Offline with Jon Favreau - How to Be Happy with Dr. Laurie Santos

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Dr. Laurie Santos, Yale University's “Happiness Professor,” joins Offline to lay out a scientific guide to finding happiness. On her podcast The Happiness Lab and in her course Psychology and the Good Life (the most popular in Yale’s 300 year history), Laurie educates people on the way our brains lie about what makes us happy and helps them reorient their priorities to find genuine happiness. She sits down with Jon to talk about the root causes of declining happiness among young people, why in-person interaction is a crucial part of being human, and why putting others before ourselves makes us happier than fulfilling what we think we want. But first! Jon and Max are surprised to learn they agree with Ron DeSantis and break down the ridiculous conspiracy theories that have taken over Twitter after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You know, we forget that this act of getting closer to somebody is really powerful. It feels really good. We also forget that us being a little bit more vulnerable can feel really good. I think we kind of assume we have to be this perfect plastic facade to the people around us. But what the research really shows is that getting vulnerable can actually make us be more liked by the people around us. There's this lovely effect I love called the beautiful mess effect that when we look kind of a little bit messy to people, not like, you know, full on tragedy, but when we look a tiny bit messy, people actually enjoy that. People like not oversharing, but sharing a little bit because it makes people feel a little bit more close to us. And so I think, yeah, going deep is something we don't expect to be really important and powerful, but we enjoy it much more than we and that our brains predict we will. Welcome to Offline. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from this week's guest, Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University and host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Max, are you happy? Wow, am I happy? I mean, this moment I'm potting, so that's pretty fun. But in a deeper level, I don't know. I mean, what does Lori have to offer me in terms of understanding and- Fantastic advice. Fantastic advice. The World Happiness Report just came out. Okay. And for the first time in history the United States was not in the top 20

happiest countries and our decline was due almost entirely to self-reported happiness among wait for it Americans under 30 yeah

so we've obviously spent a lot of time on this show talking about the various things that are making us less happy especially our screens.

I thought we could talk to someone who's an expert and what we can do to make ourselves more happy. And Laurie Santos has spent her entire career figuring this out. She's a professor of psychology at Yale where she researches the evolutionary origins of human cognition and has taught the most popular course in Yale's 300 plus year history. What's the course? It's called Psychology and the Good Life. Oh, man. And she's, yeah, it was like almost a quarter of the college signed up for it the first time that she taught it.

It was back in 2018. And you can now hear Lori's wisdom on her immensely popular podcast, The Happiness Lab. It's great. And right here. And right here. We had a really fun conversation. We talked about what it takes to lead a happy life, why happiness rates among young people keep declining,

and what ways, if any, we can keep ourselves happy heading into an election that seems destined to make us miserable. It's already doing it for me. There's my answer to your question. Now that I'm thinking about the election again, I am no longer happy. I was. I was doing great. I know they like connected electrodes longer happy. I was. I was doing great. I know, they like connected electrodes to us. Talking about the election. Yeah, there's the car battery underneath the table every time the election comes up.

Well, speaking of politics, I wanted to start with some praise for longtime friend of the pod, Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis took the Laurie Santos happiness class and he said, I know the answer. I know how to make people happier. This week, the Florida governor signed into law a bill that will significantly restrict

social media access for teens under 16. If you're 14 or 15, you can sign up for a social media account with parental consent. If you're under 14, you can't have a social media account regardless of parental consent. Total ban. The new law requires social media companies to verify user ages and delete all existing social media accounts held by children under 14. Net Choice, an association representing major social media platforms, has already vowed to fight the law in court. And that group has already had some success fighting similar laws in other states. Some of their arguments are about free speech issues. And they also have a concern that age verification raises privacy concerns for both kids and adults, since the adults would have

to provide some information to verify the kids and consent and all that. What do you think? Is this a step in the right direction or does net choice have a point? So it's kind of uncomfortable, right? Because we are... Are you taking the side of Ron DeSantis or Mark Zuckerberg? Go ahead. It's a welcome to our modern social media regulation landscape. Sure, I'm glad that Congress left it in the hands of these two. Great choice. So it's uncomfortable, right? Because Florida is another of a few states that tend to be the reddest states, that tend to be using the most culture war reasons to ban social media for kids. And it's like, you know, it's not great to be in the company of those people.

It's also not great because their justifications for it are usually not good. It's very like parental rights. It's very like, you know, there's a little- They'll go on social media and then suddenly they'll become trans. Right, right. Or they're being- That's the, that's the, or they're going to turn, it's going to turn them gay, right? They're going to join Hamas. They're going to join gay Hamas. Gay Hamas, which is the worst kind of Hamas. You know, that is, that is, that's what some of the right-wingers are concerned about.

So I think there's kind of two questions here. One is like the idea in general of banning social media for kids as, for example, Ron DeSantis is trying to do. Is that a good thing? And then the second is like, is the specific way that he is doing it something that advances like the greater good? And on the first, like the second one is like a little messier. We'll get into the first one. I have to tell you, a couple of years ago when people started asking me about this, I was ambivalent to opposed and banning social media for kids.

It's just like a blanket ban. It's like that's a blunt tool. And it's like people find it useful. I am really coming around. I am really starting. The more I read, the more research comes out on the effects of social media usage for kids that I'm really convinced that it is incredibly harmful for them, that the negatives vastly outweigh the few positives, and that those negatives are increasing every year as social media becomes more algorithmic, as its effect is heightened. The rates of depression and anxiety among kids, I mean, you mentioned this, like people are less happy now. And it's because if you grow up with a phone and you grow up on algorithmic social media, it is just really, really bad for

you. And the like, I think the specific mechanism by which he is effectively banning it, which is third party verification. There's already a law in place that says that kids, I think it's either 12 or under 13 or under can't use social media, but it is just not enforced because there's no age verification for it. I think age verification is a good idea. You need your driver's license to drive a car, to fly in an airplane, to go to an airport. It's not like the idea that you have to provide ID for something as some radical new invasion of privacy. So the idea that you would need it to go on an app that is going to destroy your brain for all time. Like maybe that's a trade-off

that's worthwhile. Yeah. I, I tend to come down where you are and I really try to take the other arguments seriously and the, and the arguments fall into two buckets. One is the privacy concerns. And I get that. I get that handing over your data for age verification purposes. There are privacy concerns there. Though having a third party app do it that doesn't give it to the social media companies seems like a step in the right direction. State-sanctioned agency. I have to say, I also feel like the horse left the barn on this one with like, oh no, our data is being scooped up by social media. It's like, we're all alive in 2024 and people know a lot more about us than I

think we'd want them to. Oh, that's actually a great point is that the privacy we are losing by being on social media is so extreme. We just don't, it's not in our face because they hide it from us. And verification is a like tiny, tiny bit of privacy we're giving up. It's just that it feels more extreme because we're doing it openly. And there's always the concern that, okay, well, people should be able to go online anonymously and speak because you don't always want people knowing who you are, right? You want to have that protection, which I think this legislation tries to protect anonymous speech online. The other argument that I heard that I saw from the ACLU on this is, you know, it infringes on kids' freedom to speak or find information. Now, I'm not sure what information you can find on social media that you can't find on the internet.

