going on with the bronze medalist, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
There's another person on the stand. What's their comparison point? It's not gold. They were multiple people multiple seconds away. their salient comparison is like, by the grace of God, like I'm up here at all. I almost like, you know, two seconds the other direction, I would have never gotten up here.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And when you analyze the bronze medalist facial expressions, they're sometimes even happier than the gold medalist. Definitely happier than the silver, who's objectively better, but sometimes even happier than the gold medalist because they're like, relative to my comparison point, I'm doing amazing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Exactly. This is a point that I make with my Ivy League students who've been perfect in their grades and perfect at everything to get into a place like Yale. which is like, turns out that's a terrible recipe for happiness.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Stay there you don't notice, right, because you're habituated to it, just like the pattern. down feels really bad. Like that's a terrible comparison. I often play my students that DJ Khaled song, all I do is win, all I do is win, win, win. And I was like, all you do is win, win, win would be a terrible way to experience success in life because you just stop noticing it over time if you won.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, in toddler university where they're kind of learning things to get into the next grade and get the perfect grade so they can get into institutions like ours, right? It all becomes about extrinsic rewards. And so I think you're really right. We're kind of extrinsic-sizing all the rewards to the point that we're not getting to internal happiness.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And that's messed up because it means when you get, when you finally hit the success that you were striving for, If you just stay at that level, it just stops being good, which sucks. And so that raises a different question, which is like, what is a hack that we can do to get away from that?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
One is to not look for the silver lining, but to look for the bronze lining, which is, you know, you kind of think of reference points that are lower than you.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, it's like a science experiment. So look for the bronze lining, which means... Find a reference point that's not as good. And for most of the things you're comparing, whether that's your looks, your fitness level, your finances, you can look and find somebody that's doing worse than you.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Another great hack for this – and this is more one that's kind of a hack for hedonic adaptation, getting used to stuff – It actually comes from the ancient traditions. I know you talk a lot about, you know, the smart folks back in the day who came up with this stuff, right? This is one from the Stoic tradition, a practice called negative visualization.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So Stoics like Marcus Aurelius thought when you wake up in the morning, you should have the following thought pattern. You should think, today I will lose my success. I will be exiled. I'll lose my partner. I will lose my health. I won't be able to walk anymore. It doesn't say ruminate on that for forever, but just like a little and then stop and say, huh, I'm not exiled. I still have my success.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I still have my partner and so on. This is a technique called negative visualization where you just imagine you don't have to live it in real life. You just imagine you lose something.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
um if you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to you know how quickly you recognize the value of it this happens to me with my phone all the time i'm a chronic phone loser and i'm like you know and i'm like oh my god my phone is gone i left it in the airport all my contacts are there and then i'm like oh it's in the car you have this i love my phone like it's so there's that line in pulp fiction where he says like um what is it it's like it's um
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Exactly.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And that sucks to really lose your phone. Sometimes in my case, you really lost the phone, right? But negative visualization, you don't have to do that. You just use your imagination, right? And so if you're listening right now and you have a kid, let's do this negative visualization. The last time you saw your kid was the last time you ever saw them. Never going to see them again.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
No, didn't happen. You don't have to remind me about it. But my guess is the next time you hug your kid, just that two seconds of thinking about what things would be like without it can break through hedonic adaptation. So one of my favorite hacks for hedonic adaptation, you can use scarcity, really space things out.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But for the things you can't space out, you can't like have a kid and get rid of a kid for two weeks and come back to your kid, right? You can use your imagination. It doesn't take much to start to realize what you have and appreciate it more. Yeah.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It was hard already to pay attention to that stuff because – I think we'll probably talk about this. It's hard to be mindful about your emotions. You really have to pay attention to what's going on. But I think it's gotten even harder because we have these metrics. They're all over the place in our culture, but they're just not the intrinsic thing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think this gets to, you know, another domain in which I see kind of toxic positivity playing out a lot, which is kind of in this sort of domain of like, you know, how do we do this stuff better, right? Like how do we, you know, kind of get good things in life? And there's a lot of talk in some circles about this idea of like manifesting, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I'll just think about, you know, I'm feeling lonely. I'll just think about what it's like to have friends or I'm not fit right now. I'll just imagine my fit future and fantasize about what it's like to run marathons and things like that. Turns out this can be a case where you're using imagination in a bad way because what happens when you really deeply imagine, say, the rewards of being super fit,
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
you start to get like your brain's like firing the reward cylinders for like what it feels like to be super fit. And there's evidence from Gabrielle Oettingen's lab at NYU that like you actually get less motivated to do stuff. She does this in the context of fitness. She has people who, you know, want to run a 5K or want to lose some weight, for example.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They talk about like, you know, imagine how great it would be to do this. And they're less motivated to put on their running shoes and practice because they've already imagined the fantasy future. Turns out instead of manifesting, a better technique, if you have some habit that you want to engage in, is to imagine the obstacles, the bad stuff that's coming up, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So, oh, I want to get out and run this 5K. Well, what's the obstacle to that? I'm going to be in bed and alarm's going to go off. What's going to happen? Like, oh, I'm going to be, you know, too warm. Like maybe I put my running clothes on or, oh, like I'm not going to want to, it's going to be cold out. Like, oh, I should get a nice, you know, fuzzy hat to be able to do this.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So Oettingen's work shows that if you actually imagine the negative things, again, not ruminating about it and freaking out, but imagine particularly the obstacles for a habit you want to engage in, you kind of naturally come up with solutions to those obstacles, which makes it easier. So sometimes thinking about the bad stuff can be helpful. We just have to regulate when we do it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
There's some extrinsic marker that could make the intrinsic thing even less fun.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Exactly. And again, this is a case where there's nuance. You have to believe it's possible, right? Those negative voices can't tell you it's impossible because something else we know about motivation is that Believing something is possible, which requires lots of effort, but it is possible, is quite helpful for you. The best example of this comes from another sort of sporting case.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I don't know if you know the case of Roger Bannister, who's the first guy to run the four-minute mile.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Break the four-minute mile. And before he did that, people thought it was like physiologically impossible. Like the human body cannot do this. And he was like, no, the human body can do this. And everyone was like, Roger, you're crazy, whatever. Right. But then he, you know, trained and trained and probably had to overcome his obstacles. He ran it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And then within like two months, somebody else broke the four-minute mile. Like it had not been broken in all of human history. But as soon as people had evidence of like, oh, people can do that, like now everybody does it. And now I don't know. I mean, as you can see, I'm not a fit person. But like lots of people run four-minute miles. It's not like the hugest thing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But the point is that they're probably helped out by this thing called the banister effect. They know it's possible, right? So if you train, if you run into obstacles, if you don't get that time, you're not like, well, I guess it's physiologically, I just can't do it. You can kind of do it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And so there's this idea with the banister effect, you kind of have to be optimistic enough to think that it's doable. But when you think that it's doable, it's really helpful to ask the question, right? Okay, what are the things that are going to come in the way of my doing it? Maybe imagine them really kind of vividly so you get a sense. It can super help it.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. So these effects of kind of resources on happiness are really interesting and they're nuanced, right? So if you look at the lower end of the kind of income spectrum, you would obviously say that money affects happiness, right? If you can't put food on the table, if you can't put a roof over your head, definitely getting a little bit more is going to affect your happiness in a positive way.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Better than anybody else or like kind of showing off or like pushing yourself or thinking you're better, even kind of maybe striving specific, not to be, you can strive to be better, but to strive to be better than other people is kind of, it's like a no, no, it's sort of culturally frowned upon in this way that I think is completely the opposite in the US right now where like that's seen as an awesome thing.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I think the problem is that these kind of rags to riches stories, you know, you've given cases of like ones that there's like a moment, right, in SpaceX. They do this wonderful thing. You're like, yeah, they kind of got there. And, you know, Haktua is still doing her thing. But there was this moment of like, oh, my gosh, you kind of achieved this success.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
There's this idea that we kind of think that there's an end destination for something. You know, I'm going to get $50 million. I'm going to get married. I'm going to get that promotion at work, right? For my students, I'm going to get into like a really elite college or something like that. We don't put our emphasis on the journey part. We put our emphasis on the destination part.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And we assume that the destination is going to come with a lot of happiness. This is a bias that researchers have called the arrival fallacy. I'll be happy when. You know, it's almost like the happily ever after. I'll be happily ever after if I get that promotion or happily ever after when I meet that person.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
What we know from hedonic adaptation is that thing that's awesome in the moment when you arrive there quickly becomes the other thing. You mentioned briefly the gold medalists who have this moment where it's like they won the gold medal and that's awesome. But now everything else is downhill or I just got to do it again, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
We arrive at the best possible place we could have fantasized and instantly it's like I just have to start chasing the next carrot. So sometimes when we find ourselves, I think as Americans – you know, chasing after the thing, I think it's important to remember that, first of all, that chase is going to involve lots of ups and downs. It's not going to be a linear path.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's probably not going to be overnight. Even the ones you mentioned, maybe with the exception of October, it was a really extreme case, required some kind of work and ups and downs and these kinds of things, right? We don't see those. But more, the happiness that we're going to get, it's better off if we're going not for the end result, that arrival and falling prey to the arrival fallacy,
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And the data sort of bear this out. There's a very famous study by the Nobel Prize winning economist Danny Kahneman, RIP. Back in 2010, he did this cool study where he looked at the correlation between income and happiness, as reported in how much stress you have, how much positive emotion you experience, and so on. And the low end of the income scales, it just goes up and up and up, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
it's better if we can see some happiness in the journey. This has often been called this idea of sort of finding a journey mindset, which is sort of what can you take from the process of getting there, right?
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So you want to run your 5K, but like what can you do to try to enjoy the process of, you know, those runs that go along the way and noticing the kind of ups and downs and sort of paying attention to the journey. It's one way to kind of break out of falling prey to this arrival fallacy.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Totally. And I think one that, you know, is not culturally accepted in the U.S. And I think this causes a lot of, you know, it causes a happiness hit, not just because like sometimes we don't get there.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Sometimes there's reason, you know, if you set your height super high, you know, you want to be Roger Bannister or whatever, like not all of us are going to get there, whether that's a four minute mile or success at work or $50 million or whatever it is. So sometimes if you set your sights too high, you just don't get there. And so that's a happiness hit.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But a bigger happiness, and sometimes when you do get there, it's a happiness hit because you get there and there's a happiness for a moment. But then, you know, that hit doesn't keep coming. I think we also just lose out on something when we're not. in that journey mindset because there's a lot of cool stuff along the way if we can kind of pay attention.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But yeah, I think it's a big cultural shift from the way Americans usually think, but it's one that if we can achieve that, we'll start feeling a lot better. And it means even the failures in life are kind of good because you are enjoying yourself along the way. For my podcast, I did an episode about these sort of Olympic medals where I talked about the bronze lining effect and things.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I had Michelle Kwan, who, you know, Olympic medalist, we all remember her, but mostly just won silver. And I talked to her about, you know, what that felt like. And she said, it didn't matter to me. The things I love about being Olympics wasn't the medal stand.
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How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It was when she first, she talked about putting her skates on and seeing the rings in the ice and recognizing as soon as I tie these laces, I'm going to get to skate over those. And I fantasize. That's the journey mindset, right? You're not looking at the thing at the end.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're paying enough attention to the stuff along the way, even some of the stuff that's a pain in the butt that you kind of get some joy on the ride.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're old enough now, Andrew. You can jump into it.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But it can make you feel a lot. If you can get that distance from your current state, and this is a kind of, you know, you had Ethan Cross on the show that he talks a lot, a lot. If you can kind of get that distance of, well, how's this going to feel in five years? How's this going to feel in 10 years? You can sometimes feel a lot better. Interestingly, even when the happy stuff
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
More money just almost linearly gives you more happiness. But what Danny found, and it's the second part of this nuanced picture, is that that slope kind of levels off. And it levels off in 2010 dollars at around $75,000. What does that mean? That means if you get more than $75,000, you're not going to feel any less stressed. You're not going to experience any more positive emotion.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
if we can get some sense that like this isn't going to last forever, that can sometimes boost the happiness. Because we're kind of almost doing like a negative visualization in the forward direction, right? So a scarce experience, if you're having it, it's useful to remember like, you know, this is limited, right? This is temporary. I should enjoy this now while it's happening.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The most extreme version of this, of course, is with our own lives, right? Contemplating our mortality, right? There's this idea of memento mori, which is a common phrase. I actually have my ring has memento mori on it, which is morbid, right? I'm going to die. I'm not going to be here.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But when you recognize that, you know, the old school folks thought, and I think it's true, like you realize, like, I can't take any of this stuff for granted. I have to pay attention now. This is not, you know, the kind of thing that's going to last forever. And so I think moments like that for positive experiences can feel like that.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And, you know, while I'm here, you know, took a walk on Santa Monica Beach and was like, you know, my brain was like, oh, I have to, Andrew coming out. I was like, no, no, I'm going to like fly back to cold, you know, East Coast tomorrow. I need to pay attention, right? So thinking that this is finite can actually help you. There's a very funny study on this with college students where
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
They did this sort of funny framing technique where they brought senior college students into a lab, you know, kind of halfway through, you know, the spring semester and told them, you know, you either have this many hours less of your time, which maybe is a big number, you know, it makes it seem like thousands of hours, or you have only this many days left before you graduate, just like, just a reminder.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
What they found was the one that got the days manipulation, where it felt kind of short, they wound up doing more things, like kind of getting in those things that they thought, oh, I'll get around to it eventually, right? and wound up kind of feeling happier.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
So recognizing that things are short sometimes has a benefit, maybe both for negative emotions like this too shall pass, but also the positive stuff like this too shall pass. So I got to enjoy it while it's around.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it's not nice to think that these good states are going to pass. But I think it is helpful because it forces us to pay attention to them. I'm having this a little bit now where, you know, we're coming up on the holidays that you and I are having this conversation.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And, you know, I'm getting ready to do the holidays with the in-laws, you know, which there's lots of positives. It's like, oh, God, I don't want to.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Even if I double or triple or quadruple your income, on those metrics, you're not going to see any increase.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But because my in-laws, my mom is getting up there, I'm kind of like, oh, recognizing that there's not infinite holidays left with these people that I care about, that it's kind of more finite and maybe more finite than it's been, it's causing me to be more excited about it than I would have been. And so that's a morbid thought, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Memento Mori was meant to be a really bittersweet emotion, right, that we are finite, right? But it can kind of give you this appreciation. It can cause you to savor in a special way. Yeah. Sometimes the morbid is good. A little bit, a little bit morbid.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
High amygdala reaction. Me too.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
I hate horror movies. But it's worth noting that like, you know, a lot of people like them, you know, huge industry. Yeah. Um, and even if you don't like horror movies, you might like, you know, maybe a spicy food that feels not, not even good. It feels awful in the moment or super hot bath or, you know, cold, like really cold plunge. Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Or even, you know, honestly, for me, like I'm not a super fan of exercise, but like a really, really hard workout that feels miserable. When you finally stop, it feels, I do a lot of yoga and my favorite thing is at the end when they're like, and now you can do shavasana. The shavasana is always good if you've worked the worst.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
You're just really like, ha, you know, it's helpful to kind of have these moments to like have this contrast. And so building the contrast in where you kind of give yourself some negative emotion. You know, whether it's a kind of imagined negative emotion like negative visualization or a fictional one, a lot of our favorite fictional experiences are pretty terrible.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Like a novel is really boring if the protagonist is like, there's nothing bad happens, just kind of coasts along and things are just mildly positive. No, we want them to go through some terrible stuff even when we really associate with them and sort of see them as ourselves. And so, yeah, these like fictional worlds where we can play with negative emotions a little bit –
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, they didn't get into like their real – because you're like, oh, my God, well, I live in California. Like if you live in Iowa, maybe it's not so bad. But like – and those numbers will change. But the upshot is there's probably some number in like 2025, 2024 numbers that might be like maybe $100,000, $120,000, whatever it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
are super interesting psychologically because, like, why would we do that? But, you know, as you're saying, even when you get, you know, these, like, neural stimulation, we kind of want some of the negative stuff. So there's an interesting paper about what's the right ratio of positive to negative emotions. And it's not 100% positives for hedonic adaptation and so on.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
But I think really the recipe for a rich life is varied for these contrast reasons we've been talking about.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It was like, boom, it's exactly.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think it's also worth remembering that we're talking as though there are negative emotions and positive emotions. A lot of the most interesting emotions are more complex than that. You talked about this SpaceX kind of chopsticks moment. My guess is the emotion you're experiencing there is one that researchers like Dacher Keltner and colleagues would call awe.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
This sense of, oh my gosh, that is amazing. There's something bigger than me that is able to do this thing. And one of the reasons awe is such an interesting emotion is it's usually destabilizing, right? There are things that are better than I ever expected. Humankind is so masterful. Space is so big. Nature is so vast, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It kind of feels a little destabilizing when you experience awe, but we also see it as positive. And so I think kind of if you're feeling a little bored in your emotional life, trying to find moments where you can get these emotions that are not so obviously positive or negative, but are a little bit of both can be really inspiring.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
It's one of the reasons, you know, we talk a lot about sort of psychedelics and these sort of altered experiences. Those experiences tend to be thought of as being really consistent with moments of awe, but they, again, are not universally positive, but they kind of expand you and take you a little further.
