#139 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness | The Knowledge Project

But part of happiness really is about being present.

You know, there's so much evidence that when we're mind wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy.

It's one of the reasons that techniques like meditation, which are primarily techniques for, you know, intentionally paying attention to the present moment, often with a certain kind of attitude, like a non -judgment kind of attitude, those kinds of practices make us happier in part because of the non -judgment,

but in part just because like we're there, we're present, we're paying attention to life and just the act of paying attention, even if it doesn't feel good, like even if you're kind of pay attention to something boring, like that presence can wind up improving our wellbeing over time.

So finding ways to control the things that are stealing our attention and preventing us from being present can be really good ways to boost our happiness overall.

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Lori Santos joins me today.

Lori is a professor of psychology and head of Stillman College at Yale.

Santos is known as Yale's happiness professor.

She began teaching a class called psychology and the good life in 2018, which has become I think the most popular class at Yale.

I felt like this was a good episode to follow Luke Burgess and Mamedic desire because Lori and I also talk about how our minds lie to us.

You'll walk away from this episode with a better understanding of why happiness is so elusive, why you're probably feeling burnt out and emotionally drained and importantly, what specifically you can do that's backed by science to feel better.

We'll also talk about an underappreciated aspect of happiness, protecting yourself from unhappy people.

It's time to listen and learn.

We put a ton of effort and energy into being happy and yet so few of us actually seem happy.

Why not? Like what misconceptions do we have about happiness?

I mean, I think it's important to start with this idea that we put so much effort in, right?

Because I think you could sometimes think about happiness of like, oh, we're all not feeling so happy.

And that's because we're not, we're not trying.

Like we need to just do it.

And I think that's not the problem.

I think people are putting tremendous energy into the kinds of things that they think are gonna make them feel good, feel successful, lead to a meaningful life.

But then even though we're putting in this much effort, we're kinda not getting anywhere.

And I think the issue is that our minds, the way I like to talk about it on the podcast is that our minds lie to us about the kinds of things that make us happy.

We have these strong intuitions that, if this would happen, I would be happily ever after, right?

If like I have the perfect job or if I get a higher salary or if I get a certain accolade at work, if I become partner or for my students, if I get perfect grades, like people think if those things happen that they'll feel happier.

And there are studies that look at people who get those wonderful things.

And yeah, you get a little happiness boost for a little while, but it doesn't seem to last.

Lasting happiness comes from something else.

And so, yeah, so the problem isn't that we're not working at it, it's that we have these misconceptions about the kinds of things that are really gonna make us feel better.

But we really need, we need some like work to figure out the right sorts of things that will make us feel good.

Talk to me a little bit more about that, sort of like, so the way that I think of people like this, I call them happy if or happy when people, cause they're not happy in the moment.

They're happy when something, when I get a promotion, when I get a relationship, when I get a new car, when I get a new house, I'll be happy then.

And then why is it that we never seem to be happy when that happens?

Yeah, well this is a bias that researchers call the arrival fallacy.

It's really like the happily ever after fallacy, like when this happens, I'll be happy.

And you know, it's not like we're mis -predicting, you know, you get a new house and like, yeah, that feels good, but it doesn't feel as good as you're going to think, and it doesn't feel good for as long as you're going to think.

These are errors in what we call affective forecasting.

You're forecasting that you're gonna be way happier, but we're off about the intensity.

It's not as good as we predict usually, and we're off about the duration.

It doesn't feel good for as long as we tend to predict.

And that means we're setting ourselves up for some disappointment, right?

And I think this is the kind of thing that happens for the like, I'll be happy when kind of people, right?

You know, it's like, I'll be happy when I get a promotion.

And then you get the promotion, you're like, well, that didn't work.

I guess I need another promotion.

This happens a lot with salary, right?

Like I'll be happy if I get a raise.

I'll be happy if I get this amount of money.

And you get there and you don't get as happy as you thought.

And you don't think, well, I was wrong.

It wasn't salary. I should go for something else.

You think, ah, it wasn't enough money.

You know, if I get the next promotion and the next promotion, and you know, it's one thing to think this, you know, if you're earning like an average American income, but what's funny is even if you look at incredibly wealthy people, they have the same mistaken intuitions about money.

On my podcast, the happiness lab, I interviewed this great guy, Clay Cockrell, who's a wealth psychologist.

He's a like mental health professional that works with the rich and famous.

And you know, first of all, shocking is that he has a job, right?

You know, based on our misconceptions, it's like, you know, they're incredibly wealthy, you should have no mental health problems, but they have a ton.

And one of the biggest ones he sees is exactly this, like these wealthy folks thought like, when I become a millionaire, you know, then I'll be happy.

And then that didn't work.

You're like, well, maybe I need, I need in the tens of millions.

I need to be able to buy, you know, multiple vacation houses, or for people he works within the a hundred millions, it's like, well, I guess I have to become a billionaire once I can say I'm a billionaire, then I'll really be happy.

And at no point do they, they go through these steps and think like, wait a minute, you know, the last, the last five carrots, you know, like I put for myself when I got to the carrot, it didn't work in the way that I thought, you know, maybe I'm wrong.

And so, yeah, so this is, this is, this is our bias of affective forecasting.

We kind of, we get wrong, not the direction, we kind of know good things are going to make us feel good, but we definitely get wrong.

The intensity and the duration that that, that boost in happiness is going to last.

Is it because our reference group changes?

So like if you're, you get a promotion, all of a sudden you're comparing yourself against to your new colleagues instead of your old colleagues.

Yeah, there's kind of two biases.

One is this reference group bias, right?

Which is that, you know, our brains are just not built to pay attention to anything objectively, right?

We just pay attention relative to stuff.

So, hey, how much money should you earn?

You don't have like an objective number.

You have like, you know, I'm a professor in an Ivy league institution.

I'm like, well, I should earn about as much as other, you know, professors at Ivy league institutions.

Like you're a podcaster, you're probably thinking, you know, how much should you earn?

Like, well, you know, what is the average pot?

Or what is a good podcaster earn?

I kind of want to earn that, right?

You know, so we never think in objective terms, we're always thinking relative to something, and that what we think of as our reference point changes pretty quickly.

You know, as soon as you become a, you know, a millionaire, now your reference point isn't, you know, you know, what I was earning in grad school, like now your reference point is like, other millionaires and you might not be as rich as other millionaires, right?

They might have a better yacht than you or a better vacation house than you.

And what's a dumb thing about our minds is that we never look to reference points that make us feel good.

We always look to reference points that make us feel, that make us feel crappy, you know.

I was doing some consulting with a basketball team and I was going through, you know, hey, what's your reference point for, you know, what's a good basketball player salary?

And they're thinking like, you know, oh, Steph Curry, who's like, you know, the highest paid, you know, I'm like, what's your reference point for height?

You know, now it's not Steph Curry anymore because he's sure.

It's like, you know, Taco fail is like, you know, seven foot, you know, player for the Celtics.

And it's like, you instant, your brain instantly goes to the one reference point that would make you feel bad about yourself, you know.

So what kind of body you have might not be the same reference point as who's successful in your industry versus who's making a lot of money versus who's a really good spouse, right?

The comparison point you pick is always somebody that's gonna make you feel like crap.

And that makes sense.

You know, we want to have something to shoot for, but it means we never feel good with what we have.

We're always finding reference points that make us feel bad.

That's kind of bias number one about why we never get there.

But there's a second bias that's just this dumb feature of our mind, which is that we get used to stuff.

You know, you start earning a million dollars and you get all this stuff that comes with it.

You know, in week one, when you got a nice house with a nice shower and a nice car that feels good, but you know, by week two or three, that's just your shower.

That's just your car.

It's just your house.

You've stopped noticing all the great things about it.

And this is like, you know, a bad feature of human psychology for all the fantastic things in life.

Even the best things in life we will wind up getting used to.

Yeah, Dan Gilbert, who's a psychologist at Harvard who writes about this stuff uses the example of like, you know, the first time your child says mommy or daddy, or the first time your spouse who you're totally in love with says, I love you, you know, that was a moment.

Like that was, you know, you wrote about it on social media and your journal, that was, but you know, last Thursday, when your kid said, you know, mommy or daddy, or, you know, like running out the door when your spouse said, I love you, it doesn't, it lacks the same oomph.

So even these best moments in life, if they repeat over time, kind of get boring.

And this is what researchers call hedonic adaptation.

It's the reason why even when we get the good things, even if they stick around, we stop appreciating them as much because we kind of just get used to them.

And these two things together, this kind of reference point comparisons and hedonic adaptation, it means even if your life is going as well as you could have possibly expected, you'll stop noticing that it's going so well over time.

So what are sort of some of the tools that we can use individually?

Actually, before we get there, I wanna get to the tools that we can use to sort of help ourselves be happier.

But before we do that, how would you define happiness?

Yeah, I mean, there's a billion different, you know, we could have a very, very long podcast episode if we were discussing all the ways we could think about happiness.

In my own work, I tend to use the social scientist definition, which is thinking about happiness as a sense of being happy in your life and with your life.

So being happy in your life is just having, you know, lots of positive emotions like joy, contentment, awe, you know, like those kinds of things.

And at least relatively speaking, less negative emotions, not no negative emotions, cause a full and fulfilling human experience probably has some sadness and anger and frustration and fear, like you wouldn't be human if you didn't have that.

But en masse, it feels pretty good to be in your life.

And that means you have lots of positive emotions.

The second part is being happy with your life.

And that's sort of the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?

You know, are you happy?

Do you have like, do you have purpose and meaning in this sort of broad sense?

And these are what social scientists call the kind of affective component of happiness or the emotional component of happiness.

That's the kind of happy in your life and the kind of cognitive component of happiness.

You think your life is pretty good.

And most of the strategies I talk about in my podcast and on my course, it's like, we're trying to maximize both of those at once.

They won't always be the same.

My residential college dean who I live with, she and her wife just had a new baby.

And like, I think that's a moment where like, you're happy with your life.

Oh my gosh, you have a new baby, like the newborn, this is great, so much meaning and stuff.

But in your life, there's like new dirty diapers, you're not sleeping, you know, like, so there's these moments where they dissociate.

And I think they dissociate in the other direction too.

I think there are lots of cases of those rich people we were just talking about who feel, you know, in their life they have every luxury and flying first class and all these things, but with their life, they still feel like there's some emptiness in something real that's missing.

So best case scenario is we maximize both of those.

For me, that's kind of the experience of a happy life.