Yeah. Except for the opinions of complete fucking idiots. Yeah, that's actually, that's talking me into it. If what we're going to do is funnel kids from learning on TikTok to learning on Wikipedia, what an incredible net positive for humanity and for those kids. I just don't buy the like, oh, they can't find, there's certain information they're not gonna be able to find if they can't be on social media because it's not an internet ban, it's a social media ban. And then freedom to speak. You know, kids can speak to anyone they

like in real life. Again, on email, over text, if you want to give your kids a phone over email, like I don't know that you, I don't know. I mean, the courts, like I said, there was an injunction on similar laws that federal judges put an injunction on the law in, I think it was Arkansas, maybe Utah, Montana. It's like going through the system.

So they haven't fared as well in court. And I think it's because of some free speech concerns. But I go back to, we've talked about before, you know, it's freedom of speech is different than freedom of reach, right? Like you have, you should be able to communicate to anyone you want, but like you don't have a right to amplify that speech to millions of followers or thousands of followers or hundreds of followers. That's a new thing. I also think that this is an area where I am both sympathetic

to the concern, but also think that it is way more solvable than we're treating it as. When I think it was the Montana ban went into effect, I read there was this really good story that talked to a lot of kids who were really worried about this because it was like, you know, gay kids or trans kids in small conservative towns where they're like, I don't have anyone who I can talk to around me in my community. My community feels very hostile. I need these online spaces because there's somewhere where I can go where I can find like-minded people. But the thing is, is that I think this is solvable if you just separate out algorithmic social media, which is not actually a place where there's a lot of one-to-one communication. It's mostly broadcasting from places that are more like forums, like if it's a Discord or a web forum or a Slack or a group chat. If you are

banning people from the former, that's where all the harm is taking place. And that's where you're getting the least of that value that people need that sense of community. And, you know, if there, I would love to see some sort of carve out in this where we're really going to bring the hammer down, banning people from TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, but there's going to be a carve out for places like Discord. So now problem solved. Reddit. Right. Yeah. I actually think Reddit is like a pretty good place for this.

Yeah. It's the infinite scroll. Right. It's the algorithmic amplification recommendation. It's the autoplay videos, all of which have been mentioned around this legislation. Right. That is the problem. And I do not think there are good arguments for those things.

I agree. Right. Yeah. It's very hard to see the upside. Especially for kids. I mean, you know, it's something that I knew before I had kids that like their, you know, their brains are developing at this stage and they're not fully formed yet. And you sort of like get that intellectually when you have kids and you're like, oh, yeah,

they are so impressionable. And you realize that like something that they see or hear can really stick with them. And this is all with just like Charlie watching screens, but not being on social media and being exposed to all this stuff. Like I can't even imagine what that's going to be like. And so, but I can't imagine now what parents of like, you know, teenagers or

middle school students are dealing with. And some people say, well, if you don't want your kid to be on social media, just don't have your kid be on social media and you don't need a lot for that. But, you know, if your kid comes home and is like, I have a phone and all my friends have phones and they're all on social media and I'm not on social media, like that is a tough one to deal with. Yeah, you kind of need a collective solution here, otherwise known as the state. Right.

And I also think, by the way, phones in schools, especially like high school, whatever, I would say no phones in high school, but especially like middle school, get the, no phones, no phones in classrooms. There's more, I really want to actually do something in this at some point. There are more schools, middle schools and high schools that are experimenting

with cell phone bans. And anecdotally, I think we're still kind of waiting for rigorous research to come out on this. But anecdotally, they all seem to come out and say like,

wow, once we banned it for everyone, so you didn't have that sense of a compulsion to conform by being on social media. Like everyone was paying more attention. Everyone was happier. And all the kids were really happy to be off social media. Everyone was paying more attention. Everyone was happier.

And all the kids were really happy to be off social media because it sucks for them too. And something that really brought me around on this is seeing the research come out that much in the way that a big argument for banning cigarettes from kids is the fact that the effect on their lungs and on their hearts is so much more pronounced because they're younger, the way their body is developing. The psychological and emotional effects of social media are really amplified for young kids because, like you're saying, they're more impressionable. They have this higher socialization drive. So think about how unhealthy social media is for you and me. Yes.

A lot. And then multiply that by 10 and then add on the fact that it's going to be with them forever. And I think the trade-offs start to seem a little starker. Do we want to talk about like how effective we think this is going to be? Yeah, what do you think?

So, I mean, as you mentioned, three other states have tried this. I think two of them are under injunction. It seems unlikely that they are going to succeed. Just a state coming in and banning something and saying, we're banning it because we want to, it's very, very hard to get that through the courts. I was actually looking at like, well, how did they ban cigarettes for kids? Because just like, that's always kind of where my mind goes, social media and cigarettes. And it was really hard. It turns out it took like decades. And I didn't realize that even after, long after they proved that cigarettes were harmful for kids, they like passed a law banning it.

But then it got repealed by a court. And they ultimately, it was like first in 1998, a bunch of state attorney generals had to reach an agreement with the cigarette companies in settling a lawsuit. And one of the terms of that was you can't market cigarettes to kids anymore. That's where that came from. And then I didn't realize that it was this late. It was not actually law until 2009. Really? Yes. So the big issue was that the FDA kept imposing regulations that say, hey, don't give cigarettes to children because it's literally killing them. And then the courts would say, well, the FDA doesn't have authority to do that until Congress gives them that authority. And that took until 2009.

Oh, didn't we have, I think it was in the, I think we have something in the Recovery Act about this. I know it was in, yeah. It was in like that first year. I'm sure, yeah. I remember that now. That makes sense, yeah. Well, from a public opinion standpoint too, and political standpoint,

it is hard to regulate products that are addictive because the very nature of addiction means that you don't realize it's bad for you and in fact thinks it's good for you, think it's good for you. And you're going to make all kinds of arguments about why it's good for you because you don't, no one can admit they're addicted to something. That's what I did. It took me a while. Right. And I think it's also the particular challenge for social media is it is more difficult to prove harms to mental health than it is even to physical health. Right.

Like I think the story of cigarettes. Finally, the science was there and people understood lung cancer, stuff like that. It's harder for mental health challenges. And it's also like the thing that is like both discouraging but also important to keep in mind is the science on the harm of cigarettes had been in place for 40 years before it was finally regulated. And it wasn't like it was 40 years and then finally someone thought to regulate it. They were fighting that whole time. So it might take a really long time to establish that the kinds of harms

are something to qualify for FD regulation, to get a law around it. But, you know, that is kind of what makes me think, even though I think it's very unlikely that this law will stand, I think it does move the Overton window. And I think it's a little bit of a warning shot for the social media companies. It's like, hey, what if you just made your products less harmful? And then maybe you wouldn't face these kinds of bans, even if you think you can probably ultimately beat them in court.

In other news, so there was the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed this week. Two people died. And then this happened. Wired ran a non-exhaustive list of things that nutballs on the internet have blamed for the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore. President Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P. Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, Barack Obama, Islam, aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, foreign aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, COVID vaccines, DEI, immigrants, black people, and lockdowns. But perhaps no Twitter account dispensed more wisdom than the one known as Cat Turd 2. Cat Turd was all over this.