Huberman Lab
How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos
The point is that there's some number at which getting more is not going to increase your happiness at the same slope. Now, there's been nuanced fights about this, as there is a lot in kind of real research, about, well, is that really true? Does the slope really ever go up?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little intimate group.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, I took on this new role on Yale's campus where I became what's called the head of college. Yale's one of these funny schools where there's like colleges within a college, like Harry Potter, like Gryffindor, Slytherin kind of thing. So I became head of a college on campus.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And that meant that I was like living with students, like eating with them in the dining hall, hanging out with them up close and personal. And I just didn't realize the college student mental health crisis was as bad as it was. Right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students say they're too depressed to function most day. More than 60% say they're overwhelmingly anxious.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
This was a real crisis that I was seeing. And that felt really frustrating because my field has all these strategies we can use to feel better, experience more resilience, feel less stressed. And I was like, let me just develop this class. And then it got very, very big. Not as big as this, but pretty big.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
I mean, yeah, I think the first thing to answer, the first thing to say for that question is that this is normal. Right? You're not the only person in the room that's going through that. And I think that normalization is critical.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
All too often we can get into this like toxic positivity vibe where it's like, I'm feeling kind of embarrassed that I'm so upset and frustrated and overwhelmed, sad about what's going on in the world. But like, we're supposed to feel that. Negative emotions are normal in an abnormal world.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think it's fair to say that we are, you know, it's not great, but we are in an abnormal world right now. And so I think that's kind of point number one. The other reason that normalization is so important is that psychologically, it can help us.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
When you realize that these negative emotions are a common human experience, that they're emotions that are there to help you, they still don't feel good, but it can allow you to get through them a little bit better. Even here in UT Austin, there's a researcher, Kristen Neff, who studies this process of what she calls common humanity, right? Recognizing like we're all going through it right now.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And what she finds is that can actually help you get through tough times. She does this cool research with Afghan and Iraqi veterans and finds that those that give themselves self-compassion realize that everybody's going through a tough time here. They wind up coming out with less evidence of PTSD and other related disorders.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
So like when you give yourself a little grace for feeling those negative emotions, realize they're normal in bad times. that actually helps you get through the negative emotions.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
That's right. And we have data on this, right, looking across time. And those rates of depression, anxiety and stuff I just talked about, they're worse than they are in young people right now than ever since we've recorded them, right? Like, and it's much worse. And I think you're exactly right. I think it's a lot our expectations, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
We have tools that allow us to see those fancy houses, those fancy vacations, those fancy schools. And they're just in our pockets, dinging all the time, giving us a comparison that makes us feel kind of crappy, right? And what we know from the happiness science is that it's not what we objectively have that makes us happy. It's what we're expecting. It's what we're used to.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You know, that's why I love the story of your dad, right? You know, just getting a... a little bowl of ice cream, that should be enough. I think especially in young people, the definition of enough has changed. There's lots of reasons for that, but I think getting to a better point of accepting and what our expectations are, that'll help a lot.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Exactly.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
That's right. And I think it leads to mental health crisis, not just in our young people, but also in parents. The former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy talked a lot about parent mental health and parent stress. He actually issued like a public health advisory on the fact that parents are going through their own tough emotions.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
But the biggest tough emotion that parents reported is guilt, as though they're not doing enough for their kids' happiness. They're not doing enough to kind of give them everything they need. And I think that reflects exactly what you're saying.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Was bad, as you probably guessed. Not great to live in a completely hopeless culture. And we really do live in more of a hopeless culture than we ever have before. Your researchers go out and study this, and they have over time. One of the best questions for this is they just ask people, on average, can you trust the other people around you, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
In the 1970s when they asked folks that question, around 50% of people said, yeah, on average, most folks can get trusted. When you ask that same question in 2018, it's down to a little less than a third. That doesn't sound like a big drop, but if I was plotting that, that's basically how much money we lost in 2008 when the financial crisis happened, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
So this is a complete off-a-cliff decline in people's sense of trust and people's sense of hope. And it's bad for lots of reasons. It's bad for us personally, people who experience less hope, experience more depression, experience more anxiety, experience more loneliness, which is interesting. Hope seems to be connected to our social connection. Also bad for our bodies.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
People who are more cynical report experiencing more diabetes, experiencing more heart disease, And it's probably bad for us as a society because when you don't experience hope, what you think is like stuff's never going to get better. And when you think stuff's never going to get better, you don't take action to make it better, right? You don't vote.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You don't do things pro-socially to help other people. And what you find research-wise is if you study people who are cynical, they self-report not voting. They self-report not donating to charity, not doing the stuff that you need to do to make things better. So yeah, it's really bad. And it becomes a vicious cycle, right? Because as more people get hopeless,
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Then they look out in the world with this hopeless lens. They post on social media with a hopeless lens. We get podcasts that are very hopeless. And it just becomes a cycle where we reinforce each other's bad perception of the world, one that might not even be really accurate.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, we know for sure that emotions are contagious, right? They're just like COVID. And we know this, right? You go into an office and you hang out with somebody who's feeling hyped up and optimistic and excited, you kind of catch that, right? You go into the same office with somebody who's down and not feeling it, like, you catch that too, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
These days, we don't just catch emotions from the other people we're around. We have this transfer system online where folks are catching
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
emotions globally you know I hop on some social media platform I'm catching some emotion from somebody on Instagram that lives in a different country in a completely different time zone but I catch that too and that's made worse by the fact that these social media companies obviously have algorithms that thrive not on us catching each other's positive emotions but on catching each other's anger and outrage and sadness right that's what gets eyeballs on our phones and so all these things together means not just that there's transference
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
but there's particular transference of the bad stuff, of the hopelessness.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I think one of the ways to find a balance is just to realize that what we're exposed to affects us, right? You hop on Instagram and you start scrolling through that feed. You might know that some of the stuff you look at is Photoshopped.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You might know that some of the stuff, you know, these companies are, they have algorithms that are sort of pointing you in a bad direction, but that doesn't enter psychologically. You're just soaking in emotions and then the stuff you see, right? But I think that knowledge can be a little bit of power, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You can even ask yourself, how do I feel after that scroll through Reddit or through social media, and ask yourself the question, do I feel more empowered, more hopeful, or do I feel kind of gross and in despair? You can make the choice to put that away. You can kind of notice mindfully how it's making you feel, and you sort of choose to stick it back in your pocket.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Social media companies wouldn't have these algorithms if all our eyeballs weren't on phones anymore. And we actually have more agency than we often remember in that fight.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Strategy. Strategies, yeah. Yeah.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, no, but strategies. I mean, I think awareness is really key here. One of my favorite strategies for sort of dealing with your phone and being on your phone all the time comes from the journalist Catherine Price.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
She has this lovely book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues that you don't have to break up with your phone so much as you need to take it to, like, couples counseling so that you can, like, deal with it better. Yeah. But she has this really handy acronym that she uses whenever she finds herself on her phone.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
It's WWW, which you can think of because you're probably on the World Wide Web, right? But this is not World Wide Web. WWW stands for what for, why now, and what else. So what are you on your phone for? Maybe you're checking your email or looking at a map. Maybe you're just... deep in some TikTok dive, right? Was there a purpose, right? Why now?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
This is an important one because you notice your emotions. What drives you to your phone? Were you bored? Were you anxious, right? What's your cue that like gets you there? What's that craving coming from? And then finally, what else, right? What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now? You might be missing Michelle Obama on your flight. Like they're just sitting right next to you.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You didn't notice, right? You might miss the beautiful scenery. You might miss the opportunity to talk to someone who has interesting stories, interesting ideas, right? That what else question is critical because what studies show us is that because we're on our phones, we're less social than we could be.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Lovely study by Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia had people with their phones or without their phones sitting in a waiting room. They weren't even using their phones. It was just like present or not. And she just measured the amount of smiling that people did, you know, casual, somebody's in your room, you smile at them. She sees 30% less smiling when phones are present, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
calculate that by all the phones on planes in Austin and so on. So we're really missing out. But that strategy of WWW, I think what it gets us towards is like, we just have to be mindful. We just have to notice. These are good tools, right? We know even from COVID times, they were so useful. But we just have to use them in a healthy way. Yeah, I love that.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things, right? One is making sure you have the right definition of hope. Because I think sometimes when we think of hope, we think of what at least psychologists might call optimism. We're just like, everything's going to be fine. And I think that everything's going to be fine is like, I mean, look at the new, like, look at X, like, look anywhere.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
It's not fine, right? And so I think it's important to, like, call it the way it is. It's not fine. But hope isn't that. Hope says things are not fine, but... I can actually see at least a few paths for things to get better. Why is that psychologically so important? If you think things are fine right now, are you going to act? Are you going to take agency? Are you going to do anything about it?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
No, because you're just kind of, things are fine right now. The world's not on fire. When you experience hope, what you feel is things are not fine right now, but there's a path. What does that path do? It gives you agency. It gives you a sense that something can be done, and probably I can be a small part of what needs to get done.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And that small part is key, because I think when we think we have to be the only one out there fixing everything, that also makes us feel a little overwhelmed and sad. But when you realize that your small action you're checking in on someone, you're donating five bucks to a cause you care about, you stepping up in any way to make things better, that actually matters.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And one of the things we know psychologically is that it also helps us feel a little bit more hopeful when we take action. So you show up at that cause you care about, go to protest, donate some money, Psychologically, you start to feel like, oh, we're even getting closer to a solution because I stepped up. Maybe other people step up. You also see good social evidence that you're not the only one.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You show up at a protest, you're usually not the only one there. You get a whole room like this full of people who care. Now, all of a sudden, your beliefs start to change. So you can, instead of being that vicious cycle of hopelessness that we talked about before, you can become part of a virtuous cycle of hopefulness. And that's the kind of thing that can also be socially contagious.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, and I love that you share the story of your father because it's also one of the strategies that we can use, tiny strategy we can use individually to do better, which is sharing these positive social stories. Like the world and social media, all these algorithms are filled with terrible stories, but you can actually see the good ones.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
You can say, you know, my dad in the midst of experiencing this terrible disease was hopeful. He taught us gratitude, right? And, you know, it doesn't even have to be Michelle Obama's dad, right? You can find these little examples of moral goodness, but don't just keep them to yourself, share them. And I think if you're a parent, this is one of the best things you can do to your kids, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Because they maybe don't have as much kind of frontal lobe power to go out there and find those good stories. Over the dinner table, what moral goodness did you see today? What was something that delighted you, that kind of made you happy, specifically about what somebody else was doing? We don't share these enough, but the sad thing is, like, they're out there.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
We just don't hear about them enough. And so that's one of the reasons I'm so glad y'all are doing this podcast. There's going to be way more stories than that that come out that allow for what researchers call social savoring, or sort of savoring the goodness of other people.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Well, your mom might have been a better happiness scientist than you guys thought because she's like reading the evidence out there because that's what the evidence really shows is that it takes some work, but you can do things to feel better even in a horrible situation, right? Even in a horrible situation, there are things you can do to feel a little bit better.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And I think one of the biggest ones is really to connect with other people. You know, you talked about the problem of phones leading us away from each other. You talked about the loneliness crisis. Like, you're in a room with lots of other folks right now. You're probably in lots of rooms with lots of other folks. Just talk to them, right? Check in on your friends, reach out to them.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
These things sound silly, they sound like such a tiny thing to do, but they allow us to get towards more civic action, right? They're really like, in a very tiny way, the basis of democracy, right? Just talking to people and getting to know them, right? And so, in your own small worlds, do that. and reach out to the people that you care about.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
We often assume, again, that that's kind of a silly thing to do, but what the studies show is that when you're reaching out to other people, when you're checking in on other people, that boosts your happiness too. So you're ultimately, by doing nice things for others, growing the pie.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And you're giving yourself a little bit more of a sense of hope, because whenever you take action, you're like, oh my gosh, I have some agency. Things can't be that bad. I can make it a little bit better.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, and I think another thing that we can do, again, kind of channeling your parents, because I think they were on top of this stuff, is what your dad said, right? Find something to be a little bit grateful for. That can feel big in the situation that James is in, right? When it feels like everything is collapsing around you.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
It's hard to be living in LA in the midst of these fires and be like, well, I'm grateful for... If that feels hard, choose a lighter version of that strategy. Look for just something that's a little bit of a delight in the world. Like just a delight, something great. This is a practice I heard from the writer Ross Gay.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
He has this lovely book called A Book of Delights where he decided every day he was just going to go out and find some small wonder in the world that delighted him. And they're tiny things. Like you see somebody on the train give each other a fist bump. You walk into a cafe and it's playing El Debarge, like Rhythm of the Night, which is like a great song. Ross Gay was like, that's a delight, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And what it does is it allows him to train his brain away from something that our brains do naturally, which is what researchers call a negativity bias. We instantly notice all the bad stuff. You scroll through your feed and your brain is locked on to the bad information. But to find the good stuff, to find the delights, you've got to put a little energy into it.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And when it becomes a game, when you know you're sharing them with someone else or writing them down, Now, all of a sudden, you find them a little bit more quickly. And one of the reasons I love Ross's book is that he actually shows that this power of delight can help you fight all kinds of stuff. In lots of ways, it's a book that deals with a lot of the bad stuff that's going on.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
It talks really explicitly about racism. It talks really explicitly about cultures of violence and things like that. But when you find the delights, you're able to kind of get through it. It's like you're kind of padding yourself with some positive emotion to deal with the negative stuff.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And this is one of the reasons I think we need to find our light a little bit more, is the other thing that research shows is that if we wanna make changes, we kinda need the emotional bandwidth to do that. And one of the ways you do that is finding your light, right? Focusing on positive emotions.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
There's this researcher, Konstantin Kuchleff, who works at Georgetown, and he asked the question, who's out there doing the work to solve the problems, right? Who's showing up at the protests? Who's engaging in climate justice? And what he measures is people's positive emotion.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And he finds that the more you self-report having more positive emotion versus negative emotion, the more you're going out to that protest for a cause you care about, the more you're donating to kind of fix the things out there in the world. It's kind of like putting your own oxygen mask on first so you can help others, but it's not just like others, it's like helping the whole world.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
That bit of research has helped me because sometimes it can feel bad to not be hopeless in a hopeless world. Like if you're going through what James is going through, it's like, should I experience delight? Should I get happy because El Debarge is on in this cafe? It feels like weird.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
But his research helps me because it's like, no, it's almost your responsibility to find positive emotion because it actually allows you to get towards the actions that can fix stuff.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, let's do it. I think a big one is to notice how you feel when you're participating in the 24-7 news cycle, right? The news cycle didn't used to be 24-7. We all probably remember there was a day when you get the paper in the morning, you read it, you were very informed, but you put that thing away, it didn't walk around with you in your pocket, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
I think you can probably be informed with like 80% less time on your phone and you'll still know all the terrible things that are happening. I promise. They'll still be covering them, you know, 23 hours later. But just kind of give yourself a little bit of a break. Why? Information is good. You'll still have that. But you'll kind of protect your positive emotion a bit.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
I think the second one is just one that we talked about already. Social connection. Reach out and try to help someone else. Especially if you're feeling vulnerable. Especially if you're feeling in a crummy place. Just ask what very small thing can I do for somebody else? For a friend, text them, just say, hey, thinking about you.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
Donate three bucks or something, whatever you can financially afford, a little tiny thing to a charity. All of a sudden, that will start making you feel good, and you'll be doing good in the world, too. Absolutely.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
I think you're right. Like, not only does it, you said it doesn't matter for voting, it doesn't matter for, I think it does, right? If you take care of your body, you're going to be, you're going to have the bandwidth and the resilience to fight, whether that's fighting at the voting booth or fighting in other ways. And You also channeled something else that I often talk to my students about.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
We mentioned gratitude, right? And gratitude is really changing your thought patterns. It's noticing the delightful stuff and trying to move away from the negative stuff. But there's other ways we can use our thought patterns to feel good. I think one of them is just thinking back, right? Getting a little bit of psychological distance. As Michelle said before, things have been bad before, right?
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
And when you remember that, you're like, oh, we came back from it. We've come back from really awful stuff historically, especially if you look in long history. We've come back from really awful stuff. And what does remembering that do? It makes you realize, oh, things could be different. Even in a bad situation, I can see a path to something being better. What's that? That's hope.
IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
That's fighting your own cynicism right there.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah. Well, the origin of my interest in studying the science of happiness broadly was when I was a faculty member who lived with students on campus and I was seeing their mental health crisis. This is this is pre-COVID. This is like in 2018. And, you know, so many students were reporting feeling depressed and anxious. And I think at the time I wasn't very happy either.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, I'd hear them talk about. And realize like, oh, I'm also not thinking about things in the right way. You know, just an example, I'd see a student be like, hey, how's it going this week? And the student be like, oh, if I could just get to the weekend or if I could just fast forward and get to spring break.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And part of me was like, oh, man, you don't want to fast forward your entire college career. It's such a precious time. But then a bigger part of me was like, yeah, oh, my goodness, if we could just get to spring break and fast forward. So I thought, you know, I'm a psychologist. I know the kinds of things we can do to improve our mental health.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Maybe I should develop a class for students to teach them all these evidence-based strategies they could use to feel better. The class, the first time I taught it, became Yale's largest class in over 300 years. A quarter of the entire student body signed up for the class. And so that sort of made me realize that. Sorry, that is a lot. It was a lot of people.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
There were lots of logistical, you know, issues. Yeah, I was like, where do you teach them? Like in a stadium? That was when I started to realize that, you know, people needed this content.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah, so it has a couple of interesting benefits. One is it's just a practice that feels good. So gratitude in and of itself is an emotion, right? You know, when you realize you're grateful, when you realize there's so many good things in your life, that feels really good. But gratitude has all these other benefits that we don't realize. It's this pro-social emotion.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And pro-social emotions are ones where we start to think about other people rather than ourselves. They're emotions that make us want to do good out there in the world.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
David DeSteno, who's a social psychologist, he's found evidence that when you think about things that you're grateful for, if you happen to walk out of that experiment and somebody is having a slightly faked in our psychologist way emergency, you'll step in and you'll help that person who's having an emergency.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
So you're more likely to physically help out in the world when you've experienced gratitude. But an even cooler thing about gratitude is that gratitude makes us want to help our future self, right? It causes us to want to invest in our future happiness because, again, it feels like the cup overfloweth for me right now. I could, you know, put some work into helping out future me.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Like paying it forward for yourself even. Paying it forward for yourself. And you see that in a couple different domains, right? One is that when people experience more gratitude, they eat healthier, right? Because it's kind of like you don't need that treat now. You'll kind of, you know, eat a little healthier for your future self.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And when people experience more gratitude, they're more likely to save for the future. It's kind of, again, I don't need that immediate reward financially right now because, you know, again, my cup overfloweth. I'm cool.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah. So I think there are these benefits for us in terms of gratitude. But a huge benefit of gratitude is that especially when we express gratitude, it can really increase our relationship happiness. Couples who self-report being grateful to one another wind up being happier in their marriages and so on.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And there's lots of evidence that the act of intentionally remembering what you're thankful for in your other relationships, just like You know, in your family, as a parent, as a child, as a friend. These are the kinds of things that can increase our relationship bonds. Professor Sarah Aljo is a professor at the University of North Carolina.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
She has what she calls the find, remind, and bind theory. And so the idea is when we find good things about people, I find all these blessings about my relationship with you, say. That reminds me like, oh, my gosh, I love this person. I have such a strong relationship with this person. And then that causes certain actions where we bind. Right.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
So I think about, you know, this friend I haven't talked to in a long time. I'm like, man, she's so funny. She's so good to me. She's taken care of me in tough times. I'm really grateful for her. I find those things. I feel really bound to her. And what do I do? I'm like, you know, I'm going to text her or I'm going to call her or I'm going to do something nice to her. Right.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You engage in these behaviors that build that relationship up. And so this is one of the reasons I love gratitude so much, you know, around the Thanksgiving dinner table, because, again, I'm not sure about your family, but a lot of families out there are a little complicated. Right. You know, we don't always feel like those relationships are as close as they can be.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And just engaging with gratitude, not just about the random things, but about the people around us can really make us feel closer. All right.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And this is another kind of honestly, psychologically, a little strange thing about gratitude, which is that we don't really get used to it as much as we think. So most good things in life are subject to what's called hedonic adaptation. We get used to it, right? You know, so if you...
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
won the lottery today and won the lottery again tomorrow and won the lottery again this weekend, like all of a sudden you'd be like, all right, I'm bored with the money, right? You know, if you eat the same kind of, you know, flavor of ice cream cone over and over and over, even if it's delicious at first, you get bored. But gratitude doesn't seem to work that way.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, a compliment that you're given on day one, if you get a new compliment on day two, if you're thanked on day three, it tends to sort of have the same kind of happiness impact over time, right? And that's awesome because it means that like, you know, you're not even though you said like, well, you know, we just go around thanking each other. You don't actually get sick of it.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
It still has the same kind of happiness impact and the same relationship building impact. And that's relationships, you know, with our spouses and our partners. There's also lots of evidence that gratitude in the workplace can be incredible for people's performance. One study by the psychologist Adam Grant looked at this.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
He actually tested individuals who had a kind of thankless job, university fundraiser callers. So these are like the students at your old college who call you for money, you know, total hang up on them, total thankless tasks, right? So he wanted to know, okay, what are the kinds of things that would improve their performance, you know, get them to make more calls, maybe make more money?
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, you think throw a pizza party or, you know, all these things. But he just said, what about gratitude? And so what he did was he had the, you know, the big boss at the university show up and genuinely thank half of these fundraisers. You come in, you say, look, you know, we're really grateful for what you do because you do this stuff. So it's just a sincere expression of gratitude.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
What he finds is that those callers increase their rate of success. They increase the number of calls they make. This is powerful, right? Like so many of us have jobs where we work overtime. on teams where we work with other people. And the sad thing is I think a lot of times we are grateful for what those people do.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, thinking back to my happiness team, I have, you know, technology directors who help me and I have my students and I love all of them. You know, today I could list on my hand, like, gosh, they did this for me today and they came up with this cool idea and so on. But we don't often say it. And that's kind of sad, right?
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
We're missing out on these benefits when we don't express that we're really grateful for other people.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And one thing I think we can do to remedy that is to remember that like. We haven't missed our opportunity, right? You know, if Friday you're having that conversation with your husband and you're like, you know, so-and-so at work, NPR, they did this awesome thing. And you realize, oh, I didn't actually tell that person that.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
When you get in on Monday, you can say, you know, I was actually thinking all weekend about how nice it was that you did X, Y, and Z. Thank you so much. And like I think in our brains, we think it'll be awkward if we're like, remember two weeks ago you did this thing for me. Thank you. The person will be like, well, that's weird that you're bringing it up. But no one ever thinks that.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
People only think like, oh, my gosh, that was so sweet that you thought about me for that long. And so, you know, the remedy for kind of missing out on sharing what you're grateful for, especially if you're grateful for somebody else, is like just tell them. There's no kind of expiration date on it. You can actually share it whenever you notice it and feel it.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah, well, I think one thing to remember is another thing we get wrong is just this idea that positive and negative emotions are on a continuum. We can at the same time experience a lot of positive emotion and negative emotion. You know, this is why we can experience things like a moment that feels bittersweet, where it has the bitter part and the sweet part.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And I think this has helped me with experiencing a little bit more gratitude. It's to recognize that when I'm grateful for the people around the table, where I'm
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
grateful for this meal, when I'm grateful and just noticing and savoring, you know, the smell of my coffee, that doesn't negate the true anger I might feel about what's going on in the world or the true fear I might feel about what's happening, you know, with the climate or the economy or something else. We can hold those moments at the same time.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And I think that's really critical because, you know, sometimes, you know, it would be sad if the terrible events of the world made us not appreciate what we had around us. And sometimes that moment of gratitude is the sort of thing that's going to help us get through the tough times. Right.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And gratitude is the kind of thing that you can go for just by noticing, really intentionally paying attention to the good things. And I think so many of us kind of noticed that during the pandemic. I don't know about you, but I found myself having these moments where I savored tinier things in the midst of that. It takes a little bit of intention and effort.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
But if you put in that intention and effort, you will wind up feeling a lot better.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I sometimes like to think of gratitude as something that people in public health should be pushing more for. Right. I mean, I just mentioned that gratitude will allow you to save more. It'll let you eat healthier. It'll let you form better relationships. Right. It can make you feel less lonely because you feel more bound to the people around you.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And so I actually think we should be almost prescribing gratitude for people. Again, it sounds so cheesy, but when you start to realize that it has this whole host of benefits, it means we're going to be feeling more connected to people. It's a really, really powerful tool that I think we're not using enough.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Thanks. See, you're already expressing gratitude. So it worked.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And once you notice that your wanting system can be like, OK, kind of duly noted. Got it.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But time affluence is definitely something I need to work on prioritizing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
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.
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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.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
There are strategies you can use to feel better, but they're going to take a little bit of work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think there's lots of big connections. I think lots of folks have been studying mattering, even though they might not be calling it mattering, if that makes sense. I think one of the domains where mattering connects with happiness a lot is in the domain of our social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests happy people are more social, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
They spend more time with their friends and family members. They even connect more with strangers on the street. But yet we don't really invest in social connection as much as we probably should, given how much it really impacts our happiness. The reason I think this is connected with mattering is that one of the most important ways to matter in the world is to matter socially, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
People care about you. They care how your day is going. They want to talk to you about it, right? To do that, you just have to connect with other people, right? But in addition, there's lots of work showing that it's not just social connection that matters for our happiness. It's really the social impact that we're having.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
One of the biggest hacks that I teach my students about happiness is that a big way to boost your own happiness is not to treat yourself, to engage in self-care. but to do something for other people, right? Help someone else, give them a compliment, share what you're grateful for about them, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
This idea of doing something nice for other people seems to be an incredibly quick path to our happiness. And I think one of the reasons is that it's a way of mattering, right? When you help someone else and they say, oh my gosh, thank you for that thing that you did for me. That's a really easy way of mattering, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think a lot of the work in the field of happiness science that's been focused on the power of doing nice things for other people, the power of social connection, one of the ways it's taking its effect on happiness is through this mechanism of mattering. By connecting with other people, you start to matter more. By doing nice things for other people, by impacting their day,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
you start mattering. And so I think that is really the path. Pretty much everyone's studying the impact of social connection on happiness, the role that good deeds play in happiness. I think that they really are studying mattering, even if they're not calling it that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think it's hard to, can you matter on a desert island, right? No one else is there with you, right? Probably not. I think mattering really relies on our social ties, our social connection, right? We matter more when other people care about us. We matter to someone, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And that's one of the reasons I think social connection is so important for happiness, but also that it's like incorporates mattering, right? Is that you need other people to experience a sense of belonging. You need other people to have true causal efficacy for the stuff that matters. And I do think the stuff that matters is the kind of stuff that Dacher is getting at, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
These moral actions in the world, right? Often we experience awe when people go like super above and beyond. These are his Kind of ideas of these sort of moral goodness in the world really activates our sense of transcendence, our sense of awe. But I think the everyday kind of stuff, just like helping your neighbor move, right? Checking in on a friend who's going through a tough time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Those kinds of things show that you mean something. You've done something with your day that truly has helped another person. And that I think really increases our psychological sense that we matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, I think specifically the idea of mattering in the workplace, I think is one that we just haven't thought a lot about, but is going to be really important for reducing burnout in the workplace, increasing happiness in the workplace, honestly, even increasing retention in the workplace.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve, who's a professor of economics at the University of Oxford, did this really cool study recently with the job site Indeed. If you haven't been on Indeed, it's one of these job sites where you can rate all this stuff about your job, like what your salary is and importantly, how happy you are at work and so on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And he was able to get, by collaborating with Indeed, he got access to 15 million data points about people's ratings at work and their happiness at work. So for a nerdy social scientist like me, that's like a huge, oh my God, it's a big data set. And what he was interested in is what are some of the factors that predicted happiness at work?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And he got a group of economists to make predictions and they predicted the usual things you might expect. Well, it's your salary. It's having a good manager. It's like work-life balance. Those factors were important, but they weren't at the top of the list of what really made for a happy work life. The thing that was most important for a happy work life was what he called your sense of belonging.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But it really is about mattering. It was made up of three different factors in terms of these Indeed questions. One was The things that I do at work matter to the organization. The organization recognizes the things that I do matter. So you feel like you matter. The organization has recognition that you matter. And the third factor was, do you have a best friend at work?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Which is really just straight up social connection. Presumably, if you have a best friend at work, you're doing things where you matter to that person. It matters if you show up or not, right? This was the thing that predicted happiness at work much more than what people were being compensated with in terms of money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
much more than just all this stuff they teach MBAs about how to be a good manager. Just feeling like what you were doing mattered was really a big factor in how happy you were at work. And how happy you are at work predicted all this other stuff, the stuff that you might expect, retention at work and so on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But an amazing thing that it predicted, and one of the reasons Jan's paper is getting a lot of press right now, is that it also predicted how well a company is doing. In other words, companies who had more happy workers wound up earning more money. If you just look at their stock performance, they do better. And so it's not just like, the idea is like mattering isn't just ephemeral.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Now it's relevant for like capitalists. It's relevant having people at work that feel mattering matters for how much money a company is making.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I bring that up in part because I think of mattering and this kind of value that we have, like the value that we feel about what we're doing at work, what we're doing in terms of our friends, just that we're having a kind of important causal impact on the world. I think that we just don't realize how important it is, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Top economists who were making predictions in Jan Emanuel's data set, they said they were wrong about how important this factor was. And I think this gets to the idea of we don't matter to other people, but maybe we don't matter to ourselves or like we're disconnected, not just from other people, but disconnected to ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think that we just don't understand how important some of these factors are. And therefore we tend not to invest in them very much. You get back to my Yale college students. I just gave you all those depressing statistics.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I mean, where do these levels of depression, anxiety, and so on come from? I think it's, I mean, it's lots of factors, right? There's probably not going to be one smoking gun for sure. Otherwise we probably would have fixed it by now. But among those factors is the idea that students are just like really paying attention to their own individual pursuits, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Especially at a place like Yale, right? What these students are trying to be good at is good at their own personal academic success and their own extracurriculars. They're like building up their own resume, right? It's me. That's the focus. And it's hard to matter when it's really just about you, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Mattering really involves connecting with other people, doing something that is important for the world. At Yale, they have this slogan, for God, for country, and Yale. But I think it's for God, for country, and Yale. These are things that are bigger than you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think the focus right now, culturally, especially on young people who are so focused on academics and getting into the perfect college and getting the perfect job, it's about them, right? It's not about doing things that are bigger than you. And that means that they're not focused on the kinds of activities that are really going to give them a strong sense of mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think part of it is really a crisis of kind of not focusing on the things that really are going to improve your happiness, aka mattering. But in doing so, you wind up getting disconnected from yourself, right? You wind up putting in to affect all these habits and all these
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think so. Particularly these very high pressure school students, right? Ivy League students. I think that's what's happening. I mean, I think they're working incredibly hard to get to the next accolade. In my class, I show students these videos that current high school students are post online about the moment where they click on the admissions website and they find out if they get in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Yale ones are very popular where you click on the link. You're like, oh my God, I got into Yale. They videotape it and they're cheering and happy. And I show that to remind students of what psychologists call hedonic adaptation, right? This idea that you get used to stuff. That first moment when you find out to get into Yale is great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But after that, you don't feel so good because now you're just onto the next carrot, right? It's the next admission to medical school or law school, or it's the next quarterly report, right? You don't even get the happiness boost from striving for this external reward thing. Because as soon as you get it, now it's on to the next one. And the students really resonate with that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
They're like, yeah, that moment I got into, I was like the happiest moment. But like immediately after that was one of my worst moments where I realized, oh my gosh, all that work, I'm just going to have to put in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
again and i think this is key right we're pushing for something we're working really hard towards things that that we think matter that we think are gonna make us feel fulfilled but we're actually going after this stuff that's not going to work as well as we expect and we're putting all that time in at the opportunity cost of stuff that we know does matter in your own story i bet you imagine that what put on the wayside was relationships with family probably your health probably your sleep probably active volunteering and just doing big things and good things in the world
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Those are the things that the research shows really matters for happiness much more than the grind at work. And so I think one of the reasons we're seeing these levels of depression and anxiety in college students is that they are actively focused on the wrong stuff being the grind, things that are going to benefit them as an individual, not the stuff that really winds up mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I mean, you're raising an important issue, right? Because I think we don't form our expectations about the things that are going to make us happy in a vacuum, right? There's lots of cultural ideals about the things that you should be working towards, right? Again, take my Yale students who just found out that they got in, they've been working all through high school, now they got into Yale.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Like culturally, that's supposed to be the thing that you took off the list and you're like happily ever after, right? You got this accolade. And I think the disconnect between my students feeling like I did the thing that was culturally supposed to make me super happy, but I'm feeling apathetic. I'm feeling miserable. Same thing when you get to the C-suite, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Like I'm running a successful company. I'm like at the top of my game. I'm supposed to like culture has told me this is the thing I'm supposed to do to feel good, but I feel really crappy. I think that disconnect really is huge. psychologically jarring, right? Because in some ways our expectations are really high for the happiness benefit that should come from this stuff and we're not getting it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And we know expectations matter a lot for how we feel about things. But I think the second thing is it sets up what's often called the sort of golden handcuffs, which I think people think about in terms of money. But I think it's a lot due to status, right? That like, how could you leave this position that all your culture has told you is the thing that you're supposed to be doing to be happy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Something must be wrong with you. But in fact, I think our culture comes up with incorrect notions about the kinds of things that are going to mean a lot in terms of our happiness. We get happiness wrong as individuals, but especially as a culture. And that makes it really hard to switch gears when things aren't working. It makes it really hard to change.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
sure it necessarily needs to fit in. I mean, I think one of Uishi's views is that there are these different paths, right? The kind of path that you get from hedonic pleasure is just going to look different than the path that you get from meaning, but then it's also going to look different from the path that you get from this idea of living a psychologically rich life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
What we're trying to go for is convenience. If you're grabbing something off chat GPT and pasting it into a dating app, it's because you want to like reduce friction. You just want to make stuff easy, right? Real life is frictiony. Like social connection is frictiony. Mattering is frictiony. It takes work. It takes time, right? And so I think as we go towards an all too convenient society,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
By what she means, I think having adventures, doing interesting things, learning new stuff, which is different than doing the kind of hard work that you need to do to develop a very meaningful life. It's very different than what you would do if you just want to get pure hedonism, easy kind of hedonic life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I see mattering as being maybe part and parcel of all three, but I think it doesn't necessarily have to For sure, mattering is part of the meaningful things you do in life, right? I think mattering is really intimately connected to our sense of meaning. Often when we do something, often when we feel like we matter, we've done something that also can give us a sense of meaning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
If we're devoid of meaning, it's really hard to matter. You might have connections with people, but if you really feel like you're living a meaningless life, that mattering is maybe going to be lower than it should be. I think mattering does play into the hedonic, like just the sort of pure positive emotion part of life because mattering feels good, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Often when we're doing things that matter, it winds up boosting our positive emotion, right? So it plays on that definition of happiness. And I think one way to live, like one way to matter is to make sure you're doing things that involve a certain amount of psychological richness, right? Psychological richness can sometimes come from living out your values.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And there's lots of ways to connect that with mattering too. So I think mattering doesn't necessarily have to fit into all three of those different aspects of happiness, but in some ways it might fit into at least a few of them. Definitely the meaning side, for sure, a little bit of the positive emotion, hedonic side, but maybe a little bit of the psychologically rich life side too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, I think if you think of mattering as being part and parcel of healthy social cognition, right? So the healthy part of being part of the village or having these kinds of good connections, those connections really mattered over our evolutionary time. We really needed to like, the only way we survived was being part of this group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
This is why in ancient times, shunning was like the worst punishment you could give someone, right? You just go, you didn't kill them. You send them out of the group and that's like a horrible punishment. in part because it's like, it's our connections and our relatedness that really is important for not just our happiness, but also our survival.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think mattering winds up being like an important part of that, right? The best way to feel connected to the group is if they would never shun you, right? You matter to other people. And so you're going to want to feel connected. You're going to want to do these kinds of nice things. It's over evolutionary time, the things that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
we built up feeling pleasure for is often the stuff that like really we needed to pay attention to back in the evolutionary day, right? This is one of the reasons that we tend to seek out like really sweet, fatty food, right? That was hard to find back in the evolutionary day. So it feels really pleasurable. I think mattering was also essential back in the evolutionary day, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Because it allowed us to have these social connections that kept us part of this village that was so important for our survival, right? And I think it's one of the reasons that actions that show we matter show they wind up feeling good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, I think I'm going to agree with Emma in the sense that technology can connect us and make us feel like we matter. We can use it for that. And it can also do just the opposite. In fact, often it does dust the opposite, but it's worth remembering that technology is just a tool we can use in lots of different ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
we wind up losing some of the psychological benefits that can come from connection and mattering because we're trying to just bang things out and do it as easily as possible. Well, sometimes you have to put in some work to feel like things matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think taking evolutionary view of mattering helps here, helps us figure out what we get wrong, right? Because we're built for these sort of small groups, we can't really track what it means to matter in these like big Facebook groups or like being an influencer on TikTok and getting likes and so on. We're built for doing it in this small kind of way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And when we can put these mechanisms into situations where they have to scale up, They go awry in interesting ways. I'll give you one from the perspective of helping people, right? We talked about one way to matter well is to do nice things for other people. But one of the ways we get that boost of mattering is we often need to see the results of that thing that we did, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
We want to see someone smile and say, oh, thank you so much. All your listeners right now could donate money to a cause online that would, for small amounts of money, you can literally save a life of people who are living in extreme poverty, right? But you might not get the same feeling that you get when you carry your neighbor's groceries into the house, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
You might not get the same feeling that you get when you do something direct for someone one-on-one. You probably don't get the same facial expressions, maybe the same thank yous and so on. And the research really shows that we're not putting our money into these causes where we really could help folks, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
A lot of times, even if you look at the specific charities that people are investing in, they're investing in charities that are much more like face to face, right? Giving say to your like local food pantry or rather than these people who like are living in extreme poverty, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
The point of this example is to show that what kind of got us going in terms of mattering evolutionarily was like, we needed the facial expressions, right? We needed the one-on-one kind of feeling to know, ah, I feel good. I feel like what I did mattered.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so online, we try to do the same thing, maybe do an action that matters much more, say giving a small amount of money to someone in extreme poverty so the outcomes are much better. It doesn't feel as good. We don't get the same psychological oomph that felt really nice, right? That's a backfiring of our evolutionary machinery, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
We should feel like the more objectively positive outcome in terms of helping somebody should make us feel like we matter more. But otherwise, it doesn't make us feel as good, right? I think that's just one of many ways that kind of scaling things up doesn't really use the evolutionary machinery in the right way. And we get these kind of misfirings that kind of mess up our mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Yeah, for sure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
For sure. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about the kids today that I see on the college campuses is they have so many more of these technological distractions, right? In a way that we just like never had. I rewind to like late 90s college life. All you could do in the evening was sit around and shoot the crap with people about what was going on in life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
We listened to each other, right? Now you might want to shoot the crap with your roommate, but your phone is digging in your pocket. There's super interesting stuff on TikTok. I think the dopamine hits that we can get not from in real life social connection are so profound that it makes it hard to pay attention to people in real life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think that has a huge consequence for students' ability to listen, but also a huge consequence by virtue of that for their ability to feel connected, to feel like they really matter, right? And it's one thing if you're the listener, but it's a much worse thing if you're the listenee, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
It's one thing if you're the person not making others feel seen, but it's terrible for you if you feel unseen, if you feel like other folks don't listen to you. And I think that this is a real problem that technology in particular has created, right? These little short sound bites and these quick things, right? Most human stories don't fit into that, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And when we get used to getting everything in a little dopamine-inducing chunky soundbite, it can be hard to go back to those in real life interactions. And I think that's a real consequence for the kind of connection we feel with those around us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And without the normal and real life stuff. You and I are having this conversation. not in person. I don't know if your listeners know that, but we're not in the same room together. We're connecting through a technology tool. And that's great because we can connect in real time. We can see each other's faces and hear each other's voice and stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
A lot of people today are not connecting in real time, right? You text, whoop, and then when you get back five seconds later, whoop, LOL. Our brains are just not set up to process that kind of social interaction that's not happening in real time, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
In real life is the best, but at least in real time is pretty good, like talking to someone over the phone or using video conferencing or whatever. But so much of our tools have moved that away. I think a lot of the disconnects that we see in offices these days is that people connect not by walking by somebody's office and chatting with them, but they send them a Slack message, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Or send them an email, right? These forms of communication are work functionally, right, we can get the information across. But I think we're losing out on the psychological benefits of this sort of not in real time communication. And I think that has important consequences for mattering to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think technology, all these technologies are supposed to be connecting us, right? Even a dating app, it's like literal purpose is to connect you with people. Maybe people you wouldn't meet if you're not at your local bar or something like that. But when the technology is not well suited to the way our psychology evolved, things can misfire in all these ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And far too often, what we're trying to go for is convenience. If you're grabbing something off chat GPT and pasting it into a dating app, it's because you want to like reduce friction. You just want to make stuff easy, right? Real life is frictiony. Like social connection is frictiony. Mattering is frictiony. It takes work. It takes time, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think as we go towards an all too convenient society, we wind up losing some of the psychological benefits that can come from connection and mattering because we're trying to just bang things out and do it as easily as possible. Well, sometimes you have to put in some work to feel like things matter. I mean, that was like the old school DESE studies that you talked about, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
You putting the time in and maybe not even getting rewarded for it is one of the things that can build up some of the most intrinsic reward.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
You know, we think of gratitude as, oh, I'm so grateful for my morning cup of coffee or something like that, but What the research shows is that gratitude is more of a pro-social emotion. This is work by Dave Desteno and others, where what gratitude really makes you feel like is like, wow, I have a lot and I should probably give some back to other people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
This is the kind of sense that gratitude gives us. So Dave finds that people who experience more gratitude want to volunteer more, right? They want to be nice to their future self, right? They want to save more for retirement and eat healthier because it's, I can give back to like my future self who's like another person, right? Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so gratitude is an emotion that facilitates that kind of self-sacrifice, the kinds of hard work that leads to really positive social connection, leads to helping, and I think leads to doing things that really matter. So it's an emotion that gives you a sort of motivational bandwidth to do the stuff that I think increases mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And it's also no surprise that gratitude and experiencing more gratitude winds up making you feel happier. I think in the moment, but I think it leads to these kind of positive happiness spirals where you feel good, but you also feel more motivated to do nice stuff for other people. And that boosts your social connection, which makes you feel even happier and less lonely and so on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Thanks so much for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, I think a big one is to increase your social connection, right? I mean, it's like the one hack that we know can really improve happiness overall, and that can be reaching out to friends and family members. complimenting a stranger on the street, chatting with a barista at the coffee shop, texting a friend and just saying you're thinking about them, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
All these simple actions wind up making you feel a little bit less lonely and a little bit more connected. And it's often an important path to mattering. I think a second thing you can do, we just mentioned, right, is to engage in a mindset of gratitude.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Even if you're just feeling thankful for your morning coffee cup, right, it can make you feel like, wow, I really do have enough that I can start giving back. And that's really a path to the sort of pro-social actions that I think matter a lot for increasing social connection, doing nice things for others. but also doing things that kind of matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
So I think that mindset of gratitude is really important. And I think a third one, when we talked about technology and these kinds of things, you should think a little bit about your digital distraction. Things that often steal us from the stuff that really matters in life are often our phones, our technologies, right? We get stuck on that stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
So what can you do to find more of a mindset of presence, right? Maybe consider a digital detox or even simple things like when you're around other people, say putting your phones away and things like that. Those are just three quick hacks that I think are going to increase happiness, but also really particularly increase happiness via the sort of path of improving mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, one interesting thing specifically with regards to the inequality type stuff is that if you look at happiness across different countries, what you find is that one of the predictors of whether or not a country will be happy is its level of social inequality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
So the United States, for example, is a very wealthy country, which would typically predict maybe a little bit more happiness, but we're also very unequal in our wealth. And that means that we're less happy than a country of similar wealth where it was distributed a little bit more evenly. So just being around inequality makes you feel less happy on average.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think finding ways to fight that inequality and to fight a lot of what Emil talked about was these sort of political rifts, right? To not build up your sense of belonging by doing that, by hating the other group, but really finding these common paths. I think that's really essential too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I mean, I think one of the limits of, one of the things that's limiting social connection today is it feels like identity groups are so fraught, right? I can't talk to somebody outside of my political party, or I wouldn't want to talk to somebody like that because they're different than me. And I think a lot of Emile's work was trying to figure out mechanisms to cross those lines, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
To get everybody to feel like they were part of one big human group. And I think the way that intersects with happiness is it really allows us to form more social connection, right? We don't have these limits on our social connection just by what person we want to vote for or how we identify, right? we can see the common humanness in everyone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And the research really shows that doing that makes us feel good. Feeling cynical, feeling really polarized, it's not a great emotion, right? It's a pretty negative feeling. And that can wind up really impacting our overall happiness. So I think Emile's enterprise was really one of boosting human connection, even across traditionally very disconnected lines.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think that can allow us to boost our happiness, but also find ways to matter more. because we just wind up connecting and doing more good for more people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Totally. You should, if you want to learn more about the science of happiness, you should check out my podcast, The Happiness Lab. And if you want to try out that online class that you heard something about before, you should head to Coursera.org and look up the science of wellbeing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think people really want to know what they can do to improve how they feel, right? Whether that's becoming happier, becoming healthier in terms of a lot of the work that Katie Milkman does. And I think people want evidence-based strategies to do that. I think most people don't want a bunch of platitudes and woo. I think people want to engage with strategies that are really going to work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so I think it really is the case that more scientists should be thinking about strategies that we can use to help people, right? I think more scientists should be getting into the business of sharing what we know. In some ways, the fact that there are a few of us is sad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think more scientists should be out there telling people, hey, here's what our field has really learned about the kinds of things you can do. to feel better. And I've been doing this now for a little over six or seven years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And it's just been amazing to get people to really feel like people are taking what the science has shown, putting it into effect in their own lives, often in really creative ways. And it's really making a difference. So that's felt incredible to be a part of sharing some of this work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, it really started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. For a while, I've been teaching there for over two decades, but In the last six or so years, I became what's called the head of college on campus. And so heads of college are faculty members who live on campus with students. So I got to live with students in this nice house in their kind of courtyard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I ate with students in the dining hall. In this role, I was really seeing college life up close and personal. And I found what I was seeing really unexpected. It seemed like college life looked a lot different than when I went to college, which was back in the late nineties.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
It seemed like college students were much more depressed, much more anxious, much more stressed out than I remember my colleagues being back when I was in college. And this was sad for me as a head of college, right? I was the dead mother for this community that I was taking care of. I was this benevolent aunt figure. And I didn't like the fact that so many of my students were reporting feeling
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
depressed and anxious and just experiencing panic attacks. And in some cases, even suicidality, it was just not what I was expecting. But at first I worried there was something particular about Yale, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
This Ivy league institution where students were under like incredible academic pressure, but no, the kind of increases that we've been seeing in depression and anxiety in young people really are happening nationally.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Like right now, nationally, according to these, the like national college health survey right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. More than 60% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
national statistics showing that we're not dealing with a couple snowflakes who are a little stressed out, as we often hear in the media. This really is a national crisis in terms of student mental health. And so the course started because my position as a head of college, as a den mother, I really wanted to do something to help my students.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And the good news is that as a psychologist, especially kind of evidence-based psychologist, we know that there are strategies we can use to feel better, right? There's
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
decades of work in positive psychology in the field of behavior change and behavioral economics that shows how we can change our habits, how we can nudge our behaviors, and the particular things that we know will really improve our well-being. And so I designed the class to say, hey, this is what our field knows about how to do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Let me translate these strategies into something that the students can use. But when I first started planning the course, it was a new class on campus. I didn't know if students would be into it. I planned for 30 or 40 students taking it. I didn't expect it to be a quarter of the entire Yale student body, which is what it wound up becoming. The class was so popular, we had to teach it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
in a concert hall because that was the only spot other than the football stadium that would fit everyone who wanted to take it. So it was a bit of a surreal experience, but it really showed me that students were voting with their feet. They don't like this culture of feeling all stressed out and anxious and depressed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think students were really searching for not just solutions, but really evidence-based solutions they could use.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I mean, yes, effortless perfection is definitely happening on Yale's campus. Different campuses have different words for it. My favorite is a term that came out of the University of Pennsylvania, which is called duck syndrome. And the idea is that if you see ducks on the surface of the water, they look like they're just gliding and everything's perfect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But under the water, their fins are moving around and they're moving really quickly and putting a lot of work in. And yeah, I think that's what Yale students are striving for, right? They are incredibly perfectionist, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
In many cases, a lot of them really think of their own worth as their academic performance, as with the internships they get into and their performance on the football field or the extracurriculars, right? So much of their self-worth is tied into their achievements writ large. And I think they're supposed to engage in all those amazing achievements without putting in
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
any work as though it's easy for them, right? So there's this culture of not admitting when you're struggling. I think there's a culture of kind of brushing off all the hard work that has to go into the kinds of achievements they experience. It's just a really stressful, really perfectionist kind of culture on campus.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Well, I think one of the early surprises was just not just how much the class resonated on campus, but how much it resonated off campus. A couple of weeks into the first when I first started teaching the happiness course, there was a New York Times article written about the class.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think that's in part because Yale is one of these schools that like something happens at Yale, somebody is going to write a New York Times article about it. But most college classes don't have New York Times articles about that college class. And it wound up being one of the most read articles ever. of the year for the New York Times that year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think it was really exciting or interesting to people in part because I think when we think of the typical Yale student or the typical Ivy League student, you think this person has it made, right? They're 19 years old. They're like at the Ivy League. They're going to get a perfect job. They have the academic credentials to get into a place like that. I bet they're happy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And I think the article resonated with so many people because people thought, oh my gosh, there's so many unhappy students at Yale that like a quarter of the entire student body is flogging to this happiness class. What is going on? And I think that people were, well, if Yale students need these strategies, then I, in whatever walk of life I'm finding myself, I definitely need them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And so after the article came out, we got a lot of push from people, like just hundreds of emails from folks around the world saying, don't just give these strategies to Yale students. We all, Yale students, with as much privilege as they have, need these kinds of strategies. We all need them. And so that was one of the reasons we decided to put the class online for free.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Yale has this wonderful partnership with Coursera.org, where Yale is able to give content that's developed on campus to people around the world for free. And so we put the class online and yeah, it also just went really viral. We had a hundred thousand learners the first few months that we had the course up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And then soon after that COVID hit and in just the first couple of days when most people were in lockdown, we saw the number of people who were trying to take the course octuple in just 72 hours. I think it was like on the front page of Reddit or something, which is how people found out about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But yeah, I mean, I guess the big surprise was just how many people are willing to take a class on happiness, right? To sign up for a Yale class where they would learn these strategies too. It's just, I guess the content just resonated with people much more than I expected. I knew people wanted to be happy, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
We've been talking about the pursuit of happiness since the Declaration of Independence, but I didn't realize just how much people needed these strategies. And I think that tells us something really important about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
Not just the culture that I was talking about happening at Yale, but the culture that we're all living in right now of so many of us are trying to go after happiness, but doing it wrong. And so people really wanted to see what does the science say about how I could do it better?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
That's one of the most amazing things about both doing the podcast and the class, right, is that people will come back to you months later and say, hey, I tried this and it's been working for me. And often it tends to be in things that like I myself am not putting the science into practice for too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I think there's this misconception that as a happiness professor, I'm doing all the things that I preach to my students that they should be doing to feel happy. But of course, a lot of these strategies take some work, right? They take some kind of active effort.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And it always feels like when a listener or a former student of my online class comes up to me, it's like, oh, this helped me so much because I've been doing X, Y, and Z. It's usually an X, Y, and Z that I personally am not doing myself. So it's been fun to get them to maybe help the preacher practice what she's preaching as it were.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
But yeah, one of my favorite examples was a learner from my Coursera course named Clement, who was on one of the first episodes of the podcast. And he wrote me a handwritten letter. I came home one day and just found this handwritten letter. And he said, I was feeling really depressed. I was actually even experiencing suicidality. I started Googling like how to be happier and your course came up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
And at first, this is one of the reasons I love Claremont's letter. He said, I figured it was like hippie, dippy California stuff. Like I just didn't think it was going to work for me, but he was pretty desperate. And so he tried it and he said that everything has really changed, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
He's now putting into practice these strategies where he tries to experience more social connection and more gratitude. He's more mindful and the practices from the course really have helped. usually the board that he's no longer experiencing suicidality, but also just like feeling much happier with his life. And then I get to have him on the show.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
I got to interview him and come on and yeah, it was just incredible. And so, I mean, I think this is really what the work suggests, right? The research really suggests that everyone listening right now can become happier. But like all good things in life, it's going to take some work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583
It's just like getting a little bit healthier, maybe learning to play an instrument that you want to learn how to play, learning a new language. There are all these things that we want to do to better ourselves, but they just take some time and energy. Becoming happier. I think their research shows work like that, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I think this is something that so many of us seem to go through, right? It's not so much that we're not seeking happiness out. We are. We're probably putting some effort into the choices we're making, the actions we're taking to feel happier. But we're kind of doing it wrong, right? And this is by and large what the science seems to be telling us. It's not that we're not.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
going for improved wellbeing. We are, we're putting a lot of work in. Some of us are putting a lot of money in, but we tend to be picking the things that don't get us there. And this is a big insight into happiness is that we have theories about those sorts of things that make us happy. But a lot of research suggests those theories are just wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So we have these intuitions that are leading us astray.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, I think the definition of happiness is really boosting both of those, right? It's kind of finding the way to become happier in your life and with your life. That's kind of what we're going for when we're talking about improving happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I think it really is. I mean, as we talked about before, this idea of happiness is something that you need to build over time, right? It just kind of takes energy. It's like learning the violin or learning to play guitar here, right? You kind of just build it over time. I think one of the problems is that we don't spend a lot of time
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Learning ourselves, teaching our kids, setting up educational institutions to build these skills. I think understanding the strategies that we need to engage in to improve our lives, to regulate our emotions, right? To kind of not get run over by that frustration and overwhelm and so on. These are such important skills.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I think a different misconception is we just assume some people are good at it and some people are bad at it. That's not true? It is true to a certain extent, right? I think some people are naturally better at it than others. And is it because they're doing the things naturally that you're about to teach us? It's because they're doing the things naturally. And some of these things come to show.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I will say I am not naturally a happy person. I've become happier, maybe even about 20 to 30% happier since I'm like really digging into some of these homeworks and doing these things. But those strategies absolutely don't come naturally to me. It's just the kind of thing you can learn over time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. What does that mean? One of the reasons we get it wrong is that we're kind of like set up not to be so happy, in fact. And I think this makes most sense if you think back to kind of evolution, right? You know, like we are just these survivors and reproducers that have to get out there off in the Savannah and not get eaten by a tiger or something, right? What makes you do that better?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
doesn't really matter if you're experiencing a lot of positive emotion, joy, and so on, but you definitely want to experience like fear. You definitely want to experience anger so you can get access to maybe resources that you didn't get access to before. You're going to be driven to pay attention to the negative stuff, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Because that's kind of what matters for, you know, surviving and reproducing. And that means we have brains that are built with what's called this negativity bias. We kind of constantly notice the bad stuff out there. It's And that's because our brains are wired for it. These were brains that had to notice the tiger that was hiding in the bush.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So when it's scrolling through an Instagram feed, it's going to see the terrible stuff and that's what's going to get us going.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yep. We notice all the bad comparisons that make us feel terrible, right? And so that's just another feature of this. And it makes sense evolutionarily that that's what we're built for, right? Like we don't necessarily survive and reproduce better if we notice all the things we're grateful for and the blessings and have contentment, right? It works better if we live this really volatile life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Right. Or worse, you know, imagine the like contented Buddha, you know, the perfect Zen happiness who's just meditating under a tree, like he's going to starve and, you know, get eaten while he's meditating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. I think the modern world has found many more things for us to feel negative about and many more things to kind of activate our negativity bias.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I think it's worth being a little bit self-compassionate, right? You know, if you're listening to this feeling like, oh, I'm maybe not flourishing. I'm maybe not experiencing as much positive emotion as I could. First of all, you are in the majority, right? You're not alone when you're dealing with this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Second, you're just allowing your brain to play out in the way your brain was built to play out. It makes sense that you're going through this, right? You're not doing anything wrong in some sense, but with a little tweaking of the way you engage in different actions and different mindsets, you can feel a lot better, uh,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
understanding where we go wrong, I think is really the path to making things better. Amazing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, that is the bad news about happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I don't want to hear this. Okay. Dr. Santos, come on. Look, all good things in life take a little bit of work and happiness is like that too. But the good news is that if you put that work in, you can change. And I think that's another thing that we get wrong about happiness. We assume not just that some people are good at it and some people are bad, but that it's built in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
If you're a kind of Debbie Downer sort of person or a real optimist, you're just always going to be that way. We assume that there's nothing you can change about it. And study after study shows that you can change. Again, you don't necessarily go from zero to 100, but with time, you can build habits that allow you to make important, significant progress.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Chrissy Downer?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
One of the big things we get wrong when it comes to happiness is that we assume happiness is about our circumstances, right? We look out at people's lives and think, oh, well, if I could just be rich, I would be happy. Or if I could just get that promotion at work, you know, from my college students, if I could just get the perfect grade or into the perfect internship.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Or be in the different friend group. Be in a different relationship. Be in a relationship if you're not, get in a different relationship, you know, but buy that new house, even I think just like buy that new thing, right? Whether that's the new dress or the new shoes. At a local level, I think we're buying things often to make ourselves happier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
We think it's going to work, but really it doesn't work as well as we think. It seems like circumstances aren't the key to happiness that we expect. Now, that has a caveat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
If you are listening to this right now and you're like in a refugee camp or you don't have enough money to put food on your table, yes, changing your circumstances is going to matter really a lot for your material happiness going up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But my guess is you're listening to this and you're not necessarily in a refugee camp, that maybe you're not having the perfect finances, but you got food on the table and a roof over your head. If you're in that situation, then drastically changing your circumstances probably isn't going to affect your happiness in the way that you think. That's what study after study shows.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, and I think more...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And that's huge, right? Because changing your circumstances is a pain in the butt, right? Like going from, you know, like your current salary to like $300 million a year. That's a big change. It's going to take a lot of work, right? You know, kind of finding a new relationship, getting a big promotion at work. These are hard things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And they're often things that most of us don't really have that much control over. Yeah. But all the strategies we're going to start talking about soon are ones that you have complete control over. They're just things that you can engage in yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. So the most famous study on money and happiness was one that the late Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman ran back in, I think, 2009. And he asked this kind of interesting question. Does increases in your amount of money wind up corresponding with increases in happiness, which he measured in a couple of ways. First, kind of positive emotion. Do you get more positive emotion?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Do you get less negative emotion? And do you feel kind of less stressed? And so he had this huge data set where he could plot this out across different incomes. And what he finds is that if you're in the low, low end of the income spectrum, if you're earning $10,000 a year, $30,000 a year, yeah, increasing your salary over time is going to boost your positive emotion.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You're going to feel less stress, less negative emotions. But that kind of increasing curve where more money is more happiness, more money is more happiness, it levels off. And in 2009-ish dollars in the United States, it leveled off at around $75,000. What does that mean?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
That means that if in 2009 dollars you hit a salary of $75,000, even if you doubled your salary, tripled, quintupled your salary, you wouldn't get any corresponding increase in positive emotions. You wouldn't decrease your negative emotions and you wouldn't feel less stressed. Now, that is not what you probably believe.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
If you're listening right now, like if you're like Mel's got her mouth kind of hanging open. Yeah. No one thinks this. Right. And you might be like, well, that's two thousand nine dollars. The equivalent right now would maybe be like one hundred, one hundred and ten thousand dollars, something like that. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
We just don't think that we think if suddenly I could triple my salary, I would be way happier. But these research like this just shows that we're kind of wrong. And so that raises a different question, which is like, well, why doesn't more money buy happiness? And I think it's for a few reasons. One is that as you get richer, you often tend to get busier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
In fact, this is a change that we've seen in the U.S. population. It used to be that rich people lived their lives of leisure, like they look like kind of Cary Grant in the Philadelphia story, just sitting around, you know, drinking cognac out of like beautiful vases and things like that. But higher salary now usually means you're working harder or you're putting in more hours at work.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And we know that time really matters for happiness and free time sort of matters for happiness. The more you're working, the less you're interacting socially. So wealth doesn't seem to kind of give us the sort of social benefit we used to get before. And I think a bigger thing is that as you get more money, you kind of just get used to that over time, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So if you get a little bit more money, maybe you start going to see the trainer and you start flying first class, you start eating in the nice restaurants. But if you do that over and over every day, it just becomes your day-to-day experience. You don't get this kind of additional happiness boost from it. And so $75,000, I think it's not like a kind of magic bullet number. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But I think it's like kind of around them out where like a lot of your needs are taken care of. You got food, shelter, you know, maybe like a teeny vacation a year or something like the stuff that you can additionally buy with more money is not going to bring you more happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, I mean, I think when we ask this question, does money buy happiness? Part of our intuition is right. It's like, well, money can get me stuff that would lead me to be happy, right? Money can put me on a vacation that I can spend time with my family, can allow me...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
to decrease these negative emotions, like fear of like, you know, is the rent collector going to come and get kicked out of my house or overwhelmed, right? I have to take on more hours at work just to make ends meet, right? I think when you get to a certain wealth level, you shut off those basic need problems that come up that very much do affect our happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And so from that perspective, does money matter for happiness? Yes, for sure. But it only matters up to a certain level. And that's the spot that we get wrong. And I think it's not just like, you know, you and I and the listener getting this wrong. I think this is the kind of thing that like even people of extreme wealth get wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
One of my favorite guests that I've ever had on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, was this guy, Clay Cockrell. And he is a mental health professional that works only with the 0.0001%. So I think most of his clients are earning over $50 million. And the first thing that should be striking is that this dude has clients.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Right, these are people who have $50 million who apparently aren't happy enough that they need to see like some mental health professional to kind of help them get through. And a lot of their problems, amazingly, are financial. And so one of the stories Clay told was that there was a guy, you know, who he worked with who just bought this new yacht.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
His wife really wanted the yacht and they couldn't figure out where to park it. And it was like causing all this marital strife. And like, you can look at that and you're probably thinking like, you know, poor, you know, expletive baby, like kind of like, you know, like can't park his yacht. What?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Oh my God. But the flip side is I think we've, many of us at way less wealth levels than $50 million have seen some of the problems that our material possessions come up with.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
No, I was going to say the opposite way. Somebody who has an existence where they would kill for that 1987 Toyota because they can't get to work and they're taking the bus two hours a day. That feels like, how could you ever complain about that, right? And so this is the problem is that we don't, we don't, these material goods come with some costs that we don't expect.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And they just kind of don't continue to give us the happiness. Like if you were that person who was taking the bus today, every day, they would worship your 1987, your car. I love my car, it's all good. I know I have like a really crappy Nissan too. So I get it. It's like very beat up. But it's like there's somebody out there who would worship that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And this is the problem is that like you've had it so long. This is 1987. You kind of stop worshiping. You stop getting the kind of utility out of it. I mean, tomorrow, if you walked home and the car was gone and you're like, wait, where did I park it? Did somebody steal my car? What's going on? And like, it took you out. You're like, oh no, husband moved it or something.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
For that five minutes where you didn't know where it was, where it had gone. Yeah. Now you'd see the value in it. Like, oh my gosh, I don't know. I left my CDs in there. Like, you know, like, oh my gosh, like I have to get a new car. When you get it back, you're like, oh, thank goodness. That little break is breaking up what you are used to.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It's kind of a break in what psychologists call your hedonic adaptation. That's a big word. I don't know what that means. The fast definition is you just got used to something. Hedonic adaptation is you get adapted to your hedonic value. I feel like we do that in our marriages and our relationships too. Oh my God. Actually, there are curves of hedonic adaptation in marriages.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
No, they're like, you know, the moment you get married, like basically like five months in, you're already getting used to your partner. Wow. It kind of goes down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. There's really lovely work by the psychologist Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School that talks about a concept that social scientists are getting really excited about lately called time affluence, which is not wealth affluence. It's not the amount of money you have, but it's the amount of free time you have.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And if you're listening right now and you hear that term time affluence and you're like, that is not me at all. Yeah. Again, don't feel too bad because you are part of the general majority of humans on the planet right now, especially Americans right now. Most of us are experiencing the opposite of time affluence, which is time famine, where we literally almost feel like you're starving for time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And Ashley Willen's research shows that if you experience time famine, that's a huge hit on your well-being. In fact, one of her studies show that if you self-report being time famished a lot, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So really, so those of you listening right now who are lucky enough to have jobs, something else we can get hedonically adapted to. If you're lucky enough to have a job, imagine you lost that job in the next 10 minutes, how you'd feel just not having a lot of free time can make you feel that bad.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And so now you're really onto something, which is that one of the, one of the best ways we can spend our money to increase our happiness is to actually use money to buy back time. And Ashley Williams does some really cool work on this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
She finds no matter what your discretionary income is, because you can say, okay, yeah, that guy with the $50 million in the yacht, he can spend money to, I don't know, hire somebody to clean his house or take these unwanted tasks off his desk, right? He can go to the restaurant instead of cooking meals for himself. But many of us have like a little bit of discretionary income.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And Ashley finds that no matter like what level of discretionary income you have, if you spend that to get time back and you commit to spending it to get time back, you can kind of be happier, whether that's like hiring the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn or watch your kid, watch your kid, the dog.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Exactly, exactly. And the stuff arrives. And one of the extra hacks you can do to make this an even more effective strategy is... is whenever you do that, reframe the amount of time you saved, right? We were here in Boston, like, you know, before I came to the studio, I stopped at this local coffee shop that was right near there and I just got breakfast. I got this nice little egg sandwich.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It's a little egg souffle. It was delicious.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Girl, I'm with you on that. Let's go. But if I had to make that myself, I would have to like souffle the egg, which I don't know, it's that 20 minutes to get the nice pop of the egg. I'd have to have gone to the grocery store to get this stuff. I'd have to like chop up the tomato because it's a nice sliced tomato. I probably saved at least 45 minutes buying that egg sandwich at the shop.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
what did I do with that 45 minutes? Now I have some of that 45 minutes to talk to you. Maybe I take a nice walk. That framing technique matters.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So every time you get takeout, go to a restaurant, every time you dropped your clothes off at the laundromat, if you're, again, have enough discretionary income to maybe hire somebody to mow the lawn or clean or something like that, reframe it and say, oh my gosh, by spending that money, I saved X amount of time and literally give it, it's an hour and a half, hour 20, whatever.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And then ask yourself, what did I do with that time? You're making the face that a lot of my students make when they experience this smell, which is kind of like, you have this breath of, oh, I have an hour, an extra hour.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Or the money that we can use the time for, right? Right. We're used to kind of switching our time into money of like, well, if I work an extra hour, if I take overtime or... we don't realize that what that money is supposed to be for is to make our lives better. And often what makes our lives better is free time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Individuals who self-report being more time affluent, so they feel wealthy in time, they're more social. There's these funny studies where you just kind of convince people they're a little wealthier in time. You have people do like a little- How do you convince me that I'm wealthier in time? Well, psychologists have these very funny hacks.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So one funny hack is I give you a little word scramble to do. So there's scrambled up words and you have to unscramble them. But then I make those words be affluent in time. Things like vacation or time off, like holidays. Like I kind of have you have words where you're like, oh yeah, I'm sort of wealthy in time, you know? And then all of a sudden I give you the opportunity.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
They have subjects in a coffee shop and you can have the opportunity to just chat with somebody. And I just like sit back and watch. Do you chat with people more when you have that moment of feeling a little bit more wealthy in time? And you do. And then you also feel happier because you've just connected with somebody. Exactly.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
There's also studies showing that people who are wealthy in time do nice stuff for other people. The most terrible one was a study that was done kind of back in the day. And this is like back in the day when the like ethics of studies maybe weren't so great. It's like in the 70s. But there's a group of researchers who are studying Princeton seminary students.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So these are people who are studying to be a priest. And the study is that you have to go and give a surprise lecture about the story of the Good Samaritan, which for, if you don't know, is, you know, Jesus was walking around and like saw somebody doing nice stuff. It's like about doing nice things for people in need, right? Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But these different seminary students were put under different time pressures. So some were told, you got a couple hours, you need to get across town and go give this, but you got some time or really high time pressure. Like, actually, you got to go right now. You just don't have time. You got to get over there. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what the researchers did was they staged someone en route to this lecture that was in need. So he's kind of set up to look like an unhoused person who'd maybe been hurt. It's kind of like the seminary student has to literally walk over this person to get to the lecture. And the question was just, do you stop to help? Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Correct. So we would think you would be... And he's about to give a story about why Jesus values doing nice things for people in need. Okay, so you are frightened. He's in his head thinking like, how do I think about how to tell people to do nice things for people in need?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And basically, the people who are in a rush pretty much never stop to help someone, which is really sad. Which explains the state of society today. Which actually explains the state of society today. right? You know, we're rushing around. We all feel so busy, right? I think, you know, time famine has felt like it's going up around. We just don't have the bandwidth to help other people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
We don't have the bandwidth to help the planet. There's lots of evidence that if you're feeling under more time pressure, you don't recycle. I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm guilty of this myself, where it's like, I gotta wash the thing. I'm
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You just opt out. But imagine like, it was like, you know, that Sunday morning feeling where you got nothing to do and you're like, yeah, I could wash the glass a little extra to put it in the, you know, we're hurting ourselves, each other, the planet, just because we don't have any time. Okay, now I'm depressed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But the beauty is that you can... First of all, you can prioritize your free time. You can spend money to get back more. But these little hacks of just remembering what free time you do have, right? I bought my egg sandwich and that saved me 45 minutes. That alone can kind of put me in the headspace to have a bit more free time. Another one of my favorite hacks is to...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Find ways to use the free time you do have. The journalist Bridget Schultz coined this term that I absolutely adore, which is called time confetti, by which she means the little five minutes you have here and there. We don't think it's that much, so we usually just blow it. You pick up our phone. Yeah, you pick up your phone, you scroll Instagram, check your email. But those five minutes add up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
In fact, Ashley Willans and her colleagues estimate that we actually have more free time now than we did... 10, 20 years ago. What? I know it feels shocking. There's no way that's true. But the difference is it's broken up in stupid ways. It's these little five, we don't have these big chunks anymore. We got five minutes of time confetti, 10 minutes of time confetti here and there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So it doesn't feel like a lot. So we just blow it. But those are perfect moments to engage in all these strategies to fill up our leaky tire. And I think we'll start talking about some of those soon.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
The first step is to engage in more social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests happy people are more social. People who self-report being happier physically spend more time around other people, less time alone. And they also spend more time with their friends and family members. So they prioritize time, not just with any old human bodies floating around there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
They pick time with people they care about. And this seems to be true both for introverts and extroverts. Really? Yeah. So the key that other people matter for introverts and extroverts is some work by Nick Epley and his colleagues. He does these studies where he just like basically forces people to be a little bit more social than they normally would. So he walks up to people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
He's at the University of Chicago. So he does this on the L train.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, and just for a $5 Starbucks gift card, everybody's willing to do this. People sign up for that, to talk to a stranger? People will do anything for a $5 Starbucks gift card. It's really the engine of all social science research. Wow. People are like, I don't want to do that. It's like $5 Starbucks gift card. People are like, okay, fine, I'll talk to someone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
There's no way you would talk to, I mean, like you just got to talk to some rando person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, Nick actually did that comparison. He asked people, hey, if you were in these two conditions, like, first of all, would you do it? And, you know, how would it feel? And people said exactly what you're saying, Mel, and what I'm sure if you're listening, the person listening right now is thinking, right, was like, no, I don't want to do that. It would feel terrible.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Not just it would feel neutral, but it would feel actively awkward or yucky or whatever. And what he finds is that it's just the opposite. People who spend their train ride talking to a stranger experience positive emotion, they feel more energized, they feel less lonely. And in fact, enjoying your solitude on the train kind of makes you feel a little anxious, yucky.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I mean, we can kind of simulate you're like, oh yeah, if I tell you, yeah, just don't talk to anyone, enjoy your solitude, what happens? We start ruminating, we get in our head, right? And so just this simple act of talking to a stranger makes us feel good. But the reason I love Nick's research is he tested this extrovert-introvert question.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what he finds is that there's no difference in the happiness boost that extroverts and introverts get. Where there's a difference is on that prediction question. If I ask you, hey, how bad is it going to be to talk to someone on the train? Extroverts think pretty bad, but introverts think like... Like the most horrible thing. But what's striking is they're wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You're good at that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You can't invite the professor on the show and not have your listeners get homework. Sorry, listeners. I didn't mean it. That's okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. And this was something that Nick Epley said on my podcast. He said, look, Laurie, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. If somebody waves at you, you're going to wave back, right? And then that just kind of gets the social connection off the ground. And for both individuals, it winds up feeling better.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I bet same thing, you know, true of you at the coffee shop when you say, oh my gosh, this latte looks so pretty or nice nails. That person might not have predicted that they wanted to talk to you, but afterwards their happiness leaky tires a little bit more.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, it's related to the first. It's another way to exploit social connection, but it's becoming a little bit more other-oriented. What does that mean? It means like instead of doing stuff for yourself, like self-oriented, you get a little other-oriented. Like you spend your money and your time on other people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And this is a spot where I think our intuitions are like an overdrive in the wrong direction and our culture takes us in the wrong direction.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So one of the surprising things, again, spot where our intuitions are wrong. I'm going to say this and you're listening right now and you'll be like, that's not true. But what the research shows is that the act of doing something nice for somebody else makes you feel like you have more time. It's one of these hacks that gives us more time affluence. Think about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You're at work and somebody is going through something tough. You say, well, what can I take off your plate? Can I help you with something? Just like out of the goodness of your heart. What does that tell you? You're kind of like, well, I must have more openness on my plate if I'm going to help this other person do something. That's true. And if you're the one that holds open the door,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Oh, that's sneaky. It's sneaky, but it's a funny hack to make yourself feel like you have more time is to opt to do something voluntarily for others. And I think that's the key word though, voluntarily. Too often we feel overwhelmed when we feel the have-tos in life, the shoulds of life, right? I'm supposed to do this for other people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
If you're doing lots of stuff for other people and you don't have a choice, maybe you're caretaking for an adult in your life or helping someone out or kind of stuck in childcare. If you feel like you have no choice, then that doesn't count. But if you willingly are like, oh yeah, yeah, I got time to do that. I'm gonna choose to do that with my time or my money.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Now that's when the benefits start to kick in. Wow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, this is something we've seen in our students, which is that if you listen to what I'm about to say, if you follow the homework, you can actually become happier somewhere between five to 15% happier, five to 15% more positive emotions, five to 15% more satisfied with your life. It's actually what the science tells you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Totally. I mean, the rates of loneliness are like at 60% and every demographic group levels of loneliness are going up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
For sure. I mean, that might be one of the hugest impacts it has. In part because like when you reach out to other people, you know, chat with the barista at the coffee shop, talk to someone else, reach out to an old friend, another good one. Like those just kind of are actions that make you feel less lonely.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
One of the fastest hacks to reduce loneliness, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, I'm feeling a little lonely, is to try to help the loneliness of somebody else.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Like literally take out your phone, scroll through the contacts, pick the name that you think might be feeling the most lonely, having the toughest time and just, you know, send them a text that says, Hey, just thinking about you. Well, listen, this is cool. Mel Robbins podcast. We were talking about friendships and just made me think about you. Be great to connect. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And in our short, short, short, short version of the course today, that's what you're going to get. Wow. What does five to 15% feel like? Well, I think it feels like, you know, if you were like six out of 10 on positive emotion, you know, if I said all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10. You go up to like almost seven out of 10.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And it's deeply ironic, right? Like in theory, social media was supposed to be social, right? In theory, we could use our phones to socially connect, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And that's the irony, right? That they should be helping us be more social, but they just aren't. And like, you know, the study, when you look at the actual data of how much our phones are stealing our attention, it's just so terrible. Liz Dunn is a professor.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yes, exactly. Designed to steal. And to do it kind of undercurrent so we don't notice. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has this study of people just in a waiting room, right? You know, you go to the doctor's office or something, you're sitting in the waiting room. She either lets people have their phones there or not.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what she finds is that there's 30% less smiling in the room of people when people have their phones out, even if they're not on their phone, just having like it's in your purse, right? I mean, it's incredible, but you get it, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Because like the sad thing is what folks have done with phones is they've engineered content that's like, you know, built to be more exciting than what we assume is true for social connection, right? Liz Dunn, when she was on my podcast, had this lovely analogy. She said, you go to dinner with your husband and I have my phone flipped over on the desk, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But imagine instead of my phone, I had like a big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow were like printouts of every photo I've taken since 2015. you know, big binders of my emails, you know, since I moved to Yale the first time. Newspapers from every country in the world, right? Like videotapes of cat videos and porn, just like huge wheelbarrow of all the stuff on the internet.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And she's like, if that wheelbarrow was sitting there at dinner, you would not be able to pay attention to your husband because you'd be like, oh, I want to look, I want to just watch that real cat video, throw it in the VCR or something. She's like, your brain isn't stupid. Your brain knows that on the other side of that phone that's sitting flipped over on the table. All that stuff is there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So even when you're not looking at it, even when you're not ignoring your husband and sort of fubbing him because you're staring at your Instagram feed, something in your brain has to hold back, right? It's just leashes me like, no, don't look at the cat videos. Don't look at the old photos, right? We've kind of set up this distraction that's there with us all the time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And every study that's looked at has found we do worse on memory tests when our phones are with us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And that matters wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, how much joy, how much laughter you have. You can kind of pop up a little bit. You're not going to go from zero to 100, but these are lasting effects where you really go up a small but significant amount in terms of how you feel.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, because what's happening is when we're not on our phone, we're kind of missing out on something. It also ends up decreasing our presence, which is something we haven't talked about yet, but is really kind of matters for happiness, right? You used the word fubbing. What is that? Fubbing is a term that my students use. It's a P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. So it's phone snubbing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So it's like, you're trying to talk to me and you notice like, I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh. But I'm really like looking at...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, and for sure, that's what's happening to our students. But you don't have to let it happen. Totally, yeah. No, you have power over this, right? You can flip it over, you can leave it somewhere else. Or, you know, if you can't get it out of your hand... Go to a doctor, because that's a problem.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And, like, it would destroy it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I was going to say one of the... One of my favorite strategies for dealing with this comes from the journalist Catherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, which doesn't exactly argue that you need to break up with your phone, but it's more you need to take it to like couples counseling sort of idea. And she has this lovely acronym she uses.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
In fact, you could go on her website and get these little plastic bracelets that you can slide around your phone. The acronym is WWW, which kind of fits like World Wide Web. But hers is what for, why now, and what else? And her argument is every time you find your phone in your hand, ask WWW, what for? Was there some purpose? Maybe you needed to like look up directions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You know, on my way here to the studio, I had to pull my phone out because I didn't know where the studio was looking. But I also, when I was walking, was just like also scrolling through other stuff. Yeah, it's boredom usually for me. So is there a reason? Reason, you know, reasons are good. Why now? Why now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
This is a really important one because it's about what was the emotional trigger that caused you to go there? Because my sense is if you're listening right now and you heard Mel's advice, you're like, I'm going to put it away. There are going to be some moments where that's easier or harder. And the why now question forces you to ask a question like, well, why now? Why is it harder now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Oh, I was bored or I was a little bit anxious or whatever it is, right? Kind of notice mindfully, non-judgmentally, like what drives you to go there. But the most important one, Mel, I think the thing you're getting as the last one, what else? What is the opportunity cost?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Whether that's talking to your husband at dinner, just having that moment of time confetti that you could use for something more positive, maybe even most important, just being present, right? You know, I was saying when I was walking over here, I pulled the phone out for a good what for reason. I was looking for the directions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But then once it's in my hand, like it's in my hand, I had this moment where I kind of looked up for a second. I was like, oh, my gosh, we're in this beautiful neighborhood in Seaport where there's like the water and the red bricks. If I was deep in my email, I would have missed that, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And that little moment of noticing and being present with the sights and the sounds, that's a really important thing to boost your leaky happiness time. So many of those moments are just lost.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, this is one that is in the cultural zeitgeist, right? We talk a lot about mindfulness, but we don't spend a lot of time doing it. I feel like this is sort of grandmotherly wisdom, but it is not common practice, right? Most of us spend a lot of our time mind wandering where your brain is flitting to like, oh, what should I have for dinner tonight?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Not at all. I mean, I think when we talk about these strategies, especially to my very type A Yale students, right? Everyone wants to go from zero to a hundred, right? Everyone wants to do the extreme thing. And I think one of the lessons we get from the happiness research is that like, this works better in baby steps.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Or that weird conversation you had with your spouse. You're just like, brain is anywhere but in the present moment. There's a very funny study by the Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, that tried to estimate, well, how often do we spend mind wandering? And what he finds is that people self-report, I am absolutely not paying attention to what I'm doing just under 50% of the time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I think it was like 48.9% of the time. You're like, yeah, wasn't paying attention. And he finds that there's a kind of equal not paying attention-ness in like all the different activities, whether you're at work, at leisure, watching TV. He found a slight dip for one activity, which is when people self-reported that they were having sex. But I actually don't believe this data point.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I was like, I don't know. But in any case, basically all the good things in life we're not paying attention to. But the most important part of Dan's study for happiness research is that last question. How are you feeling right now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what he finds is that whenever you self-report mind wandering, like whatever to its due, even if it's like a good thing, like, oh, I was thinking about my upcoming vacation. You're less happy than if you just like weren't mind wandering. Like when you report like, oh, I was deep in that, you know, dumb Excel spreadsheet that I was like working on at work.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
When you're in flow and doing that, you feel better than if your kind of mind is off thinking about something else. And so the implication is that the way we become happier is we get in the present moment. We kind of notice what's going on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You know, for me walking over to the studio, I put my phone away and just notice, you know, the nice kind of chill in the air and the sights and all these things. How does that boost?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. I think partly it's just being in the present moment. I mean, that's what's striking about some of this research, right? Is that when you're just there, even if they're there, is it awesome? Even if it comes with, you know, this morning was a little chilly, right? You know, be honest.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And like, it was one of those days in Boston where like, you know, it was beautiful water, but a little smelly side, you know, just even though it didn't seem good, just the fact that I was there with it. made me a little bit more grounded, a little bit more pleasant in my life. That's one of the striking things is that presence works, not just when everything is unicorns and rainbows.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And it's not the kind of thing that you're just going to do one thing and happiness lasts forever. I think one of the disappointing things about happiness is that it takes constant work, like all good things in life, right? If you want to learn to play the violin, if I want to learn French, you know, if I want to get really good at Guitar Hero, which is the last thing I've invested myself in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Being present also seems to work well when things don't feel so good. And you asked before, what are the biggest misconceptions that students have from the class or the biggest aha moments? And I think this is a real big one, which is that sometimes we need to commit to being present even when we don't feel so hot.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, it's something that you just mentioned getting on your drive in. It's the practice of experiencing gratitude. And gratitude, I think, is a special form of presence that we really need to dig into, right? It's this idea of not just the noticing, which is regular presence, but noticing the things that are really good. Right. On my walk to your studio, it could be I'm walking right now. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You know, a few months ago I had a knee injury. Like, you know, I couldn't I would have had to take that Uber. But like, I'm out. I'm out walking. Right. I recently had covid and lost my sense of smell. Completely lost my sense of smell. It's awful. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But even, you know, as you're making fun of the Lake Boston Harvest smell a little stinky, like I could have a moment of gratitude for that of like, I can tell it's stinky, right? Which, oh my gosh, what a miracle that was and how easily it could have gone away. And so that's what gratitude does in presence. Like you're being present, but you're noticing that like,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
things don't have to be this way, right? I could miss out on these kind of gifts. And if you kind of have your attitude like that, if you can kind of bust out of that negativity bias to notice some of these things, there's so much stuff out there that's a gift from like our basic senses to the fact that we're above ground today, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You know, one of my favorite hacks for noticing the blessings that you might not have noticed is actually an ancient hack. It comes from the ancient Stoics who had this idea of what they called negative visualization. And so their idea was something that you love in life, your husband, your kid, your car, whatever. Just imagine it's not there anymore. It's gone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
The last time you saw it was the last time you will ever see it. You can, I don't want to, I don't want to think about that. Great. Then, you know, do that with the email, like your husband with Chris, right? Last time you saw him was the last time you're ever going to see him.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Really? I'm just trying to move from medium to hard on Guitar Hero. I know it's a little 2005, but that's what I do. But like, you can't just practice once and then that's it. Like you got to kind of keep up with it. And one of the lessons that we get from the science about happiness is that happiness works the same way. It's kind of like a leaky tire.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
My guess is when you get home tonight and you give him a hug, just that two seconds that we spent on that, you'll hug him a little bit more. So if you're listening right now and you've got a kid, the kid one is powerful. Last time you saw your kid was the last time you're ever going to see them. Or your parents. Or your parents, right? That's one hack that I like for gratitude.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But another one is just kind of committing to scribbling it down. Is the writing important? Yeah. So it's more spending time thinking about it that's important, but the writing kind of forces you to do that. So, you know, if you can commit to like another practice I've heard one of my students use is like, just when they're brushing their teeth, just go through, I'm really grateful for my family.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I'm grateful for my job. I'm grateful that, you know, my legs work today. All of those things are things that might not be true. And so just like find a time when you, doing something anyway, like brushing your teeth and think about it. But if writing it down helps, that can kind of force you to pay attention to it. And the nice thing is sometimes you can go back to it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I don't have like a fancy, some people talk about gratitude journal. I don't have a fancy gratitude journal, but even sometimes in my notes app, I'm being consistent with it. I'll scribble down things. And that's a thing that you can go back to, right? We talked about our phones being bad, but sometimes we can use our phones for positive things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And for me on a bad morning, looking back at that notes app and just seeing like all the things, you know, and they're often stupid things like, oh, the latte just tastes really... That's actually not that stupid because it's almost like a supersize of gratitude. Well, let's start there because that's the fourth way that we can unlock happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And it's through the practice of savoring and really just like diving into it, right? You know, you can drink your coffee or you can really be present thinking, how does this taste? How does this smell? How so lucky am I that I have this miracle of a sensation that can allow me to taste and smell this coffee? Which again, just because I lost, like it's more fragile than we think and we forget.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And just that act of kind of being in it. And it's useful to know that we can do that kind of for anything, right? And so I've tried to remind myself to do that whenever I'm doing the dishes. I have a dishwasher, so it's not like I do dishes religiously, but you know, sometimes there's like one or two you gotta do, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But just like the water on my hands and the suds and a little bit of the smell of the dawn, which I'm like, oh, I like that kind of fun. You know, like feeling the porcelain and like, it's so silly, but it turns that task that was this onerous stupid thing that I had to get done into, into a moment to be present and to notice like some of these things feel really nice.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Mm-hmm.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You do these different behaviors, you change your mindset, it fills things up for a little bit, but then you kind of got to do it again and again. It sort of takes constant work, but the good news is that you can change things around a lot.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I think it's one of the reasons that folks often talk about how being in nature can bring us happiness because I think it winds up being... a little bit easier to savor in nature, right? Because the clouds are moving and they're so beautiful, or you're out in the trees and you hear the crunching.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
In places like Japan, they talk about this concept of forest bathing, where you're just kind of out bathing in the forest. And I love that term because it sort of shows you the savoring, where you're like, I'm just bathing in all these sensory experiences.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And my 26 weeks switched into only five tips. We talked about time already. So maybe for my fifth one, I'll talk about a strategy that I have a lot of trouble with, which is that we should bring a mindset of self-compassion. I think one of the ways we make ourselves really miserable is that we beat ourselves up a lot. We have incredibly high standards.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And rather than achieving those high standards by talking to ourselves like a kind coach who's always motivating and knows we can fail, we talk to ourselves like this evil drill instructor that has like, why could you be so stupid? You can't do it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And this like for some people, maybe even if you're listening, you might recognize this can just become a constant refrain in our head of beating ourselves up. And I think we do this not because we're masochists. I think we do this because we think it works. We think that's the way to get off our couches and get into the world and do stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But researchers like Kristen Neff have studied like, hey, does berating yourself on a constant mental loop basis really work? It turns out like surprise, surprise, no. It makes us procrastinate. It makes us feel drained and it has a hugely negative effect on our happiness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And so Neff and others have come up with a much better, healthier mindset for self-talk, which is what they call self-compassion. And I think, you know, self-compassion is not huge, so I think it's helpful to break it up into steps. Step one is something we've just been talking about a lot, which is sort of mindfulness. And not even mindfulness of the exterior, but mindfulness of the interior.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It's, I'm having some trouble with this. This is hard. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm off my game, right? It's being mindful that you're not in a perfect space. But then the second step is what people like Kristen Neff call common humanity. It's following that I'm in a bad space up with, and that's normal. It is a common human experience to feel overwhelmed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Like it is completely fine that I'm going through this. It makes sense. It is a common human experience. But then the third step, which is a hard step, is what Neff calls self-kindness. You say, how can I treat myself with some kindness? How can I treat myself like a friend? What can I take off my plate? What do I need right now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yes, and I think probably listeners out there, my guess is a lot of you are feeling that way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You kind of coach yourself like you would coach someone you really care about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
One of my favorite quotes that my students really love in the course is, you shouldn't be comparing your insides to other people's outsides, right? Like I see my inside of like, oh, I'm ruminative and kind of messing up. And I was thinking that thing that I didn't say. But I'm just comparing them to, you know, say your outsides are like, oh, you just put together podcasts. You're doing a great job.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But like, we don't see what's going on internally. So it's a We shouldn't be comparing ourselves anyway, but that's a really unfair comparison because people are actively good at hiding when their insides are self-critical or filled with doubt and so on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Oh, it's huge. I mean, one, another stupid feature of our mind is that our minds don't ever think about something objectively, right? So take something like salary, right? Like, you know, what's your salary, right? Think about your salary right now. Is that a good salary? Probably not thinking about it objectively in terms of how much purchasing power you've had.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You probably said, well, it's not a good salary because, you know, so-and-so makes more or I could be making more, right? You're just comparing it to something else, you know? Are you pretty, right? You instantly think of people that you think of as pretty and you kind of compare yourself often in a downward way. And this is just true of how our minds work.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And the problem is that usually when we pick a kind of reference point, as it's called, that's like the comparison point, we pick a comparison point that's particularly awesome. That's like really, really good. And even if you're at the top of your game, you do that too.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
A little bit. I think one thing with comparison though, and this might be true for some of these hacks already is like, it's going to be hard to fully shut it off because we just don't, our brains just work that way. They can't think objectively, but we have a little bit of control at what counts as the comparison point, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You kind of just walking over the studios become this sort of metaphor we're using for this, but walking over the studio, um, Like I could compare myself to like, you know, all the runners that were passing by really quickly. But my thought pattern went to like, well, remember when your knee was totally messed up and you couldn't even walk and you'd be crutching over here. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It's like you finding a comparison that makes you feel good can actually make you feel. But our brains naturally go to the ones that make us feel crappy. But we can find sometimes finds one that make us feel good. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. And you're constantly at the auto body shop with the little thingy pin in and it's ready to go. We just miss opportunities to fill it up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And those boosts last, right? You know, we talked before about kind of this idea of being happy in your life, which is a sort of positive emotion and being happy with your life. The more you just commit to those little boosts, it's not just an in-your-life boost. That just makes you feel like your life has purpose. It makes you feel like your life is meaning.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It makes you feel satisfied with your life too.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. So so the course kind of started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I've been teaching there for over two decades. But in just the last couple of years, I took on a role of what's called the head of college on campus. And so Yale's one of these weird schools like like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like Gryffindor, Slytherin.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I love that you asked this, because honestly, if I had to say the question I get from students the most, it's this one. And I think the form for college students is a little bit similar. It's kind of like, how dare I? Like, how dare I, with all the problems of the world, focus on my own happiness, right? And I get it, right? You know, there are real problems out there in the world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But I think this comes to, that question sort of shows a different incorrect theory we have about happiness, which is like, if we're feeling happy, we're just going to let the rest of the world burn. Like, I don't know if you're listening right now and you know the meme with the dog with the flames going up and the dog's like, this is fine.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I think we think if we're just focusing on our own happiness, we'll be like that, right? But that's an empirical question, right? Are happy people happy? doing stuff to fix the world? Are they letting it burn? And the answer is really clear. It comes from folks like Konstantin Kuchlev at Georgetown and others who study who are the people that are out there making a difference.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what he finds is if you survey people's level of positive emotion, if you survey how satisfied they are with their lives, the people who are taking the action are the ones who are happiest. There's this lovely effect in the field called the feel good, do good effect. And which is that if you put people in a positive mood, they wind up doing better stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You know, studies, for example, like pipe really happy music at the gym versus kind of sadder music at the gym. And you have people when they're leaving the gym volunteer to do a survey or volunteer to help someone or donate blood.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And what you find is that people, when they listen to the good music or are in a better mood, just wind up doing the nice thing that takes them some time and energy, but it's for a good cause. And I think this is the answer to why we should all be focused on our happiness, is that I think one of the reasons the world is burning so badly is that we're all not feeling so good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And if we could intervene on the feeling good, we'd probably get a long way towards the doing good part too. Now, does that mean we just focus on our own individual happiness and ignore all the structural problems? For sure not. I think we could work on those together. I think we're all going to have a lot more emotional bandwidth to fix stuff if we are focused on filling up our happy tires.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
There's like these like weird colleges within a college. They're basically like dorm communities. And so I became a head of college of one of these, which meant as a faculty member, I was living on campus with students.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So it's not as bad as it sounds. It's not like happiness essays or multiple choice questions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah. So the analogy I use with my students is imagine if instead of being worried about my students' happiness, I was really worried about my students' level of fitness, right? Like I wanted them to like get fit and make better bottles and get healthier. I could teach a whole class about leg day and how to do squats appropriately and this is a deadlift and here's how muscles work.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
But if students closed their books at the end of that lecture and went home and didn't hit the gym, nothing would change. They'd know, but they wouldn't necessarily put it into practice. And this is kind of the problem with a lot of the happiness research. The biggest bug in the whole class equation is like, you got to have to do this stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And if you're listening right now, it's not just my students. You just heard all this great stuff. But if you don't put it into practice and get your social connection and think about what you're grateful for and find ways to savor and put your phone away, if you don't do that stuff, nothing's going to change.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, I'm going to pick one that you're good at. I'm going to say that all of your listeners, sometime this week, the next seven days, you have to give at least three compliments to people in your life. They can be strangers, they can be someone else, but really kind of try to present the compliment in a way that really matters to the person you're talking to.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So are you there with your spouse? Eating in the dining hall, hanging out in the coffee shop. It's kind of fun. I became this like benevolent aunt to like 500 19-year-olds, right? And I thought this was going to be fun, right? I thought college life right now was going to look like what college life looked like back when I went there in the 90s. And it just didn't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And that's nice because it's boom, it's other oriented. You're doing something nice for somebody else. Boom, it's social connection. You got to talk to somebody. And three, it's kind of savoring because, you know, when you noticed my necklace this morning, it meant that you noticed it. You were present with it. You kind of liked it, noticed the color and things like that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
So you're going to get like a threefer with this compliment practice. And extra bonus points if you tell us you did it, you know, find me on social media, find Mel and tell us what you did and tell us how it went.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And again, the tire inflating, it's not going to pop, right? It's not going to be so happy that you burst. A single compliment's not going to do that. But over time, a few of these in the week, and you can be an overachiever like my Yale students. You don't have to stop at three. You can just do one every day, right? The more you pump it up, the more happy your tire will be.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
We can all be a little bit happier if we put in a little bit of time and energy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I'm seeing the background. I'm like, oh my gosh, we're really here.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I mean, I was really looking at this college student mental health crisis up close and personal. And this is true at Yale, but it's just true nationally. So right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function. Right now, nationally, more than 60% of college students report feeling very lonely and overwhelmingly anxious.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And this was what I was seeing in my community, where there were just students who were really struggling. And I just kind of went through this crisis of confidence.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
As a professor, I'm like, we're not teaching them computer science and Shakespeare and all this stuff if 60% of students are experiencing overwhelming anxiety most days. And I was like, we got to do something about this. And being a psychologist, I mean, I'm a trained psychologist. I said, well, my field has strategies, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Like we know simple kinds of ways that you can change your behaviors and your mindset that again, don't take you from zero to a hundred, but work pretty well, right? Can make you kind of patch up that leaky happiness tire and feel a little bit better. And so I said, well, why don't I make a class? I'll just make a whole new class and I'll kind of teach students all these strategies.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
I wanted it to sound cool. That's why I called it psychology in the good life. So it sort of pop out of course, sounded like kind of fun. But, you know, it was a new class on campus. I thought, you know, 30 or so students would show up. And so the first indication that I got that something was amiss was we get these little kind of tickers as students are registering for our class.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
It's like this little webpage where you can kind of see this graph going up and down. And most of the graphs had an axis that was from zero to a hundred, but mine started going from zero to a thousand. Where were you when that started happening? It was like back and forth in my office because it was like happening over time gradually as students were coming in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I think it was something different because students were sort of voting with their feet. I mean, if you're a 19 year old right now, you don't like this culture of feeling overwhelmed and anxious and just kind of so many of your friends are just experiencing panic attacks. Like That's not a fun way to be.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I think the course was really offering students a solution and even an evidence-based solution. I was saying, look, I'm going to just comb through the science and tell you what does the science really say practically that you can do to kind of feel better right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, well, this was the striking thing about the course, right, is that, you know, the course became viral on campus. But what I really didn't expect was for the course to get viral off campus.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
About a week into teaching the class, there was a New York Times article about the class, the point of which was basically like, all these 19-year-olds, an Ivy League school of their whole life ahead of them are miserable. What about the rest of us? It was kind of like, Dr. Santos, share these strategies with the rest of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And I just get emails from all around the world of just people feeling like, you know, it's not so much that I'm depressed. I just feel like I'm kind of languishing or just kind of meh or like, you know, just there's so much going on in the world to feel stressed out about right now. Like everybody's kind of going through it right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
That's right. And I think things are getting worse and will continue to get worse unless we come up with good strategies to deal with this. What do you mean things are getting worse? Well, you look at pretty much any statistic on mental health, and I'm not talking in college students now, I'm talking about in adults, especially in the US, things are just getting worse over time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Rates of loneliness have nearly doubled since we've been measuring these things. Rates of depression and anxiety in the adult population are going up. I think even if you just look at rates of things like people reporting that they're overwhelmed, burned out, you get not just double digits, but very high double digits of folks saying like, yeah, that's me. I'm going through it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And honestly, if it's not you, it's your sister in law, your colleague at work. It's like we're just in a community where so many people just feel like they're not experiencing the kind of joy and positive emotion that they really like to be experiencing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it helps to dig in a little bit to what we mean by happiness because we can mean so many things. And in fact, there was a funny study that showed that what lay people think about happiness is not what the scholars mean when they use the term happiness at all. So you're the scholar, I'm the lay person. Yes. Okay. I'm a lay down now. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Well, I'll tell you what the scholars mean. So what the scholars mean by happiness is happiness in two forms. Scholars think about happiness in your life and happiness with your life. So what do we mean here?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
happy with what's going on but not happy in it yeah you know the classic case if you have kids right is that you you know have a new newborn baby right and you're so happy with life you've brought this new life you know so much meaning and purpose but in your life there's dirty diapers there's no sleep there's you know oh my god i'm exhausted my nipples are leaking i'm not having sex anymore i feel like i've just like shot a cannonball through my legs like what is happening miserable
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And you've had enough important people on here to know the opposite, right? Which is you can have a life in your life where there's all these hedonic pleasures. You know, you're flying for class and eating at the best restaurants and, you know, the best wines. But with your life, you feel a little bit empty. Maybe you don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
And so what scholars are trying to do is they're trying to find strategies that boost both of these in your life. And specifically, we mean lots of positive emotions, lots of joy and laughter and contentment, right? These kind of subtle positive emotions. Otherwise, I guess we'll probably talk about we don't want to get rid of negative emotions completely, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
We want to have some negative emotions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
No steamroller from the frustration or the overwhelm and so on. And that's happy in your life. With your life, it's the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied do I feel? Do I feel like I have meaning? Do I feel like I have purpose? As nerdy professors, we use scales to measure these kinds of things. But you don't need a scale.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
You could probably answer right now, all things considered, how happy are you with your life?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Exactly. And one of the things that's striking is that a lot of the strategies move both at the same time. A lot of the strategies will give you a sense of positive emotion when you're practicing it, but also overall make you kind of just more satisfied in the long term too.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Yeah, so one of the biggest ones is just how much we get happiness wrong. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're listening right now, you probably care about happiness, right? You probably want to feel happier. You're probably pursuing happiness. But you might not be feeling like it's going so great, right? You're kind of off somehow.