Well, we tend to think that amplifying things, you mentioned the word intensity, so we seek to sort of amplify our happiness, should we do that?

I think yes and no, I mean, yes in the sense that I think we, you know, happiness takes effort, right?

Like I think happiness takes work, like all good things you gotta put in some work to get there and part of that work is understanding the misconceptions, but part of that work is like, we don't often have the best instincts about what will make us happy.

The things that we kind of want to do in life are not necessarily the things we're really gonna enjoy or like or that will give us a meaningful life.

So I think we have to fight our misconceptions and we have to sometimes violate our intuitions about what to do to live a healthy life.

You know, I think for me, this works a lot like, you know, fitness and healthy eating, right?

You know, like the things I crave and I'm drawn to, you know, maybe there's some people out there who crave salad and like a well -balanced protein, but for me, I crave like, you know, like the, you know, candy and chocolate fried and greasy things, right?

Like eventually I'll get sick of that, but my instinct is to like go for that stuff, right?

But that's not really, you know, what a well -balanced healthy diet looks like, right?

You know, you kind of have to overcome those craving urges and intuitions to go for something that's a little bit more well -balanced.

And I think happiness kind of works like that.

Like you gotta put some effort in to overcome the natural intuitions, which might not be leading you towards the stuff that matters.

The problem though is, and I think where we go astray when we're seeking out happiness is that, again, we have these misconceptions, right?

We think happiness is about achieving these accolades.

It's not, we often think happiness is about self -care and treating ourselves and giving ourselves these luxuries.

It's not, in fact, if anything, it's about doing nice things for others.

That gives you more of a kind of happiness bang for your buck than like spending time on yourself.

And I think it's about this notion of happiness that's only positive emotions all the time.

I think we each have this kind of misconception that's a little on the toxic positivity spectrum where we're like, if I'm feeling sad or I'm feeling angry or I'm feeling scared, something's gone horribly wrong and I haven't done it right.

When in fact there are times when it's normative to feel sad or frustrated or scared or something like that.

And so I think we do need to work towards happiness.

We can become much happier if we work towards it.

But often the conception we have of how to do that isn't right and that means we go about it wrong and that can be problematic in and of itself.

In part because you're like, I'm seeking happiness, I'm seeking happiness and that makes you not present, it might make you a little selfish.

I mean, that in and of itself feels very anxiety provoking and is causing negative emotions.

And so doing it wrong kind of like messes you up and kind of winds up ironically leading you away from happiness.

Let's explore that a little bit because where do we get the idea that like a boat or a yacht or a house is gonna make us happier in the first place?

Is that sort of like related to Renee Girard and memetic desire?

I mean, part of it is that we're going, part of it is that we pick up on whatever reference points we see, right?

And a capitalist society where we see stuff on social media and on the news is gonna show us what it looks like to have high status, what it looks like to have happiness.

And I think there are a lot of advertisers out there who do a good job of convincing us, look how happy everything would be if you had X product that we're trying to sell you.

And so I think part of it is our culture shows us these kinds of representations and those just naturally become reference points that our brain soaks up and tries to go after.

I think also we're evolved to go after the wrong stuff.

We are products of natural selection which is a blind process that if you kind of intentionalize it, it's kind of going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation.

So natural selection's like double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff just in case, right?

Because we really wanna make sure our genes get out there.

And that's, it doesn't care about you being happy.

It really wants you to be a cravings, driving, always pushing for more genes in the next generation individual.

And so I think we're built with a mind that's not necessarily geared towards making us happy.

Like that wasn't natural selection's intent.

If that came along for the ride, great.

But natural selection more wants us to like get all this stuff out there.

And if our society tells us yachts are a thing, like brains like, all right, yacht, that's what we need.

Like why don't we have one of these?

What's going wrong?

Crave. Yeah, so all these mechanisms are, they're not built for us to feel nice.

They're built for us to go after stuff.

It simultaneously pushes us to do you more than we probably otherwise would but makes us miserable in the process.

Yeah, I mean, again, it has different goals, right?

I mean, if I was building a mind I'd build it in very different ways.

But that was its goal was to kind of get us into the next generation.

And it's not entirely clear going purely for happiness would wind up doing that as much as the built in mechanisms for striving and going after stuff.

You mentioned the course at Yale you teach.

So you teach the happiness course at Yale which is the most popular course there.

How did that get started?

And what can you learn from the fact that so many people signed up for it?

Yeah, well the origin of the class was, I taught psychology at Yale for over a decade but for most of that time I was kind of like a professor at the front of the classroom kind of thing.

So I saw student life at college and at Yale but not super closely.

And then I took on this new role where I became a head of college on campus.

So, Yale's one of these funny schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's like these like schools within a school or these like dorms have different names and communities and things.

I'm head of Silliman College.

And that means I live on campus with over 400 students who are part of my college, part of my community.

And in that, I mean the role was amazing, right?

You get to create this community for all these intelligent, amazing, talented students.

But it allowed me to see their life up close and personal.

And I really wasn't expecting the level of mental health dysfunction I was seeing, right?

With so many students reporting, feeling depressed and anxious, cases of suicidality and stuff.

First I was like, wow, is this Yale?

Is this something about the Ivy League?

But no, when you look at the national statistics, like we are dealing with an enormous mental health crisis among our young people.

Like national statistics report that now nowadays over 40 % of college students report being too depressed to function most days.

Over 60 % say that they're overwhelmingly anxious.

Another over 60 % report feeling lonely, extremely lonely most of the time.

Over 80 % say that they're overwhelmed most days by all that they have to do.

And more than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide at least once in the last year, right?

Like these are national statistics.

And, you know, as I started realizing this, I was like, wow, like we as universities are kind of failing in our mission, right?

Like these students aren't learning, you know, the Canterbury Tales or like, I don't know, computer science compiler program.

Like all this stuff we think we're teaching them, like they're just not encoding it if 40 % of them are too depressed to function most days.

And they're so anxious that they can barely get to class.

And so, you know, I kind of both in an attempt to kind of do something for this community that I really grew to care about, but also like, you know, fulfill Yale's educational mission to really get students to learn.

I thought, wow, we gotta find ways to give students some of these strategies.

And so it was really at that point that I sort of retrained in this field of positive psychology and behavior change to try to think, okay, what strategies does my field really have about how we can do, how we can give our students better strategies and what we as individuals can do a little bit better.

And so I kind of put together the class, you know, it was a new class on campus.

I thought, you know, 30 or so students would take it, which would be typical for like a new social science class.

I was a little surprised when we broke the registration forms.

So normally the registration forms at Yale go up to a hundred students, which is kind of a large class on campus, but they actually had to change the axis on mine because we had over a thousand students shopping in a class.

So they took like bump the whole mechanism up by like an order of magnitude.

And in the end, the only room that we could fit the class on campus was in the concert hall.

And so over a thousand students enrolled the first time it was taught.

And you know, you ask, what did that tell me?

I mean, it tells me students are voting with their feet.

They don't like this culture feeling stressed and anxious.

Like they realize that this is toxic and that this is like not sustainable.

And I think, you know, they really wanted some evidence -based strategies to deal with this, which I think is cool, you know, the students today, they really respond to this more scientific approach.

They don't want a bunch of platitudes about how they should live their life.

They're like, okay, what does the science say?

How can I implement these evidence -based tips?

And that was really cool.

I wanna dive into that in a second, but which house is Slytherin?

We joke, you know, cause Slytherin sounds a lot like Slytherin, but I think Slytherin is Jonathan Edwards, which is a different residential college than mine.

And with the kids and with adults, maybe, but I mean, you're getting hands -on experience with the kids.

Are you seeing a notable difference during COVID as well as we come sort of like out of COVID and how that's affecting people?

What are you seeing?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think college students were at the breaking point when I first taught this class in 2018.

All those statistics I was telling you were before COVID, you know, and many of them have just gotten worse.

Like, you know, this pandemic is a sweet spot of destroying our social connection, you know, flinging us into a period of extreme anxiety, you know, a breaking of all of our rituals and routines.

And it's just uncertain.

We have no idea when it's gonna end.

We keep being like, all right, we're out of it, but are we really?

And, you know, that's tough.

And that's happening to our young people at a time when, you know, those important rituals that you'll never get back again are happening at a clip, right?

You know, there's prom, there's first year formal, there's like, you know, like your sophomore dance or whatever.

And in many cases where students were missing out on a lot of these, at least during the depths of the pandemic.

And, you know, that's tough.

These are things they're never gonna get back again.

I think also these for our students are really formative years of practice socializing, right?

You know, we now at Yale are realizing that our first year students are coming in and the class of 2026, which will be our next college class that's coming in, you know, it was around their sophomore year that they got booted from school during COVID.

And many of them haven't really even had a full semester back in class, you know?

Like imagine what you'd be like in college if you'd made it through your freshman year and then like a booted sophomore year, right?

Like so many formative experiences they've just missed.

And I don't even mean academic formative experiences.

I mean, you know, the normal stuff that you learn going to high school and kind of having those social experiences.

I think we haven't really seen, you know, the full cost of this pandemic yet.

All that said, I think there were a few funny parts of the pandemic that wound up being better for my students' mental health than I expected.

And this was particularly true during their first year back on campus.

So the way Yale did it in 2020 is that we had students back on campus, but they were taking a lot of their classes on Zoom.

A lot of like athletics were canceled.

A lot of extracurriculars were canceled.

They were kind of doing classes, but that's it.

And I was so worried about how this was gonna go.

But two interesting things happened.

One, just not having as much stuff to do wound up making students feel less FOMO, less anxious, less time famished.

You know, students would tell me, it feels weird this semester I finally have time to like read a novel or like read a book or just like have some bandwidth, which was kind of interesting.

The other thing we saw was that in part because, you know, students were kind of in lockdown together.

They really did have this shared social experience.

I think being on things like Zoom classes all the time made the in -person time they did have much more precious.

And so, you know, after a day of Zoom classes, students didn't wanna like hop on a bunch of video games and look at screens and do nothing.

Yeah. Excuse me. Or just like, you know, spend time, just like, you know, listening to music by themselves.

I think students came to crave this social connection more.

And so it meant that they naturally like craved and built in more in real life social connection time.

And so, you know, even in the depths of the pandemic, I think that there were these moments where we saw like, huh, these interesting things emerge, like these strategies came out that might help us live a little bit better, which is kind of ironic, right?