Who wrote, FBI said it was an accident. Mayor, accident. Governor, accident. Biden regime, accident. Me, thanks. Now I'm positive it wasn't an accident. This is why we need social media. That's right.

We got to start the kids early. That's right. So the kids can understand this is what's causing bridge collapses. Can you believe they want to take this away from us? That's ridiculous. We should have the right to fill our kids' minds with this shit. Remember when people responded to a bridge collapse by not doing any of this? By saying, boy, it's too bad the bridge collapsed.

Well, did you have a favorite conspiracy? Because I had mine. But I'm sure you go first. So mine was, you mentioned the Sri Lanka one. It was actually like a tweet that did reasonably well that made this connection where it was like, I don't know what it was. It was like the colors on the boat match the Sri Lankan flag.

And then there was, I don't know if you saw Leave the World Behind. I sure did. Okay. That's pretty good. It's a Netflix movie. It's a little bit of an offline movie. It is a little bit of an offline movie. That's right. It involves a boat that rams into a beach at one point that's like called the White Lion or something. And it was like, aha, so this movie was somehow a clue that they were going to do it. And of course it was produced by Obama. So Obama did the bridge. Why did he do the bridge? Well, they don't want you to know. A few episodes ago, we talked about how the internet has made conspiracy theories fun. Do we want to reconsider that? So, I actually feel, I'm curious what your feed looked like on this because mine was actually completely saturated with bridge takes.

And what I was really struck by was not just the conspiracies because, of course, there's like the conspiracies, there's people making fun of the conspiracies. But my feed was really all 100% like polarization takes, basically, where it was like either this bridge collapse is the fault of quote unquote DEI, which of course is a not at all veiled way of saying it's the fault of black people and minorities, which corporate diversity initiatives caused the bridge collapse. Yeah, sure. Or obviously, that's right. Or it's like, it's the fault of capitalism and the fact that we have not yet converted to full communism, because boy, if there's something that has never happened in a communist country, it's a major industrial accident. Late-stage capitalism is a... When in doubt, you can blame anything on late-stage capitalism.

Okay, capitalism... I would love to ask people, can you define late-stage capitalism? I was going to say... Do you know what the other stages are? That has... No, I bet you don't. That has always been my rule.

Is it like, look, capitalism has a lot to answer for. There's a lot to this. It's like, absolutely. But I feel that as a just a little benchmark, you shouldn't get to blame something on late stage capitalism until you can define it. It's just, I think that would be- Name all the stages.

Name all the stages. Do you even know the early records of late stage capitalism? No, but the polarization thing is real because it reveals a bunch of people on the internet who are just consuming every piece of information and news through the lens of their own political ideological beliefs. And they think that it somehow confirms those beliefs. That's it. That's all we got. And the most extreme version.

And so I wanted to talk about this both because it's funny to make fun of the silly bridge takes, but I think this is useful because it lays bare what social media does, because it does this with everything, right? Where every event, every news story, everything that is generating a lot of discussion, it immediately gets pushed into like whatever your belief system, the fact that this happened proves that you were right, that whoever your political adversaries are, are terrible people and to blame. And then in fact, your belief should be carried to like the nth degree extreme. And it's like, it's easier to see when it's the bridge because it's so silly. Like clearly this is just

a terrible accident. I'm sure there was some institutional failure, but I'm not sure it proves out an ideological belief system. But this is what happens with everything, with every news story. I mean, if you think about like, if you log on and see the discourse on like AOC and Israel and Gaza, like everything you read is either that she is a like pro-genocide shill because she wants Joe Biden to be elected or she, because she wants to condition aid, like is an anti-Semitic monster who hates Israel. And I like wanted to call people's attention to this because when it's so silly, it's easy to see how this happens,

but it is doing this to you on every issue. Like there was a whole discourse this week on like age gap marriages and like everybody's furious with each other now. I didn't, I had not seen the cut piece. Yeah. About this. But the takes.

And then Emily texted it to me. Because we are in age. What's your. Nine years. That's reasonable. It's reasonable. Yeah. But she like made a joke.

She's like, I haven't read the full cut piece that everyone's like hating on. But I saw this part. I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. And I'm the most online person there is. I hadn't seen it. This is the thing is like in the absence of social media, you would meet someone who had a like age gap marriage of like some number of years. And you would be like, okay, well, like what are the particulars of this marriage? Like, it seems like this works or maybe it's like there are some like hurdles there. But when you encounter it online, it just funnels you immediately into like the angriest, most tribal possible arguments. polarization of everything way outside of politics everything is either if there's a

controversy on the internet it is either like well that is a progressive that shows my progressive values or it doesn't right and like everything has to be sorted into one or the other and i think this is this is a useful way to illustrate how that happens because if the morning after the bridge collapsed you showed that video to 100 people, 99 out of 100, their takeaway would be, that's terrible. What a terrible accident. I hope that they improve safety standards on bridges or that we don't let this happen again. And only the 100th person would say, this proves that all of my politics are correct and the people who I dislike are monsters. But if you go online, those ratios are completely reversed. And when we are saturated with that every day on every single issue,

it starts to feel like that's normal. And it starts to feel like that is how everything works and you start to internalize it. And I think, and we talked about this on Pod Save America this week, but it has political and real world effects too. Absolutely. Because in this example, and on most examples, to be fair, I would say 80% is crazy right-wing conspiracies. And then you get some of the late stage capitalism stuff. But now the conspiracies have bled into Congress potentially not providing funding to build the bridge, to fix the bridge.

Yeah, because Republicans are like, oh, we're not giving Biden that money. Maybe he should cancel his electric vehicles if he wants to find money for the infrastructure bill to fix the bridge. Because this issue has been polarized in social media

so the base is activated around it and Republicans in Congress have heard that from the base. And so now you've got one party of just, you know, old school politicians, flawed and everything else. Oh, a bridge broke. I think we probably fix the bridge fast because that'll make people happy, the voters, because then their bridge will be fixed and then they can continue on their way to work. And the other party is like, Hamas did it. What? Yeah. And you're like, like okay and then we're not going to do anything

about it now i think that's politically harmful for the republican party but it's also and it is the kind of thing that breaks through and makes people who aren't as politically polarized super red pills and just like what the fuck's going on like i heard about some of this from that wired list i first got that from a high school friend who was texting our high school chain and it's always interesting like what breaks through like my high school text chain but he's like what is wrong with everyone like what is going on with this i'm like yeah well it's this is the world i live in and um everyone's fucking nuts well i have to tell you when we sat down i did not think that the bridge in the boat would be such an absolutely perfect encapsulation of how social media has radicalized the right-wing base, the Republican Party, in ways that have horrible

consequences for us all. But it is. There you go. And also shows the nefarious influence of the Tamil Tigers from Sri Lanka. It's almost as if the bridge collapse confirmed all of our previous points. Oh, no. Oh, no. What are we going to do? But as we say here at Offline, it's okay when we do it. It's correct when we do it. All right.

