Dr. Laurie Santos
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that, too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
There's a guide for that, too. The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
There's a guide for that too. The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
I was going to say redistribution of jobs. That's right, exactly.
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.
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IMO Live at SXSW: Combatting Hopelessness with Dr. Laurie Santos
That's fighting your own cynicism right there.
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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.
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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?
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And that was kind of my day job until I took on a new role on Yale's campus where I became what's called a head of college. And so Yale's kind of like one of these weird schools like in Harry Potter where there are like colleges within a college, you know, like kind of Gryffindor, Slytherin sort of thing. I'm head of Silliman College, and that means I live on campus with students and students.
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You know, so already, you know, we're kind of in a bind of like, well, if other people aren't happy, then that's probably going to mean we're not happy, right? Because we've talked about happiness doesn't seem to come from our circumstances. So it's not like we're trying to beat other people or go after these accolades, right? Happiness comes from being grateful and present from what you have.
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And so my guess is that more often than not, if you're pursuing happiness correctly, right, you know, based on what the science suggests, You're just not going to run into situations where you're sort of competing or hurting other people's happiness because other people's happiness is part and parcel of getting true happiness.
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That's interesting. I don't know of any data that have looked specifically at IQ and happiness. My guess is there's probably not the relationship that you're looking at. But there is definitely a relationship between happiness and optimism, obviously. I think optimism is sort of part of our general happy life.
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And the good news, based on this question, is like you can, in fact, learn these kinds of things. You know, the fastest thing to do is really try to just train your brain to pay attention to good things out there. Our minds are naturally tuned to negative things, you know, the yucky stuff out there, the griping. But we can tune our minds towards positive things.
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You can focus on what you're grateful for. Another practice that I've been into lately, which I talk about on the podcast, is focusing on delights. Sometimes gratitude can feel sort of cheesy, but you can just focus on like things that are delightful out there, you know, like You know, the sunshine, like that's delightful. The fact that coffee exists, that's delightful.
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You know, I don't know, some funny video on the Internet. That's delightful. Right. Like training your brain towards things that you really enjoy that kind of cause delight.
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When I started the role, I was expecting it to be, you know, like, you know, rainbows and parties and just like happy students all the time. But when I got there, you know, I was really seeing the college student mental health crisis up close and personal, you know, with so many students reporting feeling depressed and anxious.
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again your brain is going to focus on whatever you give it data for so if you give it data about things that you're feeling really grateful about or that are really delightful that's what your brain is going to start noticing i love that you just are you're constantly filling evidence folders for like things are shitty and things are good it's like what what are you putting in your evidence folder pretty much
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And it's not just like, you know, what you're picking. It's like you're you're training your brain to look for that stuff. In my podcast, I interview this fantastic guest, Ross Gay, who's a poet and an essayist who has this book called The Book of Delights. And he decided that for every day for a year after his birthday, he would write an essay about something that delighted him.
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And he talks about how at first he was, like, really worried, like, am I really going to find things that really delight me? And he said that, you know, even just a week in, like, he kind of tuned his mind to find these things. You know, so walking down the street, he'd be like, oh, that dude's T-shirt is delightful. Like, oh, that, like, cat on the street is delightful.
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Like, he just kind of shifted his perception. and tuned his mind more towards the good things than the bad things. Our brains evolutionarily are naturally tuned towards the bad things. Makes sense. You want to see the tiger that's going to jump out at you. But we can control that tuning.
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And just by, you know, like taking some explicit work to pay attention to the things we're grateful for, to the things that delight us, to the good stuff out there.
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And, you know, even if they weren't, you know, at clinical levels of mental health dysfunction, they were just kind of feeling stressed and sort of fast forwarding their life, you know, and just feeling overwhelmed and really busy. And so I kind of wanted to do something about it.
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How do we do it? Yeah. Yeah. Tough. I mean, this is like a really real one. Right. Because there's a lot of bad stuff out there right now. You know, structural racism, horrible global pandemic, you know, like the list goes on.
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So, I mean, I think one thing that helps me is recognizing that if if I want to be the kind of person who's an ally for all that stuff, all the yucky stuff in the world who wants to have the resilience to fix it.
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i'm not going to be able to do that if i'm incredibly anxious and overwhelmed and burnt out i'm going to be able to do that best if i'm really in a happy state if i'm really kind of feeling good like if i kind of have put my own oxygen mask on first right and in fact there's evidence that so many of the things we were talking about that are parts of a happy life help for doing hard things.
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My favorite one is that people who are grateful are better at what's called self-regulation. They're better at, you know, doing the hard thing today to help their future self, whether that's, you know, saving for retirement or eating healthier or, you know, putting work into hard, scary problems like that just require a lot of hard, scary work.
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And so for me, it's made me feel like if I want the world to be a better place, I can't afford to be down in the dumps freaking out about it. I really need to put energy into doing these practices for myself so that I'll be hopefully one of the people that has the bandwidth to help with some of this stuff.
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So far from feeling guilty, I feel like we might want to feel guilty for the opposite thing, right? You know, do what we can to kind of fix things. It really does require not just working on these structures, but working on our emotions so that we have the bandwidth to fix those structures that might be messed up.
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You know, I didn't like being in this culture where so many students were stressed and depressed and just kind of not enjoying their time in college. And so I thought, well, let me, you know, figure out what my field of psychology says about this. And psychology gives us so many tips that we can use to feel better. And so I thought. All right, great. I'll, you know, I'll do what professors do.
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There's lots and lots of good things. But, you know, if I have to shift towards negativity, you know, I would say the hardest thing is that, you know, one of the things I really try to pay attention to is this phenomenon of time affluence, the subjective sense that I have a lot of free time.
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And being a happiness guru, especially in an age where there's a lot of bad stuff going on in a global pandemic, it keeps me pretty busy because, you know, a lot of people want advice, a lot of people want help. And that means I have to put a lot of work in to protect my time. So the hardest thing is protecting my time in the midst of everything else going on. I can totally understand that.
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And that's hard, right? Because, you know, I get into my inbox. I'm like, oh, that listener has this really cool thing to say or that student has this really cool question. But I also know that if I answer all those, that means I'm not spending time with the people I care about and I'm not just having time to meditate and exercise. So it's hard prioritizing the right stuff.
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But time affluence is definitely something I need to work on prioritizing.
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Oh, man, there's so many best things. I mean, I honestly think the best things are my students. I love them so much. I love interacting with them. They teach me so much and I'm so privileged to get to work with them. That's great.
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I'll make a whole class on this. So, you know, I prepped this class that I christened psychology in the good life and, you know, slapped it together thinking, you know, 30 or so students would take it. And you can imagine my surprise when a quarter of the entire campus enrolled the first time I taught it. Yeah, we couldn't we couldn't fit the class anywhere.
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We had to teach it in a concert hall on campus because that was the only place it would fit. But, you know, that showed me students are voting with their feet. They don't like this culture of feeling so overwhelmed and stressed. And I think they really wanted, you know, science based strategies they could use to feel better.
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Exactly. And, you know, I mean, I think, you know, what one of the things that's interesting is we learn as you look into the science, you learn that, you know, some of those ancient pieces of wisdom were quantified. quite accurate. Some of the platitudes we see are quite accurate, but some not so much. And I think that's why we need an empirical approach.
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We can just ask scientifically, okay, if we find happy people, what are they doing differently? What are their strategies? How are they spending their time? And then We can let the not so happy people copy that and really test. Are they feeling happier? Are they feeling less depressed?
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And, you know, these days we have almost, you know, two decades worth of scientific work that's done that in this field of positive psychology. And, you know, we've learned a lot. There's lots of evidence based tips out there for what you can do to feel better.
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Well, it's interesting. The work I was doing with dogs and monkeys was more kind of figuring out, you know, how they decide what they know about the world.
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But there was a rich similarity, which is that when you start looking into the happiness science work, you quickly realize a big way that we get things wrong, which is that we have some really bad theories about the kinds of things that make us happy.
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You know, I talk to my students and on my podcast, I often say, you know, our minds are lying to us about the sorts of things that will make us happy. You know, we think it's money and changing our circumstances and, you know, getting the perfect accolade or the perfect grade. But those things seem not to work. And that tied really nicely to some of the work we were doing yesterday.
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in animals where we showed that some of the deepest irrationalities we have in our species might be evolutionarily old. They're kind of built in. And I think the same thing about some of the things we get wrong about happiness, like even knowing these studies, it's hard for me to change my intuitions. You know, I still think, well, if I hit Powerball today, oh, man, I'd be so much happier.
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Or, you know, if it just wasn't raining today, I'd be so much happier. If, you know, we could change my circumstances drastically, that would really improve my well-being. But I know the scientific work that suggests that's probably not the case.
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Yeah, it's a few of all of those things. I mean, I think one thing in terms of our circumstances, you know, it's worth noting that if you're in really dire traumatic circumstances, yes, getting different circumstances will really improve your well-being. You know, if you're living below the poverty line or if you're in an abusive relationship, you do want to change those circumstances.
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But for many of the people privileged enough to listen to this podcast who can, you know, put food on the table, you know, has a roof over their head and so on, you know, changing your circumstances might not affect your happiness as much as you think. For many of us, changing our circumstances isn't the fastest path to feeling a little bit happier.
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Often it's more about changing our mindset, which incorporates a lot of the things you mentioned. You know, it's about changing the way we see the world, changing the way we see our circumstances, changing the extent to which we're present with our circumstances and our emotions. And it's also, you know, tapping into things that give us meaning in life, you know, giving us a sense of purpose.
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So all of those things seem to matter a lot more than what our salary level is. Or for my students, you know, the last grade they got on their midterm and things like that. Backing up a little bit.
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Yeah, tricky. I mean, we could take, you know, many, many podcasts, you know, fighting over a definition of happiness. You know, social scientists tend to try to be simpler than philosophers. So they go for a definition of happiness that's pretty easy to measure. And so most social scientists think about happiness as sort of being happy in your life and with your life.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?