Because I think Yale doesn't wanna say, well, let's cancel all activities, and all athletics and all parties, because that will make our students happier.

We don't think that, but I think we got a glimpse of, you know, overloading our students with too many choices and too many things.

That might not be the best strategy either, right?

And so, yeah. So I think that the pandemic has been this difficult, tough time, but it's given us these little glimmers of things to pay attention to, you know, to make the way we run our daily lives a little bit better.

Two other rabbit holes.

I sort of wanna go down there based on what you said.

You mentioned rituals and routines.

Can you expand on the importance of that when it comes to happiness?

Yeah, there's just lots of evidence that, I mean, obviously we're just like creatures of habit, right?

You know, we do certain things, but habits really help our minds compartmentalize stuff, right?

You know, you're at your home with your kids in the morning eating breakfast, and then, you know, back pre -COVID, everyone, you know, hopped on the subway, drove in their car to work, and then you show up at work, you see different people, you sit in a different spot.

It kinda allows you to compartmentalize the, you know, the identity you have as a parent, as a family member, as a spouse, and the identity you have at work.

When you're doing work from your kitchen table and your kids are sitting next to you trying to do school, that can feel really jumbled, right?

There's no division anymore between these things.

And that's bad for two reasons.

One is that, you know, we need those divisions to keep these things separate.

We kind of feel a little bit more cognitively overwhelmed when we're like juggling all these things at once.

And a lot of us lost that.

But the second thing is that rituals are really powerful ways of kind of connecting with other people and like putting our mind in the right mindset.

Lots of lovely work from the psychologist, Mike Norton, and his colleague, Francesca Gino, about the power of using rituals, for example, to reduce anxiety.

You know, something as simple as like, you know, you take the commute to work, can get you to work and feel like you're ready to go.

Whereas when you just like log on on Zoom, you kind of don't have that in the same way.

Rituals are wonderful things when you do them together for, you know, creating social connection and things like that.

You know, even the like teamwork meeting where you all sit at the, you know, counter together and get coffee, like it doesn't have to be a ritual qua, like a wedding ritual.

Like it can be these tiny things that allow us to feel a little bit more bonded with the people around us.

And I feel like both the big versions of that, you know, the graduations and the funerals and the weddings, like, and the tiny versions of that.

The like, you know, on Tuesdays we used to walk to Starbucks together or whatever.

A lot of that fell by the wayside in the pandemic.

And that's a hit on our wellbeing.

One that's often invisible, but one that I think we feel the psychological toll of.

Is there an element of community in that and feeling like, I feel like we have this psychological need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves and whether it's a sports team or, you know, it's even sharing a connection with a friend and that's become harder in some ways during COVID.

I mean, if I, you know, when I list out tips for how to feel happier, often the first one is improve your social connection.

Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social.

They prioritize time with their friends and family members, but they're also just like around other people more often.

Like they, and we forget that, right?

I think our instinct is like, oh, you know, I'll hang out with other people when I'm feeling social or I'm in a better mood, you know, when I'm kind of feeling in a bad mood, I wanna plop down privately and like watch Netflix or something.

But there's so many studies showing that if you intervene and force people to be a little bit more social, they wind up feeling happier, even with strangers.

There's some lovely work by Nick Epley and his colleagues showing that if you force somebody to talk to a stranger on the train on their commute to work, for example, they wind up in a happier mood.

They predict it's gonna suck.

Like they predict it's gonna be awkward and I don't really wanna talk to somebody.

I'm gonna feel anxious because I didn't get as much work done, but in practice, it just puts you in a better mood that sets you up for the day.

And I feel like all those little tiny weak ties, social connections, we had, you know, the accidental talk with somebody on a train, even if you don't really strike up a conversation, you probably smile at people or, you know, say hi to the person when you're turning the ticket in, you know, talking

to the barista at the coffee shop, you know, the chit chat that you get in office on the way to the elevator, wherever you're going, all those little moments got taken away at the height of the pandemic.

And for many of us got taken away when we're still working from home.

And I think we, again, these are invisible little like hits on our wellbeing that we don't often see, but yeah, social connection is a big one.

And when you add to that, the reduction of these rituals, you know, that makes it even worse over time.

How do you think about the role of religion and happiness then?

Because it strikes me as you're talking that religion had a ritual around most of these things, right, you would go to church every Sunday, you would see people, you would connect with them, you'd see different people than you, you would get a different perspective on life.

Talk to me about that.

Yeah, well, there's lots of work that specifically looked at religion and happiness.

And overall what that work finds is that religious individuals tend to be happier on average.

But you could imagine that's for two reasons.

One is that, you know, many religions come with a whole host of, you know, spiritual beliefs about, you know, the afterlife, about, you know, a God and whether there's someone taking care of you, you know, power bigger than you and so on.

These religions also involve the thing that I think you're getting at, which is all these rituals, right?

Like they force you to be a little bit more social.

You like hang out with everybody on Sunday or in the Sabbath or something like that.

Often they involve doing nice things for other people and being present and prayer and so on.

And so when scientists really try to dig into that, which is tricky, you have to separate, you know, people who are very religious, you know, then they have really strong beliefs, but then don't go to services as much and so on versus people who are kind of like, you know, I say I'm Catholic, but I'm

kind of agnostic, but like, you know, I go every Sunday and I go to the spaghetti suppers and so on.

When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors.

So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in altruistic acts, it seems like it's actually religious behaviors that are making us happy, not religious beliefs.

What does that mean?

That means that, you know, any kind of cultural institution that gets us to do the stuff we were just talking about that makes you happier, you know, social connection, doing nice things for others, being a little bit more present.

We haven't talked about that yet, but things like prayer and meditation are, you know, great mechanisms for being in the present moment.

Any institution that gets you to do that is probably gonna make you happier.

It's awesome to do that in the context of like religious institutions, because like, man, those are like set up with a whole belief structure around why you have to do that stuff.

You know, often they're like thousands of years old.

I'm forgetting that quote from Big Lebowski, but it's like, you know, like Walter says, you know, like, you know, thousands of years of tradition from Moses to Stanley Kovacs kind of thing about the Jewish faith.

And I think, you know, it's the same thing about so many religions.

It's not just like some ritual I made up and I'm trying to get my family to do.

It's, you know, one that's thousands of years old and has a lot of tradition behind it.

And so, yeah, these are powerful institutions for helping us put into practice these kinds of behaviors that will improve happiness.

But it's worth noting that it doesn't have to be just religion.

The Divinity scholar Casper Turcile has been studying, you know, other kinds of institutions that are starting to do that.

I'm thinking of things like, you know, you're a cross fit group, right?

You know, there's really intense cross fit group that you meet with every week.

And if somebody gets sick or gets, you know, breast cancer or something, they, you know, do all these events for, you're present with them in a different way.

You feel like you have this holistic identity.

You know, it turns out that does a lot of the same work, right?

So you need something with like sticking power and religions have special sticking power in part because they shape our identities and our belief systems.

But if you can find other things that work, that can work too.

You don't necessarily, the benefits don't seem to come from the beliefs as much from the behaviors.

I like how you distinguish between the behaviors and the beliefs and the sounds like the organization then of religion is just a way to get the behaviors.

And it comes with a set of beliefs, but you don't need the set of beliefs in order to acquire the behaviors, but it does seem to help because it's this cohesive package all in one, yeah.

Yeah. And I think, you know, and of course we know there's a lot about having shared beliefs with other people that, you know, allows you to feel a closer identity with them and so on.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we were talking earlier about kind of natural selection shaping our intuitions.

I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that shaped these cultural institutions.

And I think there's a reason the institutions we have are thousands of years old.

They've kind of beat out other sorts of practices cause they're at this sweet spot of bringing together lots of mechanisms that help us change our behavior in ways that might promote at least a sense of shared identity and in many ways an improved wellbeing.

And it's worth noting that a lot of those institutions are kind of, you know, not going away, but I think we're becoming much more individualized, much more secular.

These kinds of cultural institutions don't often have the same force that they did, you know, many hundreds or thousands of years ago.

And I think that's telling for the kind of increased rates we're seeing of mental health issues.

And speaking of behaviors that people engage in, I mean, everybody thinks that social media is sort of good for us in some ways, and we all engage in this at one point or another.

And yet it seems like it's having a negative effect, especially on kids.

I mean, maybe you can talk just broadly about the effect of social media on adults, specifically what you're seeing when it relates to university -aged kids, and then how we can think about this as participants in this world where maybe we're not opting out, but how do we put guardrails around it?

Yeah, I mean, social media is an interesting one because ultimately it's like a tool, right?

It's a technological tool that we could use in all kinds of ways.

And you could imagine a world where we use this tool for all the stuff that could promote happiness, right?

Like I could use Facebook Live to connect with my family members and really have social connection with people that might be tricky without that technological tool to connect with.

I could use Instagram to be really present with my food and mindfully notice it and really be there.

I could participate in charity appeals that are happening on these sites and things.

I could use them to set better reference points.

So I saw what people in Ukraine are going through or really kind of figured out the privileges I had and looked at reference points that made me feel good.

In theory, we could do all of that.

In practice, we basically do none of it.

Like in practice, these tools are often used oddly, even though they're called social media to reduce social connection in real life.

You know, if you think about the study that we mentioned about Nick Upply with people chatting on the train, like why don't people talk to other people on their commute?

It's because their head is stuffed in a piece of technology, maybe not on social media, but they're in their email or they're just looking at something, right?

And it's a way that you're not connecting in real life because you have these other tools.

It's really not great for reference points.

And I think this is one of the factors that people find when you're looking both at adult and teen effects, like the effects of social media on adult wellbeing and teen wellbeing, is that the more you're susceptible to social comparison, you know, the more being on social media winds up negatively affecting

your wellbeing. You know, we just see the vacation photos and the bikini shots and the nice stuff that's happening to other people.

And even though it's well -intentioned, it can kind of make us feel crappy.

You know, this is the week for academics when all our PhD students are finding out about certain fellowships, whether you've got like a National Science Foundation award or so on, and my entire Twitter feed is, "'Congrats to my students so -and -so "'who got a National Science Foundation award.'" And

that's great, it's nice to celebrate that, but I know there's probably, you know, the 80 % of other graduate students in the world who didn't get that social media award or are looking at that tweet and feeling like crap this morning, you know?

And we can't help it, right?

You can't look at these reference points and not feel that.

And so we get a lot of that, but then there's these just subtle things that I think social media is doing, right?