Before the break, Pod Save America is hitting the road this summer for the Democracy or Else Tour. If you're in Brooklyn, Boston, Madison, Phoenix, Philly, or Ann Arbor, we'll be coming to your city to break down the political news of the week, help figure out what matters and what each of us can do about it. VIP tickets include a signed copy of our new book, Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps, and more exclusive merch. Check out Pod Save

America plus love our leave at tour dates at crooked.com slash events. Also, which job do you think involves more improv about immigration policy starring in Veep or working at the real White House? The truth is both. Yeah, that's the answer. On a new episode of Inside 2024 out now, actor and former White House staffer Cal Penn joins Dan Pfeiffer and Alyssa Mastromonaco to talk about their time in the White House together and how accurate shows like the West Wing and Veep really are. West Wing, not so much Veep.

Yeah, that sounds right. No flip music playing in the White House. There's no, a lot of walk and talk. To get access to this Friends of the Pod subscription series and others, head to cricket.com slash friends now. After the break, Dr. Lori Santos on her guide to finding happiness. Thank you. Creepy stuff. The hosts are Cindy Cohen and Jason Kelly. Cindy is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been in the trenches, the courtrooms, and boardroom of tech activism for decades.

Jason is EFF's activism director, focusing his work on privacy, free speech, and surveillance. In each episode, Cindy and Jason invite someone with a vision on how to fix the internet, someone with real solutions on how to move the needle towards a better online world. This show will make you feel better about our digital future, on how to fix the internet, someone with real solutions on how to move the needle towards a better online world. The show will make you feel better about our digital future, be more knowledgeable about what needs fixing, and be more engaged to demand change.

I just checked out their latest episode, which is called About Face Recognition. As the title suggests, it's about the very frightening trend of facial recognition software. It's about a company called Clearview AI that has scraped the internet to gather without consent 30 billion images to support a tool that lets users identify people by picture alone. Very frightening, very frightening, but it was a

fantastic episode. So definitely go check that out. Search for How to Fix the Internet in your podcast player. My thanks to How to Fix the Internet for their support. Episodes are available anywhere you listen to podcasts and at eff.org slash podcast. Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me on the show. So I spend most of my time talking about politics in the news. So I'm very excited to be talking about a subject that doesn't come up very often in that arena, happiness. But it's also, it's a subject I've been thinking a lot about now that I'm in my 40s and have kids. So I have a ton of questions for you, but I wanted to start with how you came to be an expert on happiness. You started out doing cognitive psychology research, comparing

the minds of humans to primates, monkeys. How did you get from there to happiness? Yeah, it seems like a big jump, but in lots of ways, it kind of wasn't really. So, I mean, I've been a psychologist my whole career and kind of mostly interested in studying these sort of biases of the mind, often using non-human animals, but sometimes using humans too. And, you know, that was like my main day job for, you know, almost 20 years. But I switched to studying happiness when I took on this new role on Yale's campus. I became what's called a head of college, which means I like live on campus with students. I'm a faculty member who's like eating with students in the dining hall. I was kind of seeing the like real 360 student life.

And honestly, I didn't like what I was seeing. I was seeing the college student mental health crisis, like up close and personal where, you know, right now this national stats are really striking. Like right now, nationally, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Um, over two thirds report being, uh, very anxious all the time. Um, another two thirds report feeling very lonely. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide. Like when I dug into the numbers, I was like, wow, this is like a real crisis. And so I kind of retrained in this field of positive psychology in order to

teach a class to my students where I gave them, you know, hey, here's all the strategies that folks in the field have really learned about that you can apply practically in your daily life to kind of feel better, to kind of combat all this depression and anxiety we were seeing. And so that was like the start of it. What I didn't realize was that teaching that class was going to go totally viral on campus. It became the largest class in Yale's 300-year history. Over a quarter of the Yale student body showed up the first day of class when we were trying to teach it, which was a kind of logistical nightmare, but we worked it out. But yeah, I mean, it's really taught me that students are voting with their feet.

Like they don't like this culture of feeling so stressed out and anxious all the time. And I think they really want to do something about it. What was the pitch for the class? Like what was it called? I'm just thinking about what would generate that much interest in a class that people haven't taken yet. Yeah, well, I kind of wanted it to pop out of the course catalog. So I christened it Psychology and the Good Life. So it kind of had this like, ooh, sort of title.

I take that. But more, again, I think, you know, students really, they want answers to the kind of crisis that we're facing societally. And I think the mental health crisis that students are facing is kind of one of these parts of it. And I think what's cool about these students is like, they didn't want a bunch of platitudes. I think they really wanted like, what does behavioral science say about the kinds of things we can do to feel better? I want to ask you about the new world happiness report that came out a few weeks ago, which really caught my eye because the U.S. dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries for the first time in the report's 12-year history. And the drop is apparently driven by Americans under 30. If you separate out the rankings by age, America ranks 10th for people over 60, but 62nd out of

143 countries for people under 30. Why do you think, and you've obviously had a ton of experience in this, why do you think young Americans today aren't as happy as young people in other countries or previous generations of Americans? Yeah, I think there's not one like kind of smoking gun that's making young people so unhappy. I mean, the report talks about six different factors which can kind of take a country's happiness. And if you look at the way these factors affect young people, I think you get a sense of like, oh, young people are getting hit by this stuff. You know, one is a sense of social support, right? The young people in the United States today are the loneliest generations of Americans that we've seen,

like, in the country's history since we've been measuring data on loneliness, right? Like, these are young people who just, like, don't get together in real life, that don't feel like they have close friends outside of, you know, the platforms that they connect on, you know, with screens and things like that. Another factor that the report talks about as being important for improved happiness is a sense of benevolence, right? Doing nice stuff for others. And I think this generation of young people more than others is really not as much focused on other people. They're focused on themselves. It's like, well, you got to worry about your academic performance so you can get into a good college so you can kind of make good on this sort of scary economy right now and make

sure that you're protected, right? It's kind of a very I, I, me, me culture instead of a kind of we culture. And I think the economy is another feature. I think this is the first generation of Americans that are looking at what job prospects there are out there and what's going on with the economy and is saying, I might not be as well off as my parents, right? I think that sort of lack of hope is something that the young people in our country are dealing with in a really different way. And so, yeah, I think there's all kinds of factors that are contributing to it. But what's super interesting from the report is that that kind of tanking that we're seeing in well-being in young people, that's not necessarily true around the world. If you look at

Eastern Europe, if you look at the global South, what you're finding is that young people there are happier than they were a few years ago. And so we have to kind of take the United States' young people's happiness tanking at the same time as we're looking at other countries, which seem to be doing much better than we are. Yeah. And I'm wondering what we can learn from these other countries, because we've talked about this here in a couple shows. And, you know, one explanation is, well, we all went through this pandemic, but the whole

world went through the pandemic, right? And you mentioned the economy, but there were plenty of young people in other countries who are much worse off economically than U.S. youth. So I'm wondering, and we talk about social media all the time on this show as well, and the effects of being too connected, which I want to ask you about as well. But that's all over the world. And I'm wondering, like, what is it about the United States specifically over the last several years that has changed so much? Yeah, well, I think, you know, on the economy, I think, you know, definitely, you know, economically, the global south is doing worse than the average young American, right? But I think that the change has been downward in the United States, whereas a lot of the change in the global south and especially in Eastern Europe has been an upward trend. I think specifically folks in Eastern Europe, you know, their parents went through the war.

They're looking at their economic prospects and thinking, I'm going to be better off than my parents, right? You know, with the euro, I could go anywhere in Europe to kind of work. Like, they're thinking that their prospects are better than their parents. And I think that's not true in the U.S. economically right now. So it's actually less the objective economic reality and more the perception of it and how it is relative to how it was, you know, maybe a couple of years ago or a decade ago. And then in terms of social media, the report has these kind of tiny hints that maybe even though everybody across the world has access to this, it might be different in the United States. And so one of the kind of super intriguing data points about young people is that if you look at young people in Canada, their well-being has also gone down,

not as much as in the U.S., but overall it's gone down. But interestingly, it's gone down more for English-speaking Canadians. If you look at the French-speaking folks in the Quebecois, like they're still seeing a kind of downward trend, but it's not nearly as steep as the English-speaking Canadians. And so that's telling us that there's something about English-speaking nations that's getting a hit here. And that's also revealed by the fact that folks in Australia and New Zealand, young people there are also seeing a hit.

So it seems like it's like, you know, historically kind of westernized English speaking parts of the world where folks are kind of going the most down in terms of their well-being as young people. And one interpretation, this is an interpretation that I got from Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve, who's one of the co-authors of the World Happiness Report. He said, I think it's something about the American news media. Like it's something about like the English-speaking news media that kind of just works a little bit differently. You know, maybe a little bit different,

but different enough that it might be changing levels of anxiety in English-speaking nations. That like the kind of social media access that folks of English-speaking nations have is just a little bit different than what you would get, you know, if you're a French speaker or a German speaker or something like that. And I found that really intriguing that it might be something about that kind of anxiety-provokingness of the always-on news cycle, which is just worse given the countries that are publishing in English.

I mean, that certainly feels right to me. I'm wary of anything that confirms my biases, but I've been thinking about this for a long time. And you do see the media in the UK and Australia here in the US, just very, I mean, there's always been a negativity bias, right? With the news. I do feel like the traditional negativity bias of the media combined with social media and how media gets filtered through social media now. And, you know, you get more information that way, you get more conspiracies and you just get more opinions and takes and it gets increasingly negative and it just sort of feeds on each other as a cycle. And you can't get away from it. I mean, I think that's something we forget, you know, because, you know, we have all these tools around us all the time. We're just

used to having a cell phone in our pockets that can access every terrible thing some government leader has done in the last, you know, two years instantly, instantaneously. We forget that that like just wasn't true 20 years ago. I had this kind of harrowing moment with one of my students on campus where, you know, my title is head of college Santos. They call me Hawk Santos. Like, Hawk Santos, you got to come here. There's this weird number on the wall in my room. Like, what is that?

I'm like, what are you talking about? So I go to the student's room and I look. I'm like, oh, that's a phone jack. That number was the phone number that used to be the phone number in the storm room, you know, in the 90s and early 2000s and things. And she was like, wow, it's so cool. Like, like what would happen when I wasn't in my room? Like, how would I use my phone number? Like when I went to the library, when I was like at the dining hall and I was like, oh, well, like no one would call you when you're at the, they would, you know, leave a message on a really crappy answering machine or whatever. And the student

was like, kind of in some ways, like, I mean, I guess they knew rationally that that was true, but like just sort of shocked at what that would mean for her life, that she couldn't access other people. Other people couldn't access her except if she was by her phone. But more like when you think about the news media, like it's just so different, right? Like, you know, there was a time when we'd get the newspaper in the morning and we'd open it and then we'd close that newspaper and that was it for the day, right? It wasn't kind of making little notifications and dinging in our pockets with this anxiety provoking information, right? And so I think the world feels more fraught, but also the way we're accessing the world is way more fraught. And I worry it's less about the world and more about how we're accessing it. That's kind of making us so anxious.

Yeah. And you do notice this trend, especially among Gen Zers that, you know, I'm an elder millennial, but I haven't noticed it in my generation as much. This is like doomerism, right? And you'll hear from Gen Z, well, you know, yawning inequality around the world and in the United States, worried about our economic prospects, climate, right? And so there's all these very legitimate challenges to be concerned about. But I do think that the fire hose of information that they're receiving is something that we didn't necessarily have when I was coming of age. And we were a generation that, you know, was half out of social media and half in social media.

But I do think that that's probably affecting their well-being. I don't know how it doesn't. Totally. And just their attention, right? I mean, I think one of the striking things about social media is that we're kind of constantly given information that's kind of negative, that, you know, is anxiety anxiety provoking but another is that that kind of fire hose of information pulls us from in real life social connection that is the kind of thing that we

know matters for our well-being you know how often have you seen you know family out at dinner especially with young people where people are all together in real life but everyone's looking at a tiny screen on their phone. Right. And, and I think that that's the thing that we, we haven't really been able to calibrate, right. Which is like how much of our daily waking life is a little bit kind of paying attention to what we could be looking at on our phone. You know, you and I are having this conversation, you know, online over a tool, my phone sitting beside me. That is like, there's some part of my brain that's wondering like, what's on the other end of the phone right now? Like I could click on Reddit and something good's going to happen. Like I could check it out. Right. Like, and that, that has like

probably a psychological cost and inhibitory cost, right. You know, we're having a fun conversation, but part of me is still kind of curious about what's over there. Right. And I think we haven't kind of fully calculated what that's doing to our in real life connection and the attention that we give, you know, to the people we care about most in life, honestly. Yeah, I think about that often with sort of the debate over remote work in that, you know, I think if people have work that they're doing on their own, right, if you're writing or you're like, you know, whether you're in the office or at home, who cares? And obviously, during the pandemic, it was very helpful to be able to connect over Zoom and everything else. But I wonder about the quality of connections with other individuals over text, Slack, Zoom versus in-person? Like what is sort of your, the research that you've seen and done say about that and its effect on our mental wellbeing and happiness? Yeah. So the research is actually pretty clear here. I mean, obviously in-person is better and we know this from the pandemic, right? Like I missed, you know, giving everybody a holiday hug,

that horrible, you know, 2020 holiday year, right? Like in-person is better for certain kinds of social connection, giving hugs, you know, that kind of stuff. But the evidence really suggests that in real time connection works pretty good, right? Talking to your best friend over the phone, you can have a really good in-depth conversation, even though you're not in the same place when you do that over the phone. What seems like it doesn't work as well is not in real time connection. So I text you two minutes later, you text me back, you know, or at work, I get a Slack message, you know, I Slack back, haha, you know, like that kind of disconnected connection, like it doesn't, it doesn't kind of fill our primate brains with what the primate brain's really expecting, which is that we're going to kind

of connect in real time. So in-person is better if you can do it. But I think if you can't be there in person, finding a way that you're actually on the phone, on like, you know, Zoom or FaceTime or something where you can kind of talk, you know, in real time, kind of like you and I are doing. We're not in the same studio right now, but, you know, we're having this good conversation. It feels like we're connecting. If we were doing this where you sent your video and then five minutes later, I had to record my video and send it back, that wouldn't feel as continuous.