You know, how many times do I pull out my phone when I'm walking down the street and could be paying attention to, you know, the daffodils that are popping out this week cause you and I are having this conversation in the midst of spring or the other people who might be smiling at me.

You know, how often does my phone, you know, just sitting close by my bedside cause it's my alarm clock and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm tempted to look at it, and that's a hit on my sleep.

You know, one of the physical processes that we know are necessary, critical for wellbeing.

Lots of evidence that you see sleep disturbances in 13 year olds, 15 year olds, in part because they are looking at their phones.

And so, you know, I think we could be using these technological tools for lots of good, but they're doing lots of bad.

And then the question is, all right, like how do we, you know, you, as you mentioned, we're willing participants in this, right?

Like this is us giving away, you know, our behaviors that are like not making us feel good.

How can we do a little bit better?

And one of my favorite pieces of advice that I share with my students comes from the journalist, Katherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues you don't have to break up with your phone, but you have to like take it to couples counseling, basically,

like renegotiate the relationship.

And she has this lovely acronym that she uses called WWW, which stands for What For, Why Now, and What Else.

And so she argues like whenever you find yourself on your phone, because again, sometimes it's social media, but you know, for me, sometimes it's email, or like looking at my text thread, or looking at something else that's doing all those same things that's stealing my attention, preventing me from connecting

with people in real life and so on.

And so, you know, you find yourself with your phone in your hand, think WWW, what for?

What did I pick up this phone for?

Was there a purpose?

You know, I was checking the weather, I had a specific text that I was looking at.

Or again, just like wind up, you know, like am I just down some rabbit hole of some stuff I was looking at my phone, that's different.

Why now, right? Like, what was the trigger?

Maybe again, there was like some specific goal, or maybe I was feeling anxious, or I was feeling bored, or it's just become this habit that I, you know, I pull it out when I'm walking, right?

Like, you know, why are you really on there now?

And then the critical question is like, what else?

That's the sort of opportunity cost question.

It's like, what are you missing out on being on your phone?

Maybe it's noticing the daffodils, maybe it's talking to your spouse at dinner, right?

Maybe, you know, it could be a million different things, but like when you mindfully and intentionally pay attention, what else could you be doing?

And she argues that a strategy like that might help us because it's not like these technologies are awful.

Again, they could be used for all kinds of useful stuff.

And even kind of hardcore folks who've done the experiment to get rid of their smartphones, you know, you often find that you come back to them.

Nick Epley, who's the researcher, who does all the lovely work about talking to people on trains was feeling like his smartphone was making him do that less.

So he got rid of it.

He got a stupid phone, paid a lot of money to get a stupid phone because nowadays it's like really hard to get like a stupid phone.

And what he found was like, he had to get rid of it.

You know, not because of the social media, but because like, you know, he needed it to like call Uber or a Lyft or like, you know, he needed like to look at the map, you know, when he was traveling for conferences and things.

Like there are things that these devices are doing that are really helpful for us that I don't want to go back on.

But we need some way to renegotiate the relationship and trying to mindfully notice what your patterns are and then, you know, changing them if they're not good can be a strategy towards using these devices, but in a way that's a little bit more intentional.

How much of our happiness is directed by where we place our attention?

I mean, so, so much, you know, one of the full lectures I give in my class is on what I call attentional hygiene, which is, you know, making sure you're paying attention to how your attention is being allocated.

There's some really stupid features of human attention, which is like, we kind of can't control where it's deployed, right?

You know, if someone screams fire in a crowded theater, your attention is going to get deployed whether you want to or not.

But the same thing is true.

If you're, you know, if you see, you know, great vacation shots on Instagram, your attention is just going to get deployed to like how crappy your life is.

You know, if there's banging and things, like your attention is going to get deployed to that, you know, if you get a notification or something, even if you're having a nice conversation with your spouse, right?

And so we put these devices in that are stealing our attention at kind of critical moments.

And that's bad enough when our attention should be on something that could be improving our wellbeing, like, you know, it's nice social conversation I'm having with my spouse or being present and paying attention to the daffodils, or just kind of feeling like, you know, you had some time, like, sometimes

these notifications just break up our time in a way that can make us feel, you know, a little bit more time famished, a little bit more, like we just kind of don't have any free time to be present, you know, we like, again, we willingly do that, right?

Like we could shut off the notifications, but we kind of don't.

But part of happiness really is about being present.

You know, there's so much evidence that when we're mind wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy.

It's one of the reasons that techniques like meditation, which are primarily techniques for, you know, intentionally paying attention to the present moment, often with a certain kind of attitude, like a non -judgment kind of attitude.

Those kinds of practices make us happier, in part, because the non -judgment, but in part just because like, we're there, we're present, we're paying attention to life, and just the act of paying attention, even if it doesn't feel good, like even if you're kind of paying attention to something boring,

like, that presence can wind up improving our wellbeing over time.

So finding ways to control the things that are stealing our attention and preventing us from being present can be really good ways to boost our happiness overall.

And how do we measure happiness?

Like, how do we even come to some sort of quantitative approach to this?

Yeah, I mean, I wish there was better ways to measure, you know, as a scientist, I wish there was like a little like happiness thermometer that I could put in your mouth.

I was like, doo doo doo, like you're 80, you know, 80 .1 happy or something.

We don't have that.

And we don't have that for good reason, which is, you know, happiness is subjective, right?

Like the best person to tell me whether or not you're happy is you.

And so the way psychologists often measure it is that we just ask people, which sounds not very scientific.

It sounds, when you, would you tell people a lot of this work is based on self -reports.

I think they think those self -reports are like some crap like, you know, quiz that you'd get like on BuzzFeed or something.

And, you know, you can have self -report scales that are true scientific instruments that have been really well validated.

We know that they're measuring something that is like a true construct in the world.

We know that these self -report measures correlate with things like, if I were to do like a detailed hormonal analysis or, you know, like detailed interviews with your friends and family members, or, you know, certain physiological markers, like we know those things correlate.

But, you know, the best way to ask you, you know, hey, are you satisfied with your life?

Scale one to 10 is I ask you and you tell me.

You know, the best way to get at are you happy in your life is to ask you, you know, hey, have you experienced these positive emotions in the last week?

And you tell me. And, you know, again, on the one hand, it feels not scientific, but it sort of is.

And it's probably the thing I want to maximize, right?

When we're doing all these interventions to try to improve your happiness.

If I do these interventions and your hormones change, but you're like, I'm not any more satisfied with my life.

You know, I've probably failed, right?

But if I do these interventions and you tell me, hey, I'm experiencing more joy in my life and I feel like my life is more meaningful, then like, check, we've sort of succeeded with our interventions.

What's the relationship between long -term, you mentioned sort of maximizing happiness.

What's the relationship between long -term happiness and short -term happiness?

And how should we think about that when it comes to maximizing happiness?

Yeah, I mean, I think that this question comes up a lot, especially in my, you know, very type A Yale students, who I feel like are often thinking that they're like, you know, studying and killing themselves now and not sleeping.

Cause eventually, you know, they'll be happily, they'll get this job that'll make them happily ever after.

They'll get into medical school and so on.

And so I bring up that example as like an extreme case, because I think we often think there's this conflict between happy now and happy in the future.

Like, well, we should sacrifice now to like be happy later.

Or, you know, oh, if we invest in the stuff that's fun now, we'll, you know, screw up our lives and we'll never get the accolades we want.

But I think a lot of that sense that, you know, these things are in competition really comes from these misconceptions we have.

Like, you know, yeah, you might not get the perfect accolade in the future if you don't devote time now, but, you know, but that's cause you're wrong about how much that accolade in the future is going to make you happy.

If you look at the kinds of practices we're talking about that really work, social connection, doing nice things for others, being present, there's not a, you know, there's not this much of a like fight between, well, do I want to do that now?

What's the consequences going to have for in the future?

If you invest in those things now, they'll feel good in the moment and they'll feel pretty good in the future too.

And so it's not to say that there's not, you know, our present selves versus our future selves and then there's no kind of trade -offs there, there always will be, but a lot of the stuff that really works for maximizing happiness, it's not a like, well, do I get the benefit now or later?

They kind of benefit both.

And so it's a way to sort of overcome the typical thing we think of with happiness, which is like, well, you know, whose happiness am I investing in?

If you do it right, you often, you know, can overcome that kind of trade -off in ways we don't predict.

And are there cultural differences in terms of what makes us happy?

We're going to dive into the evidence -based approaches here in a second, but I'm wondering how much of what we know about happiness is Western versus Eastern and how much of it correlates across all cultures?

Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, many of these studies are done in Western populations.

You know, the psychologist Joe Heinrich often talks about how psychology has a weird problem.

And he uses the acronym WEIRD for Western -educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

Most subjects in every published psychology study are Western -educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

Like, and they kind of come from those things and that leaves out a whole host of different populations with different kinds of identities and backgrounds.

So that is true of the work that we talk about.

That said, you know, for a lot of the practices I'm mentioning, when you look cross -culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere you go.

You know, take the case of pro -social behavior, doing nice things for others, which is one that I think has been best studied worldwide.

Lara Akhnin has done some fantastic work on this stuff.

Well, she looks at the correlation, for example, between volunteering or donating money and happiness worldwide.

And she's able to do that because you have some nice, you know, big gallop surveys that look at these kinds of things.

And she finds this pretty much true in, like, every single country you study, right?

Like, the idea is it's probably a cultural universal.

And my guess is for most of these things, we're talking about cultural universals.

And that's in part because of the data we have, but in part because, you know, again, if you look to, like, religious traditions and what they're telling us to prioritize, like, you know, these people were on top of this stuff, you know, like Buddhists, you know, who lived in, you know, different countries

with, like, different kind of attitudes towards collectivism and so on.

Thousands of years ago, they were like, hey, be present, stop your craving, you know, focus on others.

Like, these are kind of edicts that are coming down that have been true across countries, across time and so on.

And so while I wish we had better data, as an empirical scientist, I always wish we had better data that weren't mostly focused on, you know, Western subjects.

Like, often when we look, you see surprising consistency.

And if I had to guess not having the data in front of me, my guess is that a lot of the specific things we've been talking about are universal.

How they play out and the nuances of how they play out across countries are gonna look different.

But at their core, you know, being social, being nice to others, being present, you know, moving your body in appropriate ways, like, you know, nonjudgmentally interacting with your negative emotions, my guess is that those are gonna work wherever you grew up.