That wouldn't feel as good. The problem is that that kind of not in real-time connection is easy. It feels easy to send a Slack message. So many of my students like texting. They hate calling somebody on the phone because they're kind of used to that kind of not in real-time connection.

Yeah. Talking about sort of young people and the challenges they're kind of used to that kind of not in real time connection. Yeah. You've talked about sort of young people and the challenges they're facing. You've talked about how grades are inversely proportional to well-being, getting good grades. So it's the higher achievers who are unhappier. Why is that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's for lots of reasons, right? I mean, I think one thing we know psychologically is that not all rewards are created equal, right? What really kind of gets our motivation going, what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose is when we kind of go for internal rewards, like that sense that you did a good job

or that you've pleased someone or so on. What doesn't work as well as any extrinsic rewards, like money, likes on social media, or grades. We've created a whole generation of young people who I feel like are no longer working for the benefit of learning and the kind of awesome sense of kind of accomplishment they get. They're often working for the perfect grade so they can get into the perfect college so they can get the perfect job. It's like extrinsic, extrinsic, extrinsic. And we know that that has a cost on people's sense of purpose. It has a cost on people's motivation where you kind of feel yucky and you're only doing it for kind of everything starts to feel like a job to these students. And I think over time, we've taken

more and more of childhood and turned it into extrinsic rewards. You see kids not playing soccer just because they like soccer, but like, oh, it'll look really good on your college transcript. You can play soccer, right? We also see that kids are getting more and more scheduled over time, right? So that they just don't have any free time. So this kind of pursuit of grades and academics means that kids are busier than they have ever been. And this is a really obvious thing if you look at the positive psychology literature is that one thing we need to feel happy is a sense of what researchers call time affluence, that you kind of feel wealthy in time.

And I feel like this kind of, you know, academics at all costs has really made our kids busier than they've ever been. And that has a cost, that sort of time famine has a cost on people's well-being too. So I think the focus on grades and on academic performance has really kind of given our young people a lot of hits on their well-being that we're only now starting to understand well. making sure they have time to connect and enjoy themselves and be happy. And also, you know, there is some necessity in getting decent grades, getting a job, you know, like making sure you have enough money, right? Like there's some requirement there, but you don't want to go overboard. And yet your own individual choices are also within the context of a larger society that demands these things. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the ironies is that I think we get the sorts of things that matter for achievement wrong. You know, what we assume matters for achievement is like, well, you know, we'll have a kid, you know, really push themselves in high

school, right? So they really work hard to get good grades and maybe they have to sacrifice a little bit of sleep and a little bit of social connection now, but it's so that they'll get this reward later. We think that that kind of sacrifice leads to better performance. But researchers have gone out and they've looked at, okay, what are the kinds of things that lead to good academic performance? For example, what are the kinds of things that lead to getting a good job later in life? And one of the things we don't expect that seems to be really important is your level of positive emotion, your level of happiness. One famous study by the University of Virginia psychologist Ed Diener, he looked at cheerfulness in 18-year-olds just as a measure of positive emotion, surveyed students' cheerfulness, and then used that measure of

cheerfulness to predict whether or not students would get a job that they liked that was paying good money. Not when students were 18, when he first measured cheerfulness, but later when they were 27 and when they were in their 30s. And what he finds is that a student's level of cheerfulness is predicting not just job obtainment, so you have a job, that you like your job, but also how much money students are making. So the students who are more cheerful at age 18 are earning the most money at age 30, right? And this has always been striking to me because I feel like what's happening to our young people is that they are sacrificing their cheerfulness. They're sacrificing their happiness. They're getting themselves depressed and anxious to kind of keep up with the academic culture, thinking that that's going to make their

performance best. They're sacrificing, for example, sleep and social connection to do something to get into a good college so that they'll eventually make more money. And I think when you really dig into the research, what you find is like, we might need to focus on mental health and children's happiness first. We might want to make sure a teenager is actually feeling happy and cheerful, and that might be predicting something about the sorts of things that are going to matter for the bottom line later on. I think this is the most interesting research that's coming out these days is just like how much our happiness matters for our performance. One of my favorite, my favorite, favorite hands down study of the last year of 2023 was a study by these researchers at the University of Oxford in collaboration with

the job site Indeed. And it was cool for these folks to collaborate with Indeed because this is a paper that used a data set of over 15 million workers, right? So they have this huge data set. And what they were interested in is like, okay, what are the kinds of things that predict happiness at work? But more interestingly, what does happiness at work predict? And they asked the question, are companies that have the most happy workers earning the most money? Like are their stocks doing the best? And what they find is that the answer is yes, like super significantly yes. That the companies, if you pick, for example, the companies with the hundred happiest workers, so these are the hundred companies whose workers on Indeed self-report the highest levels of happiness.

And you look at these companies at time one and you say, well, what if I invested 100 bucks in stock in these companies? Kind of like it's like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones. What you find is that those 100 happiest companies beat all the normal economic metrics. So if you invested in the 100 happiest companies, you would have made more money than if you threw your money into the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones or whatever. And this is not what we think. We don't think the way you make money as a company is to make your workers as happy and as cheerful as possible. We think the way you make the most money is to

exploit them. And maybe it's not moral, but that's what you got to do if you want shareholders to get the value they deserve. But when you look at the data, when you actually dig into the data, what you find is it's just the opposite. We perform better when we're happier. Our companies perform better when our companies are happier. Our young like, of course that's true. Like, think of the times when you've been feeling super depressed and anxious. Like, you're not studying the best. You're not kind of like performing the best at your work. Like, when we're in a positive mood, when we're kind of taking care of our mental health, we have bandwidth to think innovatively and do better. But we forget that that should be the thing that we're maximizing if we really want to improve our performance. So what makes a happy company and a happy workforce? Like what are some common traits of companies where the workforce is happy and they're doing really well?

Yeah, well, the Indeed study pointed to, again, something that like folks just didn't expect. They actually did this clever thing. This is a work of Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve and his colleagues. He first surveys economists, say, hey, I have this data set where we really have these factors that predict happiness. What do you think are going to come out at the top of the factors that predict happiness at work? And the economists say salary, like how much money people are earning. Things like, you know, how good your manager is, work-life balance, that kind of stuff. Those things are predictive, but they're kind of middle of the pack predictive. The thing that predicts the best, whether or not you're happy at work, is a measure of your belonging at

work, which in the Indeed hands is made of a couple different constructs. One is, I feel that I matter at work. People care about the work that I do. It matters to the company. But also, I have a best friend at work. That single item measure, do you have a best friend at work? Yes or no, predicts a lot of the variance in people's happiness at work. And again, this is not, you know, especially as we think more about remote work and people coming back, I think companies aren't necessarily thinking about prioritizing friendship at work. This is not like something companies are looking into to try to make people happy at work, but also to like increase their shareholder value.

I think that's not the kind of causal connection companies are making. But when you dig into the data, what you find is that that kind of stuff matters. It matters more than what you get paid. It matters more than work-life balance. And even whether you have a well-trained manager, it's really striking. so a lot of this seems like when you hear the research you're like okay that totally makes sense it's you're able to understand it sort of on an intellectual level. What are some of the best strategies for people who are thinking, okay, I need to pay more attention to my own happiness? What are some of the most easily achievable strategies?

Yeah, well, one big one is really to kind of prioritize your social connection. You're in real life or at least in real time social connection, right? And that could be kind of making sure you're, you know, kind of engaging in the social connections that you've already built, you know, like literally take out your phone and scroll through and be like, oh, I haven't texted that friend in a while. Let me just say, hey, thinking of you checking in, right? You know, actually set that coffee date or that time to hang out that you could actually achieve in real life. But also just kind of connecting with people generally. I think we forget what we lose when we're not, you know, just engaging in chit chat with the barista or the, you know, person down the hall in the office cooler, like kind of thing that these kinds of weak ties, it turns out really matter for our positive mood and our social connection too. And so that's really like number one is like really most of the happiness advice comes down to like other people really matter for your happiness. So talking to other people, connecting with them really matters.

I've heard you talk about how like real connection isn't just making small talk. It's engaging people in meaningful conversations, which feels right again, but always seems harder to pull off on a regular basis when you're just like at the water cooler with someone and say like, hey, tell me about your life right now. It's always easier to be like, hey, how was your weekend? Right? Like that's an easier question. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, again, one of the things we have to remember is that so much of the way we think about social connection is just wrong. The researcher Nick Epley at the University of Chicago has this term he uses called

under-sociality. Like we constantly predict that we want to be less social than we assume, less deep socially, less social in general, right? But like our brains are always wrong. And so the sort of deep connection work, which is actually Nick's work, is one of the things that I find like in my own misconceptions, this is like one of the spots where I get the stuff wrong too. Like I don't want to go deep. I just want to like stick to the small talk and whatever, but all the data show that like actually going a little deeper can be, you know, quite profound. Um, my,

I was just chatting with a friend of mine or I was asking about her weekend and she was telling me the story that, um, she had hopped in a cab and she was like, you know, doing the week, week talk with the, you know, weak connection ties with the cab driver of like, oh, how was your weekend? What was happening? And the cabbie was kind of complaining about stuff. And she was like, you know, I'm going to go, I'm going to, I'm going to use the deep talk thing that you've been talking about, Laurie. She's like, so to the cabbie, you know, what was one thing that went really well? What was one thing that you were really proud of? And they launched into this deep discussion of like some interesting, you know, political podcast that the

cabbie had listened to. And they went really deep about, oh, how does that affect your family? And where's your family from? And first of all, it made the ride, you know, super long ride to the airport go by way faster. But also she left feeling like she'd had a real conversation with this person. And if she just like switched topics to the weather, she never would have gotten there. And so I think, you know, we forget that this act of getting closer to somebody is really powerful.

It feels really good. We also forget that us being a little bit more vulnerable can feel really good. I think we kind of assume we have to be this perfect plastic facade to the people around us. But what the research really shows is that getting vulnerable

can actually make us be more liked by the people around us. But what the research really shows is that getting vulnerable can actually make us be more liked by the people around us. There's this lovely effect I love called the beautiful mess effect that when we look kind of a little bit messy to people, not like, you know, full on tragedy, but when we look a tiny bit messy, people actually enjoy that. People like not oversharing, but sharing a little bit because it makes people feel a little bit more close to us. And so I think, yeah, going deep is something we don't expect to be really important and powerful, but we enjoy it much more than our brains predict we will. It's so funny you say that because as you started talking about it, I was like, I can't imagine myself in a cab saying, what was something that you were really proud of last week?

But then when you talked about being a mess and vulnerable to others, the one time where I, the one situation I'm in where I talk to people and have like deeper conversations with strangers is on planes because I'm a very nervous flyer. And so if I'm alone on a plane and the turbulence is really bad,

I will turn to the person next to me and strike up a conversation and be very open about how, I will turn to the person next to me and strike up a conversation and be very open about how scared I am about flying. And I end up having like deeper conversations during those moments when I'm feeling a little more vulnerable than I would like, you know, talking to the barista

or walking down the street and talking to someone. And if we were to ask you, you know, is it going to be awesome to like reveal your deep fear to some random stranger in like a, you know, tight metal box? You'd be like, no, that would be terrible. But actually when you engage in it, it's, it's kind of pleasant. Yeah. So deep human connection is, is one strategy that everyone should focus on more. What, what are some others? Yeah. Another one is really kind of finding ways to make sure we feel wealthier in time. This is some lovely work by the researcher Ashley Willans

at Harvard Business School on this concept of time affluence, this sort of sense that you feel wealthy in time. Like, you know, if somebody called you and was like, hey, do you want to get together? You wouldn't be like, no, how about never? Because that's like one, that's the only time it's going to fit in my schedule. And what Ashley finds is that if you experience

the opposite of time affluence a lot, what she calls time famine, where you kind of feel like you're almost starving for time, that's as bad a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. So most of the listeners, if you lost your job tomorrow, that would be a hit on your well-being. Just feeling like you don't have any time is as bad, right? And I think that's awful for a lot of us

because many of us feel like we just simply don't have enough time. And so one way to fix that is to objectively give yourself more time, you know, take some stuff off your plate, cancel some meetings, do a little bit less. You know, the worry with that is like, well, I'll make less money. But Ashley finds that if you prioritize free time over getting more money, you're actually happier. So the people who are kind of saying, I'll do a little bit less work at work or maybe spend some money to get back some time, you know, so like, I don't know, like going to take out, right. And recognizing that, you know, the food that you bought with takeout is some food that you didn't have to cook yourself. You didn't have to chop the vegetables and so on.

And so finding ways to kind of trade off money for time is actually quite happiness inducing, she finds. But another strategy she talks about that I love is to make good use of the free time we do have. She talks about this concept of time confetti, which is sort of the little pieces of time that we have floating around, you know, that five minutes when the Zoom meeting ends early or 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep, you know, earlier than you expected, right? We never think of those as big amounts of time. So we kind of just blow them off.

But research shows that if you add up our time confetti, we actually have more free time now than we did even like 20, 30 years ago. Like, so it kind of adds up to a lot. It's just, it doesn't feel like it at the time. And so Ashley recommends making what she calls a time confetti wishlist, where you kind of have a list of things, you know, maybe that's when I text my friend or that's when I strike up a conversation with somebody if I'm out and about when I have those five minutes. What can you do in those five minutes to really boost your well-being? It makes you feel better, but it also makes you feel a little bit more

affluent with your time. This is the lesson that I need to learn more than any other because I am feeling very time poor. Me too. Me too. It's like I have a, you know, it's election year. I have a three-year-old at home. We have a three-month-old at home. And I was just like, every day at the end of the day, I'm just like, where is like any time for me? And because of my, like the way that I've been my whole life, if I have extra time at the end of the day, I'll be like, okay, let's look at the to-do list and let's figure out how I can get ahead of next week and I'll get some more stuff done. But the time confetti sounds a lot better. Yeah. But also that kind of anxious looking at time and kind of like divvying up time into these

small amounts, that makes you feel almost like you have less of it. Right. Yeah. Another strategy Ashley recommends is giving time away, which seems so counterintuitive, but she finds that like people who use their time to help others, you know, if your friend calls, you're like, oh my God, man, can you help me? I don't know, some huge package. I can't take up the stairs. Like, oh yeah, I'll run over and do that. The act of doing that makes you feel like you have more time because you kind of perceive like, well, I was given it away, so I must have more. And so the act of using your time to help others makes you kind of feel more time affluent, which is cool too. Yeah. It seems like a lot of the happiness interventions you teach about in your class revolve around diverting attention away from yourself toward others, practicing gratitude, like you said, helping others, being with friends.

How does moving beyond the self contribute to our happiness? Yeah, well, I think we're learning more and more that the self isn't awesome when it comes to happiness. I think this is a misconception we have, right? We have all these mantras of like, self-care, treat yourself, right? But as you're saying, by and large, a lot of the work suggests it's getting away from the self that's kind of improving our happiness um i think one of the domains where we're just getting some new data i think the jury is still out a little bit is in you know kind of like substances that actually allow us to get away from ourself there's a lot more research these days on like psilocybin use and using psychedelics which you know if you read them you know read

kind of accounts of them even like you know the old school 1960s accounts it which, you know, if you read them, you know, read the kind of accounts of them, even like, you know, the old school 1960s accounts, it's like, you know, I was one with everything or myself dissolved, right? That's kind of what people self-describe using these substances. But there's a lot of intriguing new work suggesting that these are substances that can also maybe reduce things like depression, allow us to feel a little bit more positive emotion, allow us to feel happier. These are positive emotion, allow us to feel happier. These are now being researched as sort of interventions in clinical trials. So again, the jury is still out, but it kind of fits with this notion that like what happiness is really about is it's other oriented. Whenever we get all focused on ourself, we wind up feeling a little bit less happy, whether that's in our actions or even more importantly, in our mindset. Think about ruminating about your problems. And as soon as you get really self-focused, you wind up being much less happy. It's tricky too, because so much of this is thinking like, okay,

how do I get more time for myself? How do I make more connections? How do I call more friends? How do I do this? And so you're really thinking about your own happiness in terms of the self. And it doesn't seem as intuitive to sort of let go of that and just say, like, the more that I'm going to focus on the people around me and giving back to the people around me and showing gratitude, that that's actually going to make me feel better. Yeah, it's kind of striking. I mean, as you kind of engage with these practices more, you can sort of embrace that mindset a bit more. I mean, this is something that I've been doing a lot. I mean, one nice thing about being a happiness expert and teaching this class is, like, I have to practice what I preach, right?

And my natural inclination is not to do any of this stuff. Like, I'm really not social. I'm really ruminative. I'm really not grateful, right? So I've kind of had to force myself. But having done this for a couple years now, like, you kind of wind up in this rhythm. You know, this week was, you know, a kind of really hectic week. It was like a little, the weather was kind of nasty. We're chatting in the middle of spring. It's been like raining all week. And I was feeling a little bit down and I had this moment of like, oh yeah, when I'm feeling

down, what can I do for somebody else? Literally pulled out my phone and just scrolled through. And I was like, oh, that friend, haven't heard from them in a while. They were going through something. Let me check in, you know, this friend of mine who's, you know, having some marital stuff. Let me check in and see how she's doing. Right. Like this instant response is like, rather than try to what can I do to make myself happier? What can I do to help somebody else? And instantly their frame of mind just changes.

Right. Like you're kind of not as worried about yourself. You're not as ruminating. You're kind of a little bit kind of bigger in terms of the way you're thinking about things. And then, you know, those folks write back and then it does kind of improve your mood. So I think over time you can kind of shift from this self-focus, but it takes work, you know, it takes kind of practice to be able to make this a little bit more natural. Have you noticed changes in some of your students at Yale over the last couple years? Yeah. I mean, we were able to test this not with the live class at Yale,

mostly because we didn't get our act together because everything was last minute. We're like, oh my God, a quarter of the entire campus is in class. We then didn't come up with surveys. We were just dealing with all that. But we put a version of the class online on Coursera.org, freely available, so folks can take it. It's called the Science of Wellbeing on Coursera.org. And that

platform was great because it allowed us to kind of do pre and post surveys to a big group of learners online. There's more than 4 million people who've taken the class online. So we could really get some decent samples. And what we did was compare learners in the happiness class before and after they took the class to learners in a different psychology class on Coursera, like an intro psych class. So everybody's taking a psychology class before and after what happens. And what we find interestingly is that both groups kind of go up in happiness a little bit. So it seems like just taking an online course is good and kind of boost your sense of purpose or whatever. But students who took the happiness class went up about a point more. And so on average, students are going up

about a point and a half on a 10 point happiness scale. So that means if you start off as like, you know, a six, you might go up to a seven and a half. That means if you start off as a four, you might go up to a five and a half. And I think those numbers are important to put in perspective. I think sometimes when we talk about these sort of happiness strategies, people think, well, I'll talk to a barista at the cafe and I'll go from zero to a hundred on happiness. Like these aren't like enormous effects, but they're ones that are significant. And, you know, honestly, if I was at a five out of 10 out of happiness scale, I'd be really excited about any practice that in a few months could take me up to a six and a half. Right. And so that's the kind of magnitude of the effect we're seeing. But yeah, when we,

when we do the kind of pre and post testing, we do find that learning about these strategies and doing the homework and putting them into effect, which I think is probably more what's doing the work, that does really have a positive impact, a significant impact on people's well-being. Well, and all change is gradual and cumulative too. So I'm sure that you just keep at it like everything else. And eventually one day you're like, oh yeah, I'm much happier. Yeah. And I think these, you know, these cumulative changes are really important, but, but also the idea that like, you kind of have to keep doing it. I mean, I think that's the depressing thing about any sort of behavioral change in life is that most of the ones that matter aren't like one and done, you know,

like you want to get fit, you don't just go to the gym once and you're like, good. All right. Next 20 years, I'm set. Like, unfortunately you got to go back like, you know, every day or every couple of days. And I think the same is true of these happiness practices, right? Like, they really are the kind of thing that you need to turn into habits like going to the gym or brushing your teeth. The good news is as you do them more and more, you know, like brushing your teeth, it kind of becomes a thing that you do regularly. These strategies for me have become more of the go-to, not perfectly, but more of the go-to for me

whenever I'm kind of feeling down. And I think that that's nice. You kind of have to put in the work, but the work becomes easier over time as you get used to it. Laurie Santos, thank you so much for chatting with us. Your podcast is The Happiness Lab. It is fantastic.

I listened to a bunch of episodes before this and will continue to do so. And thanks for all your work on this. Appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much. And thanks for having me on the show. Of course. Take care.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

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