And it's interesting as you say that, what stands out to me is they also probably, not only do they stand in the test of time and they cross cultures, but they probably are the same no matter what age we are too.

There's some lovely, especially actually, Laura Acton whose work I just mentioned, she in collaboration with Kylie Hemlin and Liz Dunn and others have done these developmental studies of little kids who, you know, you might think of as like, pure selfish beings, like, or pure hedonists.

And what you find is like, they wind up happier if they're doing nice things for others.

They wind up happier if they donate some of their goldfish crackers to some other kid, right?

And so these kinds of practices that we're talking about in adults are probably not just kind of universal in terms of like, across all people everywhere.

But my guess is universal in terms of age, you know, these are, you know, time -worn strategies, but time -worn, even you know, across human development and things too.

And I think that's one of the reasons that, you know, lots of historic patterns that we've seen in happiness across ages are changing a little bit, right?

You know, it used to be the case that, you know, older individuals wind up being the happiest, something we don't expect, but something that's, you know, good to look forward to as you get older, right?

And then there's not a lot of fantastic things to look forward to as you get super old.

But one is that like overall your wellbeing tends to go up, not down.

Elderly individuals tend to be happier, but a little bit less so recently.

And I think that's in part because loneliness is up in those populations.

You know, same with my college students, you know, I think college, you know, when I was there in the nineties used to be a time when people, you know, were really social, felt like they had a lot of friendships, you know, but these days again, as I was saying, around two thirds of college students

report being very lonely most of the time.

And so I think there were these historic age -related patterns that were related to wellbeing, but those patterns weren't just like, oh, you're just happier when you're older.

You tend to do the stuff that promotes happiness more when you're older, it's either easier to or more culturally accepted to or it kind of happens more naturally.

But as those behaviors change across ages, you're seeing corresponding hits that come to wellbeing and flourishing too.

What's your gut tell you about why we're feeling more lonely now than before?

I think again, it's lots of things.

I think the technology really is a hit on this stuff.

I mean, I noticed this myself, you know, I teach this stuff and I try to be really careful about this stuff, but there are definitely opportunities that I've lost out on for in real life social connection because of my phone, right?

You know, I'm embarrassed about the number of times I'm like, huh, and my husband was talking to me about something and I was looking at something on my phone, but it wasn't like some important, like, you know, do or die email, it was probably like the weather or like, you know, I don't know, I was looking

at real estate prices, this is like some stupid incredible thing.

Katherine Price has this harrowing story that she told on my podcast, the woman who wrote this, How to Break Up With Your Phone book, about she had just had a new baby and she was nursing and she realized that she was nursing that her baby was looking up at her into her eyes and she wasn't making eye

contact because she was looking at her phone to buy new doorknobs.

She was like, I need new doorknobs, I'm doing this kitchen renovation.

And she was like, oh my God, this, you know, like millions of years old evolutionary moment of a parent looking at a nursing baby and I'm not even present there because like I'm looking at frigging doorknobs, you know?

And I think we've all had these moments.

And so, you know, I think we really need to pay more attention to our technologies, but also not beat ourselves up.

I mean, one thing that you realize if you start taking attention seriously is like, it makes sense that we're drawn to our phones rather than the people in real life.

Liz Dunn, who's a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who studies a lot of the social effects of technology use.

She has some really scary data.

She does these studies where she has people sit in a waiting room as though you're waiting for the study, but really the waiting room is the study.

And she has you either have access to your phones or not.

And she measures really simple things like how much you smile at the other people who are sitting in the waiting room.

Not even how much you talk, but just how much you like have the basic human social interactions like smiling at other people.

And she finds things like we smile 30 % less when we have our phone near us, even if you're not using your phone, right?

And, you know, all of these teeny tiny basic social interactions are going away.

But she points out like, it makes sense, right?

You know, even if my phone is off on my desk, my brain is not stupid.

My brain knows that on the other side of that phone is my entire inbox for the last 15 years.

And, you know, every weather statistic and music and podcasts and, you know, porn and cat videos.

Like, we know that on the other side of our phone is like all this interesting stuff.

And she likened it on my podcast, you know, like imagine, you know, in going out to dinner with my husband and instead of bringing my phone, I bring this big wheelbarrow full of interesting stuff.

And it's got like DVDs and a TV of every movie out there, every music video, it's got photo albums that have printed out my photos for the last 10 years.

It's got like, you know, printed binders of all my emails and like, you know, like videos of porn, like anything.

If that wheelbarrow was there, you would not pay attention to the conversation.

You would be like, oh, honey, let's like look at the pictures from our wedding that are like, and she's like, your brain's not stupid.

Your brain knows that that full wheelbarrow and way, way more is on the other side of your phone.

So like, you know, I have a very interesting husband.

He's a philosopher, you know, we've lots of good conversations, but like if his conversation always as good as that complete wheelbarrow, like maybe not, you know?

And, you know, my brain's not stupid.

It's like constantly checking, right?

To go back to it. And so I think we've created these devices that have rewarding content that will always be more rewarding than in real life social interaction in the short term, in the little quick dopamine hits.

But ultimately that means we're missing out on in real life social connection that really is better.

And drives long -term happiness.

And really drives our long -term happiness, yeah.

Let's talk about the evidence of based approaches to feel better.

Yeah, I mean, I think one awesome thing about the modern day is that, you know, I think we have all these intuitions about what makes us happy, but you know, with positive psychology and empirical psychology, we can test these.

You know, we can take not so happy people and make them engage in social connection or do nice things for others and measure whether happiness improves.

Happiness as measured by self -report on how your positive emotions feel after doing that or your sense of satisfaction with life and so on.

And when we do this, we find the things that make us happy are pretty straightforward, right?

We want to increase our social connection.

We're happier when we do nice things for others.

We're happier when we are focused on our healthier habits, like things like improving our sleep and getting more exercise.

We can really see the effects of this stuff and often quite profound effects.

One of my favorite most profound effects is the effect of taking a little time for gratitude.

You know, the simple act of counting your blessings.

There's evidence that in as little as two weeks, the simple act of writing three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can improve your wellbeing.

Like significantly improve your wellbeing.

There's also evidence that expressing gratitude to other people, like writing a detailed thank you note to someone that you've always wanted to thank but never got a chance to.

The act of doing that, at least in Marty Seligman and others' data can improve your wellbeing not just significantly immediately but can give you an improved wellbeing effect that lasts for over a month, right?

Which is crazy, you know?

I find it's like, you know, there's like this pill that you can take that will improve your wellbeing significantly for over a month.

Once you take one pill and months later you're feeling good, you'd be like, man, I'm gonna do that.

Like the simple act of writing a thank you letter can do that.

And so I think we need the evidence because the evidence is sometimes shocking.

Even for me that knows it, I'm like, I would not have predicted that.

Like, but then when you see it, I think you can say, all right, I'll commit to that.

And I think this is one of the powers of doing this class with my students is like, I show them the graphs.

I'm like, do you wanna be here on the graph or here?

Like if you wanna be here, that's doing some thank you letters.

That's writing down things you're grateful for.

And I think when you see how much you can really improve, I think that's what gets people to commit and actually make the behavioral changes that take some work to really engage with this stuff.

How much of that is really changing our frame into our own life?

So it's not that we've actually changed anything.

It's we're changing where we place our attention.

And by doing that, we're giving ourselves more perspective in terms of the world.

And I say this coming out this, when I catch myself having a bad day and beating myself up, I always try to remind myself that there are like 7 billion people in the world that would instantly change all, like trade all of their problems for all of my problems.

And that phrasing and just that way of thinking about it tends to get me into a broader perspective and then gets me seeing things a lot differently.

Yeah, I think there's so much that we can change by changing our mindset, by changing our attitude, by changing the things we attend to.

You're talking about resetting your reference points, right?

Like your reference point could be like, there's millions of other people that would be so happy with this, right?

Another change that's related to that is a technique that we know from positive psychology but it's also an ancient one.

It's one that the ancient Stoics talked about a lot which is what's called negative visualization.

So the Stoics thought that you should start everyday visualizing just for a second that everything you thought was great in life is gone.

So they said, you should wake up and be like, my spouse left me, I've lost my job, I'm lame in my legs, like I'm about to be ostracized, I don't have my community anymore.

You do that for five minutes, you're like, but that's not true, it didn't happen.

It's kind of like it's a wonderful life and you run the movie really fast in your head.

And the idea is like, just by feeling what it might feel like to have something negative happen, it resets your reference point.

It also kind of like stops your hedonic adaptation for a second where you're like, oh my gosh, there are good things about having my spouse and so on.

One technique I use which always freaks out my audiences when I'm giving a talk about hedonic adaptation and negative visualization is I have people say, if you're a parent, imagine like the last time you talk to your kid, that's the last time you're ever gonna talk to them.

Like we don't have to figure out what terrible thing's gonna happen, but they're gone, it's done, right?

Instantly, you get this sense of like the next time you see your kid, you're gonna hug them a little bit closer, right?

And all it took was like a two second negative visualization about what if they weren't here, right?

We have the capacity to really appreciate this stuff, but we need to bring our attention to what matters and why these things are great in our lives.

And that takes a little bit of work, but it's really possible we can have a richer life and savor things a lot more by changing our reference points.

Let's talk about kids for a second.

Can we adjust our kids sort of like baseline level of happiness based on our own modeling of behavior or is it all sort of genetic and is there a magic window where we can influence their happiness set point sort of easier?

Yeah, I mean, so when you look at happiness in genetics, you kinda get two kinds of messages.

One is that there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable.

So some of the variants we see in the population about happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right?

However, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny.

Even the heritability of happiness is lower than you might expect.

Estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around 40%, 30%, it's not that all the variance and the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't, that's just simply not the case.

And that means that there's a lot of room for the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold.

And usually when I meet an environment, I hear like you and your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness.

And so that's the story about happiness in genetics.

And I think, as a parent, as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on.

I focused on college students, I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and learned about these evidence -based approaches much earlier.

And so we, with my team here at Yale, we're sort of trying to think about ways that we can get these strategies out to younger and younger kids.

But I think there are lots of ways that parents can promote this stuff.

I think parents do a great job of worrying about whether kids are getting good grades and being academically successful.

I think we really need to think about conveying some of these skills for boosting happiness over time too.

Do you see any parenting techniques or approaches that perhaps are well -intentioned, but over time lead to discontent or unhappiness in children?

I see lots of parenting habits that I wish I could switch around in part because I see the effects that they have once students are at college.

You know, I think we've seen, especially just over the last 10 years, a lot of changes in how much parents intervene and help their kids.

You know, there's been a lot of talk of obviously like helicopter parenting and so on.

Now it's often said that we're in the domain of what's called lawnmower parents or steamroller parents.

It's not like you're swooping in to help your kid, which is the helicopter model.

It's like you're mowing the lawn or flattening the path completely.

So there's like no bumps or you know, little things for kids to navigate, kind of doing that preemptively.

And I think it's incredibly well -intentioned, right?

Like no one wants your kids to go through anything hard.

I think there's a real sense that the stakes are high.

Like, you know, you want your kid to like learn, but there's also like performance and you want them, you know, you want your kids to learn and to take their bumps, but you don't want them to do that on the SAT because that's going to like really matter whether they get into college.

But I think more and more like everything feels like the SAT.

There's no point where it kind of is okay for them to like screw up and learn.

And that's really problematic because we know a couple of things about how kids learn.

One is that like, you got to fail to learn.

And in addition, you got to fail to develop anxiety that you can do.

You got to fail in order not to develop the sort of anxiety that whatever task you're doing is going to be impossible for you.

And what I worry about a lot is that parents who kind of in this very well -intentioned way try to solve problems for kids, take away the opportunity that kids get from solving those problems themselves.

And that might not seem bad, except that that there's lots of evidence that that contributes to kids beliefs about whether they can solve those problems themselves.

My colleague here at Yale, Julia Leonard studies the way that kids develop beliefs about their own competence.

And she does this in like really little kids like so think toddlers.

And her task works something like this.

So she brings a toddler in, she gives them a tough puzzle to figure out.

And she either has parents, you know, try to help by, you know, giving some sort of strategies of like, hey, what color is this?

Like a kind of teaching thing where you're not solving it for them, and you're not giving like, hey, I'm going to give you a hint.

You're just like, hey, you know, let me like just let you pay attention to the right stuff versus the thing that parents tend to do, which is here's how you do it.

I'm just going to give you the solution or even worse, you know, and I get it, like you know, as a person who's like dealt frustrated with the kids before is like, let me just do that for you.

Like you don't know how to do it.

It's really hard. Like, let me just do it.

What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition where the parents give the answer give up much more quickly.

And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, they believe like they probably don't have the ability to do that stuff.

And it makes sense.

Like, you know, if a kid's like, well, my mom's taking over for me, this must be really hard.

This must be really scary, right?

You know, when my mom's getting anxious about my grades, that must mean that the grades matter really a lot, right?

And so I think what parents don't realize is that that, you know, quick solution of like, oh, I'm just gonna take care of it, either out of their own anxiety or out of a real, you know, idea that this is helping, it winds up ironically doing just the opposite.

It winds up kind of making kids feel like they themselves are less efficient and less capable than they could be.

And it winds up contributing to a lot of anxiety.

And in my experience as a college professor, I see this more and more among parents, more and more parents, you know, checking in, you know, my roommate's having a rooming conflict.

And I'm like, well, why are you talking to me?

You know, like, why aren't they, you know, you can give them some advice about handle it, but it's their rooming conflict.

Or, you know, parents calling professors about a student getting a bad grade.

And again, I think it's well -intentioned.

The goal is to help, but ultimately it's not achieving the goal that parents think they're achieving.

Well, in a way, you're not practicing sort of the muscles, the resilience muscles that you'll need later in life.

And you're not getting a chance to exercise them.

And then when something happens and you're called upon to use them, you just don't have them.

I mean, I think that's right.

And I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right?

Is that they've never had a chance to mess up.

They've never had a chance to do it on their own.

And so when they finally have to do it, it seems really scary and they really have these beliefs that they're not capable.

The author and former Stanford team Julia Lithcott -Hames has whole books about helicopter parenting and she talks a lot about how today's teens are failure deprived.

Like they haven't had a chance to fail and this has these consequences.

Not just that like when they finally do fail, it's like really terrifying, but even to try something where they might fail feels way scarier than it would have if they'd had tinier failings along the way.

What else comes to mind when you think about sort of parenting techniques that are well intentioned but you're seeing in college kids that backfired?

Yeah, I think another one is, I think a lot of parents are worried about their kids' wellbeing.

And I think that that's good.

Obviously we want parents to care about how their kids are doing.

But it tends to be, in my experience, very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids.

When I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids' grades, I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are anxious about grades because you're embodying all of these kind of anxieties.

And so I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of emotional contagion.

That like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions.

If you're embodying calm and this is gonna be fine and everything's okay, then kids are gonna follow that.

If you're embodying your anxiety and like, oh my gosh, this is so important.

Kids aren't actually gonna catch that too.

And I think that that's tricky to remember.

I often get parents saying, oh, what can I do to make my child feel happier?

And I'm like, well, have you focused on your own happiness?

Like, how are you doing?

And it's like, well, no, no, no, I wanna focus on them.

And it's like, you gotta put your own oxygen mask on first, right?

Not just because they're paying attention to the strategies you're using.

They're paying attention to your priorities.

Those are implicitly getting transmitted, but literally your own emotions are getting transmitted.

And so I often say that if you're really worried about your kid's happiness, like do some work to focus on your own because if you're feeling less anxious, if you're feeling in a better zone, if you're expressing gratitude, all these things are gonna naturally come to your kids more easily too.

You mentioned the term emotional contagion.

I like that. How do we protect ourselves from unhappy people?

Whether they're sort of like that friend we sort of can't let go of or a coworker or the sort of miserable surly person that's in everybody's lives, family member or something.

What can we do to put a firewall between us and them almost?

Well, I think one thing is to recognize explicitly that they are having that effect.

I think we all know that implicitly when you interact with the one coworker who's like that surly person, and you leave that like, oh, and then you take the surliness out with you.

It's worth remembering though that emotional contagion is a two -way street that we have power to.

Just as that surly person is affecting us, if we walk into that meeting, expressing optimism, feeling good and so on, they're gonna catch that too.

And I think we forget that we concede the kinds of emotions that we wanna see.

That's true in our interpersonal interactions.

It's also true in our social media feeds.

Sometimes I feel like you hop on Instagram or Twitter and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, people complaining, people complaining.

And then you kind of catch that.

But it's worth remembering, you can see the opposite, right?

You can post something different.

And so taking control over yourself and your own emotions is a way to do that.

I think another strategy is making sure you notice what's happened in those interactions so that the emotions you caught don't automatically wind up affecting your behavior.

This is another kind of misconception I think we have.

This misconceived notion of how emotions work.

I think we think there's a situation, it triggers emotions and now we have those emotions and we will act on them.

Our coworker made us angry, so now we will inevitably slam the dishwasher around or doing things and be a little short with our kids.

It's just like, we have to.

But there is this idea that between feeling the emotion and acting on it, there's a whole host of strategies we can use to regulate those emotions, notice them, but not act on them.

And I think this is important because when we look at the misery that's caused by our negative emotions, it's not often the situation that caused it.

It's like the extra bad steps that came with how we reacted to those emotions.

My favorite kind of way of thinking about this comes from a story from the ancient Buddhist tradition that's known as the Second Arrow.

And so the story is that Buddha is talking to his followers and he is telling his followers this parable and he says, hey, if you're walking down the street and you get someone shoots you with an arrow, does that feel bad?

And people are like, oh yeah, it's terrible to get shot with an arrow.

And Buddha says, okay, well, imagine you're walking down the street and you get shot with not just one arrow, but two arrows.

Is that second arrow worse?

And people say, yeah, it sucks even more to get shot with a second arrow.

So Buddha goes on to explain that we don't often get to control the first arrow, that's the situation that you walk in and it's the surly coworker or you get some bad health news or just something bad, like the world throws this at us, right?

That's the first arrow.

But he says, the second arrow is our reaction to those situations and that's under our control, right?

You know, that's if you like, you have this surly coworker and you don't like take time to do a couple breaths and then you take that home to your kids or you know, you react to the health news by like, you know, freaking out and making bad decisions.

And like, and what Buddha points out is like, we are responsible for the second arrow and sometimes we really make it worse.

And you know, Buddha doesn't say this, but I'd say like, you know, sometimes not just one second arrow, it's like an entire quiver of arrows that I'm like, you know, I had a bad day at work and then I, you know, like I'll, you know, have an extra too much glasses of wine and then I don't sleep, and then

I'm short with my husband and then it's like, boom, boom, boom, you know?

So we need to realize that those second arrows are on us, but also that we have strategies we can use to control those secondary emotions that come from it.

There really is things we can do to kind of control the things that we come up.

What are some of those things that we can do?

Because in that moment, what's happening is we're reacting and we're not reasoning, right?

So we're thinking, we're just in automatic mode.

And how can we get out of that automatic mode?

How can we put a clutch in or just to slow down and just to kind of change a gear?

How do we create that pause where we can move from reacting to reasoning?

Yeah, I mean, one is finding ways to be more present and allowing yourself to notice what those emotions are, right?

Like when you're in that meeting with a surly colleague, if you can develop these practices in mindfulness, you can be like, I'm watching my blood pressure rise, like that thing with my jaw is happening.

Like, this is a signal that I'm feeling pissed.

Like, okay, it's okay to be pissed, but then now I have strategies to kind of deal with that.

Another is to kind of watch your reactions and the kind of timing of things.

This is where I often catch it where it's like, I'll have some interaction with a coworker.

I'm really annoyed, but then like three hours later, I'm talking to my podcast producer and texting him about like, can you believe she, and he actually is, we know the second arrow stuff, so he'll text me back to arrow emojis.

And I know I'm like, it's four hours later, she has nothing to do with this, right?

This is me keeping this going.

And so a little bit of mindfulness can really go a long way here of like, because once you have this moment of noticing, you realize like, I don't have to be my thoughts, I don't have to be my emotions, right?

I can kind of, I can hit pause and I can react to this differently.

So back to that coworker just for a second, what role broadly speaking do boundaries play, if anything, in sort of our own internal happiness, whether it's boundaries from other people that we're setting and or boundaries from work or sort of like having a work home divide, how do you think about the role

of boundaries and happiness?

Yeah, I think boundaries are really important.

In some ways you could think of them based on the kinds of things we've talked about before as kind of control mechanisms that we use to deal with our attention, right?

Like if you know it's gonna like be a situation that causes you to feel anxious or pissy if you deal with a surly colleague, then like you can limit them out, you deal with a surly colleague, right?

Emotion regulation and finding ways to control your emotions are sometimes about you experience that emotion, you've gotta control it and regulate it in the moment.

But you can also be smart enough about like trying not to get yourself into that situation in the first place, which is often like emotion researchers call these things complicated things, but it's like situation selection, like don't select situations that are gonna put you in this horrible emotional

place. Like kind of give yourself a little gift so that your hot self is not kind of put in these awful situations in the first place.

And ultimately, I think boundary setting is a lot like that.

You're really kind of mindfully paying attention to things and making decisions about your wellbeing based on whether this is a good situation to go into or not.

And sometimes that can involve hard decisions.

I mean, it's very similar to the phone.

Ultimately, the thing we were talking about with technology and kind of regulating its effects on us is setting some boundaries with how you use your phone.

Maybe you don't use it in bed cause it's gonna affect your sleep, or maybe you commit to like having it notify you and you have this moment of like, oh, is that for a good thing or something?

Like you're functionally setting boundaries with how you use that.

And I think we need to do that with so many of the things that affect our wellbeing in life, whether that's other people, certain situations, ways that we spend our time.

I think we need to intentionally and mindfully notice what it's really doing for us and then make some informed decisions about whether we want to keep experiencing that.

Is the lack of boundaries one of the reasons that we're experiencing so much burnout?

Like, talk to me a little bit about burnout and how we can avoid it.

Yeah, so burnout it's worth, I mean, there's so many kind of lay notions of burnout.

I think it's important to just start with how scientists really think about burnout.

And so, when you look at how scientists like Maslac and others have thought about burnout, they usually think of it as having these three parts.

And so part number one of burnout, which is kind of what we commonly think is this idea of emotional exhaustion, right?

You're just dead, right?

Like you have a good night's sleep and two hours into your work day, you're done, right?

Like you just, that's emotional exhaustion.

But there are other parts of burnout too.

And so another one is this idea of personal ineffectiveness.

You just feel like ultimately the things you're doing have no meaning, right?

And I think that I think is coming up more and more in the present day, maybe more and more with COVID, but like, even if you're doing your job perfectly, it doesn't matter.

It's not helping people.

It's not kind of doing the right thing.

I think there's just a problem where a lot of jobs are structured to kind of feel like that.

The late journalist David Graeber talked about this idea of bullshit jobs where it's like, you know, like if your job went away, no, it wouldn't really affect, you know, like the fate of the world in any rich way.

Like it doesn't matter, right?

So this is this idea of personal ineffectiveness.

You just feel like what you're doing doesn't have meaning.

But the third part of burnout is an interpersonal kind of burnout.

It's what Maslak and others call depersonalization.

It's functionally just like a terrible cynicism and lack of compassion, right?

You're just getting a little bit of a short fuse with the people around you.

Like someone asks you a completely reasonable thing for your job description and you're like, you know what, screw you, like screw you for asking for me.

Like, you know, how dare you, your intentions are bad.

And so these are the features of burnout.

There's this lovely, Maslak has a kind of patented burnout inventory, a burnout scale, one of these self -report scales you can take.

I encourage people to do, you know, Google it and like, you know, grab a free copy and take one of these things.

You can find it on the internet, but you can get a sense of how high you are on some of these things.

And when that number starts creeping up, this is yet another one of these cases where emotions are really good signals for us.

They're telling us some important information.

If you're experiencing those symptoms, it means you have to make some changes.

Like you're, and oftentimes it's not because your work, you didn't care about your work or your work is boring or it sucked.

Oftentimes it's cause you got so involved in your work, your work is really your identity right now.

And it means that you gotta kind of make some big changes.

You know, recently I announced that I'm taking a year off from my role at Yale as a head of college and taking a year off from Yale, and it was in part cause I was noticing the seeds of some of these things, right?

You know, feeling a little bit more personally ineffective due to COVID.

I think a lot of that was COVID, but a lot of that was like, you know, like throwing my, I'm trying to do all these cool events for students.

We can't do anything cause we, you know, they can't be in person or we can't throw these kinds of things.

I was like feeling that more and more, but definitely feeling the kind of depersonalization, and that's the one I was most worried about.

You know, a student would ask me like a reason, you know, can I see my grade on the midterm and see how I did?

And I'd be like, oh, you want to schedule a meeting with me?

Like, do you know how packed my calendar is?

You know, and I was like, wait a minute, it's completely reasonable for a student to want to meet with me, you know?

And so it's like, it's those things that are kind of creeping in where you're kind of like just annoyed with people and you've got this short fuse and it's like, it doesn't feel good, but again, it's like, if you think of emotions as these like regulatory signals, they're these like beak, you know,

these alert systems like on your car where you're like gas gauge goes on, like these symptoms are your emotional gas gauge for burnout.

And if you don't act on them, you know, you're going to really run out of fuel or like, you know, like you're gonna, like a catastrophic problem.

And you got to kind of take action on an action, you know, it looks different.

Sometimes it's real rest, like real rest, like taking some real time off.

Sometimes it's renegotiating your own identity and relationship with your job.

You know, often, you know, in a tricky way, it's like structural changes.

Like maybe we need to rethink, you know, how we're thinking about work more broadly as a society, but it's important.

And I think it's, these are powerful signals that we need to listen to a lot more.

A lot of people when they find themselves in this situation seem to seek solitude.

Is that the right approach and if not, why not?

Well, I mean, solitude, I think when you're experiencing this, the depersonalization, which is like rich cynicism, you know, I get it.

It's like, I don't want to deal with people anymore.

But ultimately that's allowing us, that's forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism for kind of filling up our happiness tanks as it were, because other people really do make us feel better.

And I think this is the problem when we're in the fix of something like burnout, we often go towards the wrong stuff, right?

Like we're often not like, let me pick up an engaging hobby that will like build my identity, but it's kind of hard.

Like you're emotionally exhausted.

You're like, I'm not doing hard.

I'm doing like plop on the couch and watch Netflix.

But actually kind of what you need is hard.

What you need is to engage in a little bit of flow.

The psychologist Adam Grant had a very viral article in the New York Times during COVID on the phenomena of languishing, which isn't so much burnout.

It's just kind of this sort of deep feeling of like meh or blah, right?

You know, if you hit like full depression, you know, this depression can feel like an intense sadness feeling, but languishing is kind of like neither here nor there you got nothing.

And, you know, the science shows that the way out of languishing is to get into flow at this active state where, you know, you feel engaged and energized and challenged and it can be hard to go for flow when you're feeling emotionally exhausted.

This is one interesting thing I teach my students about is we're really bad when it comes to picking leisure that will feel good.

There are these cute studies where, you know, you ping people at different times of the day and you ping people when they're at work and you ask, how are you feeling?

And, you know, not for every job, but for a lot of jobs, people feel in flow and a little bit challenged.

It's hard, but you're working and, you know, you feel engaged and you feel active and things.

When you ping people when they're at their leisure, because often we pick leisure that's like, you know, plopped on the couch, you know, like scrolling through what shows, you're not even watching a show, you're scrolling through now shows you could watch.

People say they feel kind of apathetic, like they're not really that challenged, they're not in flow, but you ask people, hey, you're at work, would you rather be at work or would you rather be at leisure?

People are like, oh, definitely would rather be at leisure.

And you ask people at leisure, like, would you rather be at leisure like you are right now?

Or would you rather be at work?

People are like, oh, I'd rather be at leisure.

So it's like, we don't wanna be at work, but we forget in some ways the like good things that work does for our psychology, which is it sometimes kind of puts us in challenge mode, puts us into flow.

And I think the answer is that we kind of all need, we need leisure that's a little bit more challenging, that's a little bit more flow inducing.

You know, we kind of pick incorrectly when we're sort of picking these things, and that leads us to not get the benefits out of leisure that we could get.

And I think this gets exacerbated in burnout because of the emotional exhaustion issue.

You're like, yeah, I don't wanna learn a new language or figure out some new thing, I just wanna plop because the only energy I think I have is to plop, but like staying in that local minimum, you're sort of missing out on opportunities for the kind of engagement that could pop you out of those emotional

states. It's interesting, as you're saying that, I'm thinking the types of leisure activities that I most enjoy are all encompassing, right?

So they're sort of like cooking, they're paddle boarding, these sort of things where you have to pay attention, and you can't really, I mean your mind can wander, but it can't go very far, and they're carthic in that way rather than the channel surfing.

Yeah, and I think when we think about what we really want out of our leisure, I think it's flow inducing activities, and it might also be activities that you wanna call fun.

And there's actually not that much empirical work on fun, but Catherine Price, who I mentioned before, who does this work on technology and phones, also has a new book called The Power of Fun, great book if you're struggling with your leisure and you want some good ideas, but she argues the first ingredient

of fun is that, is flow, it is engagement.

You can't have fun if you're just kind of plopped around, but she argues that fun kind of adds a little bit more to flow where it also has an element of being really social.

So it's hard to have, like if you think of the times in your head simulate a time that you think of as like most fun, like that thing I was doing, that was the most fun ever, usually it's social.

Even sometimes social like a dog or like a whatever, but it's usually social.

It also has a certain kind of attitude and it's like an attitude of play.

Like you're not doing a side hustle, you're not doing something to make money or to perform in a specific way.

You're just kind of messing around with a sort of childlike attitude, a sort of playful attitude.

So she'd argue that if you really wanna prioritize the best leisure possible, you want the flow, the active engaged, but you'd also wanna add elements of being social and you'd also wanna add elements of playfulness.

And I think again, a lot of these get harder during burnout.

You're cynical, so you're like, I don't wanna be around other people.

You don't have the energy to engage in flow.

And I think because of this personal ineffectiveness, you're kind of so constantly beating yourself up that it's hard to kind of give yourself the benefit of the doubt and like, I'm not gonna be judgy about this.

I'm not gonna be trying to be perfect about this.

I'm just gonna be like letting myself do it for enjoyment's sake.

And all those things become harder, which compounds the problem.

Switching gears a little bit, what do we know about what makes for a happy relationship?

I mean, happy relationships are, relationships are happiest when you're in a relationship with other happy people.

And so I think one thing to make sure is that you're helping your partner achieve some of this stuff that we're talking about too.

And again, I think the number one question I get is how do I make my kids happier?

But I think the second question I get is like, how do I make my spouse happier and my partner happier?

And so I think finding ways to engage in these sorts of things can be really powerful.

I think we forget the power of attention to make our relationships better.

If you look to some of the work on relationships and what kinds of factors can signal that your relationship is not going well, there's some work suggesting that it has to do a little bit with attention.

Often in relationships we make these kinds of bids.

I show my, oh honey, look at this stupid thing on the internet, oh, how did your day go or something?

We're doing an ask of someone.

And they're two ways our partners can react.

They can kind of attend to that bid and show you attention and respond back.

Or they could kind of like ignore it or blow it off or they're not even paying attention because they're looking at their phone.

And there's some evidence that you can make predictions about how a relationship is going based on just the number of those so -called bids that a partner responds to positively.

Like when you're asked for attention, you kind of attend back.

And these have been talked about in the domains of relationship science, about couples and blah, blah, blah.

But I think it's functionally about attention.

Like when you're kind of reaching out for the attention of your spouse, do you kind of give it back?

And I think this is one of the challenges and the ways we were talking about is there's competing things for our attention and there are companies that are making millions and millions of dollars winning that war.

My spouse doesn't have an entire team of Google engineers making his bids for my attention more interesting, but Instagram does.

And so yeah, and so I think we need to kind of pay attention to how we're attending to our spouse and how we're devoting time in some ways that those are the biggest gifts.

And I think if you start solving those, you go a long way to the other stuff that comes with it.

When you're being more present, you can be more grateful.

When you're being more present, you can find more time for fun and play.

But the attention and the presence kind of comes first.

And that relates to another big thing we know is so important for happiness, which is having a little bit of free time.

Why don't we attend to our spouses?

It's partly the technology, but it's partly because we're busy and we just don't have time.

Lots of evidence that one of the key ingredients for happiness that we often forget is what's known as time affluence.

This just subjective sense that we have some free time.

Time affluence is the opposite of what's often called time famine, where you have this subjective sense that you're starving for time.

And we know psychologically that time famine feels a lot like real famine.

It has the same physiological effects where you're triaging stuff, it doesn't feel good, it activates your fight or flight.

And it's awful for your wellbeing.

In fact, some work by Ashley Willens shows that if you self report being time famished, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self report being unemployed.

We know unemployment is awful for your happiness.

Just feeling like you don't have any time is bad too.

And I think one of the reasons it's bad is when we feel more time famished, it's harder for us to connect.

We're just like rushing or you're rushing, you don't even have time to connect, but you just kind of have this triaging sense.

You don't have time for social connection, I don't have time for that quick conversation with my husband, it's just like, boom, boom, boom.

And so giving yourself the subjective sense that you have a little bit more free time can open up windows for social connection, including the kind of social connection that you get with your partner and your relationship.

And when you're feeling rushed, you're always thinking about the next thing you have to be doing.

So if you have a short meeting with no gap between the next one, you're always just anticipating that.

It's harder to even be in the moment.

And so part of happiness then is sort of like doing less to have more free time.

Yeah, I think that's the irony is that we'd all be a lot happier if we gave ourselves some free time.

It was a real irony for my college students who have a bazillion extracurriculars and they're always feeling FOMO that they're not even doing enough despite having such a filled plate.

But it's irony that we all experience.

One of the, Ashley Blins has done some really lovely work on time affluence broadly.

She has this great book called Time Smart that talks a lot about this.

And she argues in her work that one way that you can spend your money to feel happier is to use your money to buy back time.

We all have, any of us that have a little bit of discretionary income can choose how to spend it, but one way we can spend it is on time saving purchases.

You buy the cut up veggies at the grocery store to cook or you get curbside pickup or takeout.

You hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn, things that you're doing to get back a little bit more free time.

And if you make those purchases, you're happier.

But if you reframe the purchases you're already making as time saving, it can make you happier.

Probably many of the people listening to this at some point have ordered takeout.

But did you, when you ordered the takeout, calculate how much time you saved?

I went to the Thai place and I got pad Thai.

I'm like, dude, if I tried to make chicken pad Thai, that would take, my kitchen would be a wreck.

I'd have to clean it, I'd have to look it up.

I got two and a half hours out of that pad Thai order.

What did I do with that two and a half hours?

Just the act of saying that for me feels like, oh gosh, I saved all that time.

What did I do with it?

There's a quote that's somewhat controversial, but it goes something like the rich invest in time and the poor invest in money.

And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Although what Ashley finds is that you'd think that was true, but in practice what she finds is that the rich are often not as much investing in time as you expect.

In part because there's this idea that time is money.

You'd think when you'd get to a certain wealth level, you'd be like, all right, I can shut off and stop earning this income.

I'll take more vacation time and so on.

But what she finds is now time is really money.

So if you're earning minimum wage, your time to like, if I don't go to work for an hour, I don't get my ideally 20 bucks, but in some places 15 bucks, whatever.

If you're earning what Elon Musk does and you don't go to work for an hour, when you think about that like, oh my God, I just lost, I mean, I don't know how much he earns per hour, but it's probably a lot more than the minimum wage.

And that can be really hard.

Now that trade off, because we prioritize money so much and assume that it's the thing that makes us happy, it's really hard to back off.

And she argues as your income goes up, it can get harder to back off because it's like almost a status symbol because you're making more money.

So I think that used to be true.

Like the leisure classes used to, I think like, if you look at the leisure classes in like the 1920s, I'm thinking like old Cary Grant, movies like Philadelphia Story, like the privileged classes enjoying their privileges and one privilege was time.

But even though privileged people could be investing in time more, they don't always.

But there's a flip side to this, which is that the privileged classes could do this, but they're not.

Ashlee talks a lot about the fact that a lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily a not having money hit, it's a not having time hit.

So she argues that time famine comes with being low income and it's actually the time famine that's a real hit on well being more so than the money famine.

It's interesting because we often think of discretionary, we talk about percentage of discretionary income that goes to like groceries and sort of goes to gas and all of this stuff, especially now as inflation is rearing its head.

But we never think about like the percentage of time that people have to spend on certain activities and how that correlates across different socioeconomic statuses.

No, and to your point about sort of having people who once they're earning money, well now it's loss aversion, right?

So you get two powerful forces working for you.

One is loss aversion, I don't wanna lose the salary that I've worked so hard to get and all of these forces that drove me to get to this place and the story that I'm telling myself about why I'm here doesn't just turn off like a light switch now that you've sort of reached some tipping point.

Exactly, plus all these other forces telling you what you should be spending your money on, which isn't time, it's like a new gadget or another material possession and so on.

So I wanna sum up some of the things that we talked about today in terms of evidence -based approaches people can use, writing down what you're grateful for, writing down and expressing gratitude, doing things for other people, negative visualization, and sort of creating more free time and then being conscious

about how you're spending that time too and what activities that you're engaging in.

What am I missing and what else do you wanna add to that list?

You covered a lot of stuff.

I think the one last thing I'd add is just the importance of remembering that your brain and your happiness are tied to your body.

I think we think there were these minds that are floating off in nowhere and we forget that if that mind is attached to a body that's not getting any sleep, that's not moving, that's constantly flaring up its fight or flight system, we forget that those kinds of things matter a lot.

One of the things I try to emphasize with my students is these basic healthy habits.

And it's funny as we get busier, as we get more frantic, as we're feeling more depressed, you can watch these things fall by the wayside.

When I'm having a particularly frantic week where I'm feeling really time famished, often my instinct of the first thing that should go should be my morning elliptical.

It's like, ah, I could steal that hour back.

But that morning elliptical, there's evidence that getting like a half hour of cardio exercise a day is significantly reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

We forget how powerful it is.

That's exercise and let's not even get into sleep.

Which is another one of the first things to go is like, oh, I'll sleep less, but then that winds up having these cascading effects on our mental health during the day but even things like our concentration, our ability, the ease with which we're present and so on.

And so if you're really trying to prioritize your happiness, you also kind of have to prioritize taking care of your body, particularly exercise and sleep for improving your mental health.

Totally, I want to end with a question that comes from one of my friends, kids actually, and she asks, is there a difficult point in your life that you could share where the methods that you're teaching helped you get to a better place?

Yeah, I mean honestly, so many tiny little ones, it's like hard to pick a single one.

I mean, if I'm being honest, when I became ahead of college and took on this new role and saw the kind of mental health stuff that my students were going through, part of it was the really extreme mental health cases.

But part of it was like the little stuff, I'd run into students in the courtyard and be like, how's it going?

And it's like, if I could just get through midterms and get to Friday, I was watching them kind of just like fast forward their life.

Like out of stress and these little things and not being present and not noticing stuff, and it hurt me because I'm like, I don't want them to do that, but it also struck a chord because I was doing that stuff too.

If they asked me how my week was going, I'd be like, oh my God, if I could just get through the trips and get to Friday, right?

But it's easier to see in other people.

Totally, and so what seeing these stresses and this stuff through my students' eyes taught me is like, oh man, I have to start doing this stuff, I have to be a better example for them.

And in so many domains, in part because I'm a human, and in part because I think my instincts are worse even than the average humans, I don't have any of the intuitions to do this stuff.

I'm having a bad day, every molecule in my body is screaming like, don't talk to anyone, plop and watch Netflix, definitely don't do a hard yoga class.

And I know that's just wrong and I'm like, brain shut up.

And so for me having these techniques at the ready are really, really powerful.

And honestly, I think have, we're so essential in getting me through the pandemic in one piece.

I'm a nerd, so I take a lot of these self -report surveys over time and I found that on average, since teaching this class, my well -being has gone up in a small but significant way, probably about a single point on like a 10 point happiness scale.

But that's a lot, I'd much rather be an eight than a seven.

And when times are tough, I'd much rather be a six than a five, and that's kind of the power of these approaches.

They're not gonna turn everything, sunny and roses and unicorns all the time, but they'll give you that competitive edge when things are feeling pretty tricky.

And so, yes, I don't know if I have a specific one, but in just so many different ways, these techniques have saved me.

And I watch myself forcibly put them into effect even when I don't feel like it, because I know the science and I know I want my students to see that I'm doing the right thing too.

Thank you so much for taking the time today, Lori.

I appreciate our conversation.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on the show.

Thanks for listening and learning with us.

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[The Science of Well-Being: Debunking Happiness Myths and Mastering Intentional Living]-[#139 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness]

📋 Summary

The Science of Well-Being: Debunking Happiness Myths and Mastering Intentional Living

The Fallacy of Future Happiness

The Trap of Relative Comparisons

Redefining Happiness

Practical Tools for Well-Being

The Role of Technology and Attention

Parenting and Resilience

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript