Podcrushed - How to Be Happy with Laurie Santos

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

World-renowned expert on the science of happiness, Dr. Laurie Santos (host of The Happiness Lab; professor of Yale University’s most popular class in history!) takes the time to answer YOUR most submitted questions on happiness this week. From sharing about the most misunderstood ideas on happiness (hello money!) and the most overlooked aspects of happiness, to whether single people can actually be as happy as married couples, to the fastest way to lift yourself up out of sadness (the answer might surprise you), this episode of Podcrushed will leave you armed with new insights to improve your happiness, in the short and long term. Follow Podcrushed on socials:XTikTokInstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's some work by Liz Dunn who's at the University of British Columbia where she does these studies where she hands people money on the street and she tells them either, hey, spend it on yourself and treat yourself or, hey, spend this on somebody else and do something nice for your community or for someone else. And she has people to predict which of these will make you happier. And people overwhelmingly think spending on myself going to make me happier. But then she runs a study and she finds it's exactly the opposite. Right. And so I think part of the problem is that in some ways maybe capitalism was so successful because our intuitive theories of the human mind, in part informed by some of the stuff we were talking about. But I think just like, you know, our minds think that we'll be happier by investing in ourselves. And the data suggests it's really just the opposite.

Welcome to Podcrushed. We're hosts. I'm Penn. I'm Sophie and I'm Nava. And I think we would have been your middle school besties. Miserable. Seeking happiness. Welcome to Pod Crush. Sophie's not here as you... We kicked her off the island, finally. Yeah.

You know, as you probably won't notice, I think. But only because you can't tell female voices apart. So, you know, as far as you know, Sophie was part of this episode. Yeah. We miss Sophie, but Sophie is making herself happy today. Yeah, we're on vacation? She took the mandate. I think she's on vacation.

Yeah. We're not even sure. We don't know what Sophie's are. She's at an outlet mall. So today's guest is an expert on happiness And I have to ask you, Penn We're not even going to like We're not even going to like rib each other a little bit before we

This ties into the question that I was going to If you were a little more patient All right, well, I'm not So let's get to it I was going to ask you Penn Sort of in keeping with the theme of the episode What is one thing that made you really happy this week? Oh yeah

Well, it's always easy with the kids, right? there's always these like moments that they that their faces come alive like the 14 year old not so much right he's going through a phase where he's trying to dampen every single emotion like a true young man oh sad but the little ones they i mean we have a three-year-old i mean when his face lights up it's just so pure it's it's so easy to at least for a moment you know recognize gratefully like That's subjectively great and should make me happy. Yeah. So then I ask, why am I miserable?

What made me actually happy? Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. This is going to sound silly. I had a really, really incredible deep conversation with my wife, with Domina. Why is that silly? It's not silly, but it sounds like what makes people happy. It is, actually.

as you'll learn from our episode, but it's just on paper. You know, it doesn't look that exciting. Disagree. You're wrong, as always. What about you? Yeah, no, I've had a great week. Maybe two things that made me particularly happy this week. One of them, I feel like you guys have been like, this girl, can she ever shut up about her dog? Her dog and her dead mom just again and again.

But my dog, Louis, when I got him, was like a wild devil child. and has gradually, you know, been less and less that. But lately, he's, like, in his meek era, he's just been so meek. I don't know how to explain it, but it just makes me so happy. He's just so sweet and, like, oh, my God, I love him so much. That's number one. But also, I, on Friday, this actually relates to what Dr. Sanchez will say, too. I had a lot going on.

I had been invited to go to this, like, jazz night at Lackma with some friends. And I was very busy and was going to cancel. But I was like, I feel like going to go. out with people will make me happy. Like, I think that I should end this week. It wasn't a bad week, but I should end this week doing something that will bring a lot of joy. So I push myself to not cancel. And I often do cancel on things that are social that would be good for me.

And it was so fun. I'd never been to Lachma, the music, the atmosphere, the picnic, the friends. It was just so nice. And I'm so happy that I did that. And it really ties in with some of the tips that Dr. Sanchez will share for things that actually make us happy. Yeah, so let's get to that then. we have Dr. Lori Santos

who if you don't know is the host and creator of the Happiness Lab which is a super successful podcast you probably know about it if you're listening to ours I would think if not you really should go and listen to it she has accomplished so much

I can't list them all but she is the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Lab Rotori she is the director of Yale's Canine Cognition Lab. She was the former head of Yale's Cillam in College. Now she is

she's teaching the most attended class at Yale ever. Actually one fourth of the Yale student body attended her class. She's doing incredible things. Linking. Well, not linking. She's exploring the science of happiness,

really. And what do we want more than to be happy? I really think you should listen to this episode and then go and listen to hers. Her whole podcast is phenomenal. We have Dr. Lori Santos coming up right after the break. Does anyone else ever get that nagging feeling that their dog might be bored? And do you also feel like super guilty about it?

Well, one way that I combat that feeling is I'm making meal time everything it can be for my little boy, Louis. Nom Nom does this with food that actually engages your pup senses with a a mix of tantalizing smells, textures, and ingredients. Nom Nom offers six recipes bursting with premium proteins, vibrant veggies and tempting textures designed to add excitement to your dog's day. Pork potluck, chicken cuisine, turkey fair, beef mash, lamb, pilaf, and turkey and chicken cookout. I mean, are you kidding me?

I want to eat these recipes. Each recipe is cooked gently in small batches to seal in vital nutrients and maximize digestibility. and their recipes are crafted by vet nutritionists. So I feel good knowing its design with Louie's health and happiness in mind. Serve Nom Nom as a complete and balanced meal or is a tasty and healthy addition to your dog's current diet. My dogs are like my children, literally, which is why I'm committed to giving them only the best. Hold on, let me start again because I've only been talking about Louie. Louis is my bait.

Louis, you might have heard him growl just now. Louie is my little baby and I'm committed to only giving him the best. I love that Nom Nom's recipes contain wholesome nutrient rich food, meat that looks like meat and veggies that look like veggies because, shocker, they are. Louis has been going absolutely nuts for the lamb pilaf. I have to confess that he's never had anything like it and he cannot get enough. So he's a lamb pilaf guy. Keep mealtime exciting with NomNum available at your local pet smart store or at Chewy.

Learn more at trinom.com slash podcrushed, spelled trinom.com slash podcrushed. A 15-year-old girl who chewed through a rope to escape a serial killer. I used my front teeth to saw on the rope in my mouth. He's been convicted of murdering two young women, but suspected of many more. Maybe there's another one in that area. And now, new leads that could solve. these cold cases. They could be a victim that we have no idea he killed. Stolen voices of Dole Valley breaks the silence on August 19th. Follow us now so you don't miss an episode. Dr. Lori Santos. I

would call you absurdly high achieving but not in like some I don't know pathological way. Like you just you just it's really impressive what you've done. We love to spend time. Usually I in the adolescence and coming of age of our guests, your work is so compelling that I think we're going to spend most of the time there. However, to get a window into your mind now, I kind of want to know a little bit about your heart back then. So, like, you know, if you can paint however broader specific you want to get, just, you know, what was life like for you in New Bedford?

Is that right? That's right, yeah. Like sort of growing up and then, you know, who, just a snapshot of who Lori Santos was at, at, at, Yeah, yeah. So I think to answer that question, it helps to have a snapshot where I was a little bit before that. So very happy kid, had a little brother, you know, family grew up in a nice house in a neighborhood that wasn't so great. So it was kind of like we were doing sort of good in a neighborhood of folks who weren't doing so well. And then around the time I turned 12, my parents got divorced. We sort of had to move. I grew up kind of very like skinny, straight-haired kid and somehow puberty delivered both like more girth and chubbiness and much. my hair got curly in the way it is now. But at the time, it was this very awkward in between, like, full-on frizz phase. And I was having some trouble at school, getting a little bullied in things.

And so we decided, in part because of the move and in part because of that, to, like, switch schools. So it was a time of much change. It was a time of much kind of, like, thinking about my own identity and how I fit in. It was a time, honestly, of a lot of loneliness. And so it wasn't like, you know, peak time. for Dr. Laurie Zendez. It was a dark, it was a dark period. That's like constant with almost everybody's experience here, except for like, I'm trying

to think. No, I don't think we've ever had a guess. Well, Ed Spilliers never had a bad moment. That's right. Ed Spilliers. Let it, let the show that it's Follears did not have an awkward story. I guess I'm curious, like, just a few things before you get into your work. Who was it that opened the door to you for, to be?

be a scientist because like you know now obviously we have a lot of different rhetoric than we did back in the 70s and 80s like you were you were a girl you know you were a little girl and and very early on it seems that you must have been getting into this so like just can we can we know a little bit about that yeah honestly it was a little bit later so I remember kind of being good at science being good at math and really having the moment of like oh girls don't really do that stuff like I was good at math throughout my time and I remember in high school hearing like, oh, you don't really need that. Like, don't take calculus.

You won't really need it. And so wound up even in college, like, kind of playing catch up because of some of those decisions. Yeah. But you went to Harvard. I did go to Harvard. Yeah. So what did you do to get into Harvard? I know.

I was just really good at what I did do. I think it's maybe what happened. But no, but I think a lot of that rhetoric was there. And part of my interest in psychology happened, you know, almost as an accident. I wound up taking intro psych because it kind of seemed cool, but it was really like an extra class, like some other class that I wanted to take had like fallen through. and I sort of added it on. And I also had this sort of conceptual confusion

about how office hours and college work. You know, if you've been to college, you know it's like, you go and ask professors a question. But in my, like, freshman brain, it got coded as like something I had to do, like, a midterm to, like, pass the class. So I was like, oh, man, the stupid office hours, I got to get this hour over with. And so I showed up first week of classes in my professor's office

thinking that there would be like some procedure for office hours. And he was kind of confused about like, you don't have anything to ask me, why are you here? So he was like, why are you here? Did you want to work at my last? or something. And I was like, oh, work in your lab. That sounds cool. And so I started there and the rest was history. So it was really a kind of confusion that got me started. Is that what took you to, I don't remember the name of the island, but an island off of...

In Monkey Island in Puerto Rico. Yeah. So my day job was really studying animals. This was actually a lab I worked in before that. It was a lab that studied mental imagery and how you kind of can view the world and it's different parts through the images you have in your mind. And at the time, the professor, when I started, because he wasn't expecting a new research assistant, I just kind of rolled through, he was obsessed with ice skating. So I started this project on whether ice skaters have better mental imagery than the rest of us. Fast answer is, no, it was like a two-year project that went absolutely nowhere. But that was my glorious beginning. If you recall, how would you at around 12 or 13 have been thinking about happiness?

What was that to you? Oh, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I think I, you know, fell prey to a lot of the same biases as my students have now, that happiness was ultimately about me getting good grades and doing well in school. I think not as extreme as the pressure that a lot of students face. You know, I think it wasn't my end-all be-all. I was still spending a lot of free time hanging out with friends and just goofing around.

Like, it wasn't as intense as I think a lot of teens face, like, life right now. Did you have any? We always do have to ask, first crush or, or heartbreak? Do you have a story there? I mean, so the sad thing is, you know, this is going to date me, but I was really obsessed with new kids on the block. Yeah, that's great, yeah.

I was so obsessed at the time with Jordan Knight that I fought with my Catholic school to allow them to let my confirmation name be Jordan. If you're a nerdy Catholic, you know that confirmation names have to be some saint, and they're like, Jordan's not a saint. And I actually wrote an essay in eighth grade that the River Jordan...

I was going to say... It featured prominently in the... Bible. And so they should let me do it. And I think they just gave up. They're like, fine, your confirmation name. Wow. So first love, first heartbreak, Jordan Knight. I also didn't know that she went to a Catholic school, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. Well, that was one of the transitions. So I'd kind of gone to Catholic school, think like small classrooms, like, you know, 20 kids who know each other for a long time. And so that's why the bullying was a little rough. And so then subsequently switched to public school where I was kind of a face in the crowd. And that worked out much better for high school. I'm not sure how sharing stories like this relates to happiness if there's a relationship. But the other question that we ask every guest is to share an embarrassing memory from that time, if you have one.

There was one time that we went to like a Six Flags kind of amusement park. And they had, you know, they have these like photo things. You can take like old-time photos or cool photos. But one of the fake photo things they had was that you could be on the cover of like Teen Beat magazine, like a Teen Magazine, which again, rewinding to my childhood in the 90s was like thing, right? And I was like, oh my gosh, I want that. I want the 8 by 10 of me on the Teen Beat magazine. And I posed, like, for this, you know, $12 picture thinking I looked like the most beautiful,

the most cool that I've ever looked in my life. And I look at the photo now and I was just like, you know, it was like total like fail, you know, just kind of like awkward, you know, teen years kind of fail. Like it could have been on one of these Reddit threads, right? And I think it just, you know, showed that this transition period is hard for everyone, right? that we're all trying to make sense of our identity. We're all trying to do it the best we can, but sometimes it doesn't always go well.

Do you know anything about the signs of the brain at this time? Yeah. So I think a couple of things to say there. One is like, your brain's not done yet at this point, but it's making all kinds of new connections, and it's really growing at this time. And a lot of the regions in which it is growing are these domains where you're kind of thinking about social connections.

How do I think about other people? How do other people think about me? right? How do I think about risk in terms of what I'm going to do to fit in with the crowd, right? Like a lot of the regions that are developing in the brain are the regions that are making sense of your social position in the world. And I think that that alongside what's happening in your bodies where your bodies are developing systems to like, you know, go out and form relationships and have sex. And like, yeah, exactly. It's just such a tough time. And I think it, you know, it reflects in the kind of chaos that people see. Neurally there's like kind of a lot of growth and change and chaos and in life there's a lot of growth and change in chaos too. Do you think that the because it sounds like what you've been doing somewhat systematically, it's not all you've been doing, but it's almost like debunking myths about happiness so that people can actually be happy.

That's right. That's right. And although you've not successfully saved the world, do you like, I'm thinking right now, of course we think about this a lot on this show, but in the context of having you here, I'm suddenly like, it's crystallized in a different way, it feels to me like the myths that adults carry on and perpetuate and believe in and invest in around happiness really fall so heavy on the shoulders of kids growing up. Totally. And I think this has really gotten worse, right? I think our ideas about the fact that, you know, money will make you happy.

You know, getting all these accolades at work, like being successful will make you happy. kind of pushing yourself, hustle culture, you know, go, go, go, that'll make you happy. These are the things that adults fall prey to, but these are the things that parents are instilling in middle schoolers, right? It's why, you know, I as a 12-year-old never thought about, like, you know, I was like, oh, maybe I'll go to college, but I wasn't like, I must get this on my SATs and all my extracurriculars must be in this line so I could, you know, feed them to an admissions officer. Like, you know, this kind of accolade stress is getting in much earlier, you know, even during middle school. where you see a lot of middle schoolers not just kind of enjoying school because it's like school

and this fun place you learn but it's this stressful place and it's not just kind of academics in school, right? It's a lot of students' extracurricular activities. I hear from middle schoolers and teens who talk about how much they started playing soccer or running track because they loved it

and now they hate it because it feels like there's something they have to do where their performance matters so much and so I think one of the things that adults mess up for kids is they really build in that these extrinsic rewards are going to be what makes you happy your grades and your performance and that trophy at the end and there are data not just that those things don't make us as happy as we think but that they can sometimes impede our happiness that when we get stuck up on extrinsic rewards it makes it harder to get the intrinsic rewards that come out of the things that we do in life right that makes me think about um i think it is your first episode is your first episode the unhappy millionaire or is that very close yeah very close okay um it's like one of the tent polls you know, I think, right?

Because it so clearly dispels some, like, major, so our biggest myths about happiness. And I'm just thinking about, when you're talking about what I think was called hedonic adaptation, where, if I'm getting this right, the good things that we imagine don't last as long in terms of what they provide for our happiness spikes. And the bad things that we fear are never really as bad

as we think they're going to be. And our ability to adapt and be resilient it is greater than we often believe. Exactly. So it's sort of like we're imagining higher highs and lower lows. And in reality, we have, I don't want to frame it negatively. It's like we have a more stable, maybe. We have like maybe a more just sort of stable and consistent experience.

Yeah. It's really the circumstances of life don't affect us as much as we think. And I think this is two consequences for teens, right? One is that the good things aren't going to be as good as you think, right? Getting that perfect grade, getting into the perfect. college, you know, having that, you know, boy or girl, you know, call you back or check in, right? Like, those good things just aren't going to keep you sustained as long as you think. But even more important for teams, I think, is the flip side, right, which is that the bad things

aren't going to stick around forever. You know, if I could talk to 12-year-old Lori to tell her, you know, that, you know, one weird conversation that your friend had or that note that got passed that fell on the floor, that, you know, that person in class read, that bad grade, like, those aren't going to matter at all for your happiness. They're just these like blips in the big scheme of things. And I think we really don't realize that. And I think we especially don't realize that in teen years where everything can feel, you know, so much huger than it's felt before.

It makes me think for adults, actually, we've just taken that and like, we're like, no, to know, the note in class doesn't matter. But my promotion at work, you know. Yeah, I like it. Like, and of course, they're not equivalent. Like, they do have more implications, but, but. But for our happiness, maybe not. Okay. Great.

You said it. I don't want to say it. I'm not the expert. We asked our listeners to submit questions for unhappiness. And I mentioned this earlier, but I think, I don't want to exaggerate. We got hundreds. We might have gotten about 1,000. At some point, I couldn't keep sorting through them.

But I did try to pull the ones that came up the most. The one that came up the most was, how would you define happiness? Is it subjective or are there objective markers? Yeah. It's kind of a tricky question, right? Like one of the things I wish as a scientist is we could have an objective way to measure happiness. Like there's like a little happiness thermometer and you could put it in and be like, you're 98.6, you know, unhappy or something. Like that doesn't exist.

The only way we have to ask people is subjective. You know, we give these sort of surveys about, you know, all things considered, how happy are you? Or which of these positive emotions have you experienced? And that can sound like a cheesy, like BuzzFeed survey, like some, you know, TikTok survey or something like that. But there's tons of actual psychometrics, which is like the real super nerdy science. of like validating these measures. And it turns out that these seemingly simple sounding like happiness surveys, like all things considered how happy are you with your life,

the sort of one item measure, it correlates with things like detailed interviews of your friends and family members, or if I did some like machine learning analysis on your like journals and social media posts, how much emotion you are showing. And so it is subjective, but it's good subjective, right? There's subjective measures that are pretty valid. And in some ways, it's kind of what we want when we ask, If we're looking at happiness to try to study, how can we make you happier, right?

You know, a lot of my work is giving people these interventions and practices they can use to feel better. Ultimately, what I want to change is not some thermometer measure of their happiness. I want them to say, yeah, actually, after I did this intervention, all things considered, I'm happier with my life. I feel better. I have more positive emotion. So it kind of works. But a different way to answer the question is sort of what should be in our definition of happiness. And I think researchers often think of happiness as having these two parts.

It's kind of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is your sense of positive emotion, right? I feel good today. It just feels good to be me. And it's not the absence of negative emotions. We might come to this, but there's lots of data that a good and flourishing life involves having negative emotions. But you want the ratio to be pretty decent between the positive and negative.

That's kind of being happy in your life. But you also want to be happy with your life. You want to feel like things are going well. You want to think, you know, all things considered I'm satisfied in my life. I have purpose and so on. And it's worth noting that sometimes these things dissociate. You know, you might have people who, you know, think of your favorite TikTok star who's like, you know, living their best hedonic life and they're on planes and airplanes or whatever.

But maybe how they think their life is going is like empty and purposeless and whatever. And we sometimes have the opposite where we're doing something really meaningful that matters to us and we think is important. But it comes with some negative emotions. You know, we're talking about teens, but I often think that like new parents here. You know, when you have a newborn, you know, positive emotions down the toilet and you're not sleeping. It's a mess. But meaning-wise, you're feeling really happy. And so the best case scenario is we're bumping both of those things up.

Right. Stick around. We'll be right back. All right. So let's just, let's just real talk, as they say, for a second. That's a little bit of an aged thing to say now. That dates me, doesn't it? But no, real talk.

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I sometimes use it in the morning, sometimes use it at night. All three of these things taste incredible. Honestly, you don't even need to mix it with water. And yeah, I just couldn't recommend them highly enough. If you want to try them out, go to symbiotica.com slash podcrushed for 20% off plus free shipping. That's symbiotica.com slash podcrushed for 20% off plus free shipping. As the seasons change, it's the perfect time to learn something new. Whether you're getting back into a routine after summer or looking for a new challenge before the year ends,

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iExl.com slash podcrushed. Visit ixl.com slash podcrushed to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. When did you get into happiness specifically? Because it sounds like you really got into psychology and then like when does it become happiness and how did that click over for you. Yeah. I was kind of interested in psychology for a long time from ice skaters to studying animals and how they think and all these kinds of things in the field. But happiness as an interest started specifically when I took on a new role as a professor. So I'd been teaching at Yale for a long time. But then around a couple of about five years ago, I took on a new role on campus where I became a head of college, which meant I lived with students on campus. And I'd been a professor, I'd seen

students all the time, but I hadn't seen students in the trenches. And what I saw, honestly, just sort of shocked me. I mean, I was seeing this college student mental health crisis up close and personal where students were reporting, feeling stressed and anxious and depressed all the time. I saw, you know, cases of suicidality, panic attacks, right, just utter overwhelm. And I was thinking, like, man, we as university professors, we're not doing our job unless we're solving for this. You know, students are learning if they're kind of experiencing this much mental health dysfunction. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I'm like, so, you know, I'm a nerdy psychologist.

I'm like, oh, I, you know, my field should have some tips for how we can deal with this. So I kind of retrained in this sort of happiness science to sort of put all these tips together and then decided to teach a class on, on campus about it, you know, thinking it's like a new class and a few students would show up. And the first time I taught it became Yale's largest class in over 300 years. We had, you know, over a thousand students. It was a quarter of the entire student body showed up. You now have, still on record, the most attended class. Is that right?

Correct. Yeah. And it was like kind of a logistical nightmare because when you have, there's not really spots on campus other than the football stadium where a quarter of the student body can be at once. So were you teaching in a football stadium? We weren't. It was cold. You know, Connecticut is. Not because it was cold, not because it wasn't warranted. We taught in a concert hall, which is the next best thing.

That's amazing. You're an actual rock star on campus. Oh, yeah, you must be the most popular professor at Yale ever. Another question, and this kind of maybe relates to the unhappy millionaire. By the way, that's one of my favorite podcast episodes of any podcast that I've ever listened to. And there was about a year where I was very obnoxious and I would like send it to everyone and be like, this is required. I did tend to have. I was like, no, but would you relax?

This is why. No, I was like, if we're all so. steeped in capitalism. We have to listen to this over and over again. I'm sure I was like very self-righteous about it. But it's such an amazing episode. Everyone should listen to it because we are so steeped in capitalism mentality and it really debunks a lot of things. It's such an amazing episode. So I wanted to ask you what are three, I don't know why the number three, but what are three sort of popular misconceptions about happiness? And what are three things that are overlooked that actually contributes happiness from your point of view? Yeah, no, great question. I mean, I think

one you highlighted in this unhappy millionaire episode, it's like money, right? I mean, if you survey incoming first year college students about the most important thing in life, they'll say it's to have really good finances and to be rich. And researchers have been tracking that over time and that number has been going up since the 1950s. Before in the 1950s, like, you know, some kids said, oh, that's important. But now like pretty much every, you know, versus, for example, having a good philosophy on life and having purpose in life. The answer to that question has actually gone down over time. So less and less, fewer and fewer students have said that that's important. So we definitely think money matters. And it is true that money matters if you don't have

a lot of it, right? I mean, it's worth saying that, you know, things like universal income, things like making sure we alleviate poverty, those are important things. But when you hit a certain like level of middle class income, you know, estimates vary, like there's been some quotes in literature that's something like around a salary of 75,000 US dollars or something like that. You know, we could quibble. But at a certain point, your happiness levels off. In other words, if you get more money, you're just not going to be happier. And I think that that's a really hard truth for a lot of people.

You know, when you pick your job, my student, my college students are deciding between two jobs. They often pick the one that has a higher salary, right? Even if it moves them away from their family and their friends and the hours are terrible, right? And so I think money is really a big misconception. I think a second misconception is about kind of the importance of you. and like self-care and your individual success and me, me, me, right? So much of our culture is about kind of building up the resources that we have and the rewards that we get. And by and large, most of the happiness science shows that that kind of doesn't matter as much,

that we get much more happiness bang for our buck by investing in other people, whether it's our money or our time or our energy. We kind of get that wrong. And I think a final thing that we get wrong a lot about happiness is that happiness is about being happy all the time. By that, I mean, it's like positive emotion all the time. Any challenge or negativity or sadness or anger, that is bad. And we kind of want to get rid of that. And really the research shows that we need negative emotions as signals. They help us kind of figure stuff out in life, but also just for a life of flourishing, you want to kind of have a balance between positive and

negative emotions. And a lot of the things that bring happiness, you know, finding meaning, finding purpose, it's going to come with some challenge and some tough spots. And so I think, you know, and this is something I think we get right more often in the physical health domain, right? Like I know if I'm going to get fit and go to the gym, you know, I'm going to have to lift some weights and that's going to be a pain and like my muscles are going to stretch. They might be sore afterwards, but I can see physical health on the other side of that. I think we forget that mental health comes on the other side of some of these negative emotions. So those are some of the things we get wrong. And I think some of the things we,

miss, social connection being one of them, right? That just, it's not about us, but then the flip side is like, it really is about other people. And I think that this is something our teens today are missing out on a lot, right? If you just look at time use patterns, teens today are around other humans less often, you know, because they have this sort of crutch of connecting over screens, but screens don't necessarily have the same psychological benefit of in-person social connection or doing nice things for other people. So I think we miss out on the power of other people. I think we miss out on the power of being present and just like noticing what's going on here again. I think the screens are kind of messing us up because they're really easy way to stay

distracted all the time. Podcasts are very healthy for our mental health. Yeah. Podcasts you talk about with friends, you recommend the unhappy millionaire. Like that's cool, you know, but really it's like the other screen time that's, you know, potentially problematic. And then I think a final thing that like the culture really messes up. And I think this is, I see this in my college students. I think is definitely true in middle school and high school students, too, is just kind of an attitude of positivity, noticing the good things in life, being grateful, sounds so cheesy, but the wholesome stuff kind of matters for the direction that our attitude goes. And again, I think this is something that's kind of countercultural right now. I look at the memes that my college students make,

and none of the memes are like wholesome memes about good stuff. They're all like complaining about the dining hall, about whatever, about the terrible things in life. And it can be so easy with just the content that's out there to get stuck on the negative. But kind of training yourself to find the good in the world can be really powerful for happiness. I think we forget how powerful that can be. Is the idea that there should be a baseline and a lot of us don't? Or is there, like, how do you talk about that?

It's not a well-articulated question. I'm recognizing that. But like, what is that? What is a baseline level of happiness like? Yeah, I think one way to answer that question is, and I think this sort of fits with a lot of what people think is that we're kind of just like happier we're not. Like there's some built-in thing, whether it's genetic or whatever, that's like, you're like a happy person or you're like a not-so-happy person.

And there is some evidence that, in fact, when it comes to the genetics, when it comes to what's called heritability, there is some idea that that actually is the case. So genetically speaking, like some of us are happier than others. And you could think of the biology of this, right? Some of us have more stress hormones or some, whatever. But it's not nearly as much as we think. it's probably around, maybe around 40%, you know, the heritability estimates of happiness. And what that means is two things, right?

One is that happiness isn't built in, but then it also means the flip side of that, which is that we can control a lot of our happiness. The problem is we control it the wrong way. We go after money and accolades. What we should be trying to do is to control it with our behavior and our mindset, things like social connection, being more present,

being more grateful, and so on. Yeah, it makes me think that happy as a word has lost so much meaning. Totally. Like, we don't have a great language around happiness. We say happy and it's just, it sounds like very thin. Yeah, and it probably encompasses all these things. I think we need better terms.

This is the spot where I think, you know, the ancients had it better. You know, Aristotle had concepts like eudaemia, which is a sort of term for like the flourishing life, you know, life of meaning and purpose and connection. Yeah, I think it's pretty flat when it comes to happiness these days. So that actually relates to another question. These things are all connected and maybe it's like we don't. when I get in a semantic kind of debate here, but like, what is the difference between happiness and joy and contentment? And are they distinct, or should we be thinking of them as deeply

interrelated? I like to think of being happy as kind of getting happiness. And that has these sort of two parts, kind of being happy in your life, you know, your positive emotion, and being happy with your life, how you think of it. Joy and contentment, I would say a lot of those are emotions, right? you know, like you experience joy from something that's happening, contentment, a particular kind of emotion where it's not, like, it's positive, but it's not like that extreme. It's kind of just your baselines are present and happy. And so I think we can kind of get confused when it comes to these terms.

And honestly, it's just a mess. What we try to do in the classes just define the terms at the outset. And like, let's just be really careful about, you know, using the terms in these very particular ways. Well, because so many of us were coming to this kind of discussion as novices here, just, you know, new to the conversation. this language. Let's just, let's reiterate, even though you've now said it in two different ways. What is that? Just because I feel like I probably need it, everyone listening probably

needs it, those two factors that you just said. It's happy in your life and happy with your life, right? Those are the two kind of ways. And if you think of those terms, it kind of starts to make sense. Like, what would it mean to be happy in my life? Like, oh, that would mean it feels good to be me during the day to day, right? Like lots of positive emotions. And again, we don't want to get stuck, like probably some negative emotions, there's going to be up and downs, right? But like, overall, there's a lot of laughter and joy and contentment and pleasure and these kinds of things, right? That's kind of how it feels in your life. But what would it mean to be happy with your life? Like, maybe if you just had all that hedonic pleasure, like, you know, that'd be fine, but

you kind of want more. You want to be moving towards goals. You want to be, like, feeling like you're connected with other people. You want to have a sense of purpose and meaning that you're doing something that matters, that's kind of like, okay, how do you think your life is going? And so if we kind of are happy in our lives with all this positive emotion and then happy with our lives, like we think, you know, we think about our lives is going well, then those two things together, I think they give you like a happy life overall. Are there any populations or demographics that we see are like statistically happier than others for, and I'm thinking of social factors here?

Totally. Yeah, there's a lot of good work sort of studying happiness cross-culturally, right? Some of you may have heard about this thing called The World Happiness Report. If you go in March, they kind of list like Norway and Scandinavian countries are happier than other countries. And there is some there there, right? I think a lot of countries that have a lot of social protections in place wind up being happier. So if you look at the World Happiness Report, typically it's countries like Denmark or Norway or Sweden, countries in Scandinavian. Andesavia that wind up happier than, say, the United States or even places in Asia and so on.

And one big reason is that they have social structures that promote a lot of the behaviors that we think of as helping you be happier. So take social connection, right? If you look at a place like Denmark, they have kind of less time at work, right? And enforced kind of time so you can be part of your clubs. Your parents get to go home with their families a lot earlier. They're like social safety nets, right? So there's a universal income so people can not have to feel. like they're working all the time and things like that. And so you have more time for social

connection. There's also like cultural things about like enforced rest and presence. Some of you may have heard this term like Hugo, which is the sort of Scandinavian term for kind of like being present in the like cozy space with like candles and cozy blankets and things like that. And that's just kind of a culturally shared attitude of just kind of being present and maybe grateful, especially in like the cold of winter where you get in Scandinavia. It's kind of a mess. And so the idea is we do see these differences in across nations about some are happier than others. But it's not like those nations are just genetically built to be happier. Of course not, yeah.

Those nations are doing things and have social structures set up that are good at promoting happiness. This is, no one's submitted this question, and it's maybe a little more political than you might want to see. You maybe don't want to answer it. But I've been thinking about this actually since listening to the unhappy millionaire and doing some research on wealth. I used to work at the UN. And while the UN is sort of like,

really, there's a lot of, you know, common agreement that we should eradicate poverty. It's very hard to introduce the concept of regulating wealth and sort of capping extreme wealth. And the organization that I worked for was really often trying to introduce that concept. It was like, no buy and like nobody else wanted to really be, not many people wanted to be part of that conversation. And I remember listening to that episode and feeling really angry. Like there's no justification. It doesn't make anyone happier, but it destabilizes communities.

when certain individuals are allowed to hoard so much wealth. And so I wonder, one, if you just, if you have thoughts on, like, how extreme wealth contributes to social ill, and why you think we allow it? Like, why is it so steeped in our cultural, in our collective mindset, that wealth is so important and that we should, it shouldn't have any sort of conditions? Yeah, I have a lot. I mean, we could do several podcast episodes on what I have to say about this question. Yeah, I mean, I think I have exactly the same intuition that you did, Nava, which is like,

It does seem like if you look at the happiness science that as you reach a certain wealth level, more money is not going to make you happy. So, like, why should we allow people to be ultra billionaires, right? Like, definitely when you get to that level, it's just not making people happier. And the flip side is also true that people at lower income levels, if they could just get an infusion of cash, would wind up being much happier, right? And so I think the happiness science suggests, like, a lot of policies about redistribution of wealth, right? you're not going to be hurting the overall flourishing and well-being of the rich people, but you'd be helping a lot the flourishing and well-being of the not-so-rich people. So why are people against it?

I think one of the reasons is that we have this bias of hedonic adaptation, right? We don't realize that we get used to stuff. So I think, like, well, you know, I have this much money now. If I got more, I'd only be happier. So I think one of the reasons that many people kind of fight are kind of not interested in these sort of measures of redistributing wealth is they think, well, maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to hit the lottery or get a promotion and I'll be wealthier. And I don't want people taking that money for me because obviously I'll personally

be happier if I have more wealth. But probably you're not going to get that wealthy. Like most of us are not going to become Bezos, you know, overnight tomorrow. And even if you did, you might not be happier. So I think it's both the these, we kind of disbelieve the evidence about money and happiness, but also we have these biases to think like more and more, if I only got more, I would be happier. And I think this is true in so many different domains, right, where we also see that people really respond negatively to a lot of policy interventions that are about giving money directly, for example.

Like, you know, how should we help homeless people? You know, we'll have these different programs and things. They're like, actually, you could just give homeless people money and then they could, like, get a home and things like that. But people are like, oh, no, you know, those people will, you know, buy substances with them that I don't want them to buy, they won't make good decisions and you know but actually so much of the data shows that if you just gave people more money they would be happier and they'd use it correctly and use it in the ways

that you'd kind of want them using it and so yeah I think a lot of our biases have these very clear policy implications about what the united nations should be doing what governments should be doing how we should be restricting capitalism but these biases of our mind are so insidious we think but not for me I really want the possibility of getting super wealthy because that yeah will make me happy, even though the data show probably won't. A lot of the seeds of early capitalism came out around the time when we were thinking about things like scarcity and thinking about things like the invisible hand, this idea that, you know, they will like lift all boats and things like that. It was also coming around the times of, you know, Darwin and Darwin in theory where

it's like survival of the fittest and competition, right? And I think Darwin was right about many solitary animals when it comes to the fitness of your genes. But even Darwin recognized that we shouldn't necessarily apply that exclusively to social species like humans, right, where there's a lot of evolutionary pressures for things like altruism and doing nice things for other people. And, you know, Darwin would say, like, that works because then we get, you know, reciprocation and we get our own. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is still a very, like, kind of myopic way of thinking about it. But ultimately, when it comes to our psychology, we might not be built, be built, like in this myopic kind of capitalist way, what resonates with our psychology might be being more social, doing nice things for others, like creating community, that's where our sense of meaning

and purpose might really come from. That might ultimately make us feel better. I think the failure of our psychology is that we don't have good intuitive theories about that. In other words, we don't recognize that most of our happiness would come from doing nice things for others. And there are these, like, lovely studies that show this, right?

You know, there's some work by Liz Dunn, who's at the University of British Columbia, where she does these studies where she hands people money on the street and she tells them either, hey, spend it on yourself and treat yourself or, hey, spend this on somebody else and do something nice for your community or for someone else. And she has people to predict which of these will make you happier. And people overwhelmingly think spending on myself going to make me happier. But then she runs a study and she finds it's exactly the opposite. Right. And so I think part of the problem is that in some ways maybe capitalism was so successful because our intuitive theories of the

human mind, in part informed by some of the stuff we were talking about. But I think just like, you know, our minds think that we'll be happier by investing in ourselves. And the data suggests it's really just the opposite. I mean, this is by and large, I think, one of the biggest problems of our mind is that our own theories about how our mind works, a lot of those are wrong. And so that means we're all investing in our happiness. We're putting time in. We're putting the work in. But we're putting the wrong work in both as individuals and as societies. And we'll be right back. Does anyone else ever get that nagging feeling that their dog might be bored?

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of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted. If you're a fan of books about Asian American identity, like crying and age smart or coming of age stories like somebody's daughter, be sure to pick up fetishized, available wherever books are sold. The way you're saying this, it makes me think like if we could just lift off that and it feels thin these theories, you know? It's like these theories are kind of impressed on us and it's like I feel like if we could just lift them off

and just like be ourselves more so much would work itself out and be a lot easier, far more than we anticipate. I think so and even I think even a lot of the kind of processes that happen in capitalism if we could start listening to these things we'd get closer. I mean, and I think that there's this

stuff is changing. I think there's a new set of economists who are looking at these data really seriously and saying, wait, on. Like, we are getting this wrong. There's lovely new study that just came out of the University of Oxford that's looking at the topic of happiness at work. Like, what makes us happy at work? And people think, like, oh, it must be, you know, if you're earning more money, right? You've double your salary that will make you happy at work, right? Like, we have these kind of predictions about, or that I'm, like, getting, you know, benefits from my office.

Like, rewards for me will make me happier at work. But then researchers actually look at what it is. They have this wonderful data set that comes from Indeed, you know, this job website that reviews everybody's jobs. They have 15 million data points where people rated their companies on all these factors and studied their happiness. And so they look and it turns out, yeah, you know, salary, fair pay, that's important up to a point. But it's kind of middle of the pack when it comes to your happiness of all the factors they look at. The biggest one is a sense of belonging at work is that you have social connection. You feel like your work matters, that people, you're not just like a cog in this big machine that like what you do

matters to people. And the more important thing and the reason I think it's so relevant for this capitalism discussion is they look at okay well what are the consequences of a bunch of people in your organization being happy because they've got 50 million people they can say are the companies with the happiest people doing better in terms of their profits they must be they must be they pick the top hundred companies and they find that those companies if you had invested in those companies like back in the 90s or in back in 2000 you would wind up beating the snp 500 which is the main metric of people's investments of what you should invest in and then you'd be wealthy and miserable is the irony.

But this is the point is like I think we think like oh we need to pay attention to like all this you know like normal capitalismism but like actually just who's socially connected who's happy these things are going to wind up mattering much more than we think. It's just so like obvious

just as an aside you know. I don't remember where I read it. I'm terrible about that but I very recently read a study or like an excerpt from a study that said that people who do like if someone does an act of service for you. They used to think that the person who received the act of service would be more bonded with a person who did something for them. But it's actually the person

who does something for you who feels a stronger bond for you. So the article was suggesting like, if you like someone, you should ask them to do something nice for you because they're going to bond with you. And then they're going to want to like do more nice things for you. And I thought that was so interesting. And like, yeah, it is the opposite of what I would have expected. But it makes sense, given everything you're saying, like we feel happy when we serve others so we bond with the people that we serve that we do nice things for it makes us like like them even more just so interesting we actually have a new episode of our upcoming we're doing an upcoming season on kind of all the things we get wrong with social interaction and friendships oh i love that we have a

whole episode on ask for help more often because we think like oh i don't want to put somebody in an awkward position or i don't want to get rejected i don't want to say no but actually you're helping other people's happiness by letting them help you and so why not kind of you know boost the pie I think this is maybe the major error of capitalism is that we think in there's sort of this like zero-sum game that like my win is your loss that's richly embedded in how we think about the economy and everything and everything in the happiness works suggest these cases

where the pie increases the better we do. My win is your win. And your win is my win. Exactly. Like, and my loss is your loss. Exactly. It's actually like if science is showing us that, like for F's sake, can we just get beyond, who's going to devise the system?

Where is we going to go from? We need it so badly. It's going to come from all. Normally. Oh, yeah, because I'm a scientist. This might be our first thing. He's leaving it explicit. So this is great.

No, it's because I want my children to listen to this episode. Well, I was going to say, I honestly think it's going to come from the next generation. I think, you know, I have, you know, my Yale class. I have an online class that's just for middle school and teenagers called the science of well-being for teens, where we kind of redo all your real content, just, you know, kind of more in middle school and examples that, you know, you know, middle schoolers can resonate with. And the stuff I hear from these students is like, this doesn't fit with everything people are telling me.

And like, and this is BS, right? Like, I want to push back. Like, we need to change the system. And so I think the young people today realize, like, they're seeing the disconnect. They're seeing that we know major course correct in how we do so much stuff. And I'm really hopeful that they'll learn these principles about happiness and what really matters and that they'll help the older folks with a bit of a course. correct.

Totally. Okay. Another area we haven't broached that came up a lot in many different ways, but maybe we can summarize it, is what is the relationship between romantic love and happiness? And then this question is, it's very specific, and I don't know if you'll have an answer, but someone wanted to know, can a single person or can single people really be as happy as happily married people? Ah, good question.

I'll take the second one first since it's more specific. lots of studies about happiness and marriage and these things. And it's really a story about hedonic adaptation, unfortunately. So, you know, just before you get married, you very happy with your relationship, then you get married and you serve this peak of happiness. And that peak is like the highest when you first get married, maybe for the first year after marriage. But then if you start surveying people's happiness in like year three, year four, year five, you kind of just go back to baseline.

And so it is the case that good relationships give us like lots of social connection and so on. But like so many things that we know from happiness, like just getting to, you know, like happily ever after in the like Disney sense of romantic relationships or finding your perfect partner. Like it's unless you do things to really invest in that happiness, you're just going to kind of naturally go back to baseline. That's what that's, that makes me think of like marriage or like a committed relationship is a space where you can do those things where you're engaging. in the behavior that it's like service to one another, actually. So it doesn't have to. So whenever we talk about these cases of hedonic adaptation, it's kind of like, that's the default.

Without some work and effort, you're just going to go back to baseline. And sadly, that's what happens on average for most marriages, but with some work and effort. And by the way, I just want to say it's like it's because we're not taught any of this. Exactly. You go back to baseline in any relationship because you've never been told that you have to, I don't want to say work, because we've talked a lot about that. the show and how it's kind of a misconception around it. But you have to think of, you have to be active.

Intentional, right? You have to be proactive and intentional. Yes, I like that. Yeah. And I think, you know, I mean, I think this is something that, you know, again, if I was designing middle school or if I was a middle schooler myself, I'd be so angry about. It's like, we have to take, you know, I don't know, like math and history and this. And that stuff's important, but like, where are we getting taught emotional intelligence?

Where are we getting taught, like appropriate strategies for social connection? Like, we take gym. We take gym. Like, I could have gotten rid of gym. straight through 12 through 15 and been just as physically healthy as I am right now, you know, so, yeah. That's a great point.

And then so can single people be happy? Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, again, there's so many domains in which we fall prey to what researchers call the arrival fallacy, which is if only blank happened, then I would be happy.

If only I got a boyfriend or girlfriend, then I would be happy. If only got married, I would be happy. If only I got into a certain college, if only I, like, you know, wound up with this accolade at work. We think we get the thing and then we're happy.

But the research suggests we're wrong. My colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, who's in a lot of my... He was in the unhappy millionaire, lots of episodes. He's fond of saying, happily ever after only works if you have about five minutes left to live.

Yeah, I love that. I laughed out loud when he said it. In your episode, he said three minutes. Three minutes. It's even shorter. It's even shorter. You tried to increase it. You know, there's a...

There's not a quote, but like just a little... colloquialism i've heard recently that um uh this the struggle we have in modernity and capitalism and like especially western culture i think is that we're like we're more like human doings than human beings where we're we're obsessed with this idea that we have to do the thing acquire the thing but what you're talking about is like we don't realize that there's there's something about presence or something about like the art of just being and realizing i am who i am i you know, like, I don't know what else to say about that because I don't, it's not what I study.

No, I mean, I think this is something that we all had a little bit more of a realization of in the context of the pandemic, right? Like both, you know, I think like middle schoolers who were doing a billion, you know, going to this thing, going this thing, doing over blah, blah. And that kind of came to a screeching hall. Definitely for the adults in the room who maybe stopped doing their work in the same way, some folks who were laid off, some folks who just like kind of had to chill a little bit in a different way. I think we all kind of had the realization that like maybe all this do. doing is not making us as happy as we think. And I think we had moments where just because it was so quiet, we had these times of, like, presence with like the morning coffee or walking around outside when it was quiet out, right? I think we all had these moments to kind of realize that

it's really the being present part that's the journey of life. So much. And this is the sort of alternative to this idea of the arrival fallacy is really thinking about your goals as a journey, right? You know, it's not so much that I will be happily ever after when I get, you know, married or I find a partner. But along the journey of learning more about my partner and kind of figuring this stuff out, figuring these things about me as I go through the dating life and whatever I'm going to get there. You know, same thing with work accolades. I'll be happy if I make this amount of money. No, you'll be happy along the journey of, you know, focusing on your goals, maybe failing a little bit, maybe kind of learning about yourself and growing along the way. These are the things

that matter more. It's the journey that matters for happiness, not the arrival. Okay, one was if I'm in a depressive state, we got several variations of this. Besides medicine, what helps people overcome depressive states? Yeah. Honestly, one of the things is getting social, right? And honestly, if you're feeling depressed, try to think of quick ways you could do something nice for someone else, whether that's doing something nice for a sibling, you know, giving a compliment to your parent or doing something you wouldn't normally do around the

house. If you feel pretty socially connected at school, can you text a friend and ask how they're doing? Often we get out of states of kind of feeling yucky ourselves by doing for others. it doesn't have to be this enormous thing. It can just be getting a little other oriented. And that does two things. One is you get the kind of happiness hit that comes from doing for others. But the second is that you get out of self-focus. Sometimes that depressive moment is really just this rheumatative spiral where you're just like beating yourself up over and over again. And just the act of focusing on somebody else can take you out of self-focus. That'd be one strategy.

Another strategy is to kind of find ways to get present, right? These are techniques that you would often hear, you know, if you go to clinical therapy or something like that, right? And especially do not even, it's necessarily for depression, but especially if you're feeling a lot of anxiety, which often goes with depression, right? It's like, what's a few things I can see? What are something I can hear? What does it feel like, you know, in my feet right now, in my bottom right now, in my hands right now, just like getting present.

And what that does is, again, it can kind of knock you out of that normal depression spiral of like worry and rumination and the things that normally come up. get social and get present. Okay, the other question that I wanted to ask you, which came up a lot, is what is the relationship between religion or spirituality and happiness? Oh, fabulous. You guys got some great questions, honestly. So lots of work has looked at religion and happiness.

There seems to be a pretty strong correlation between individuals who are religious and individuals who are happier. But, interestingly, it doesn't seem to be about your religious beliefs, like I believe in God or I believe it, you know, we list out your religious beliefs. It seems to be about behaviors that are associated with religion. So what do I mean? If you're religiously observant, whether you're Jewish or Catholic or Muslim, you often have to go to something that's pretty social.

You go to services, or you go to church, or you pray with a bunch of other folks. So that's social connection right there. You're often engaged in things like charity, right? You know, for many religious traditions, this is sort of brought up. Often you're engaged in practices that allow you to be really present. So things like prayer or meditation. Many religious traditions come with practices of rest, which we haven't talked about a lot, but the data suggests really matter for happiness, just having a little free time.

Let's talk about that after a religion. And so, yeah, so it seems like what the data are showing is that religious individuals are happier, but it doesn't really matter what you believe. What matters is what you do. And I think that that's helpful for folks of us who maybe want to come to happiness for more of a secular perspective. I mentioned I was in Catholic school, but these days I'm like a proper atheist. I can't believe I was confirmed, Jordan, BDM, whatever. But, yeah, I think a lot of those practices are ones where it helps to be in a religious tradition

because that means the people around you are doing some of these things naturally. But we can kind of build in our own local cultures to do a lot of those things as well. So, yeah, religion, spirituality, and happiness really important. And those are organized religions, but I think there's also lots of evidence that kind of other transcendent practices make us happier. They give us that sense that our life matters. So I'm thinking of things like positive emotions like awe, for example. Like you hear an amazing piece of music or you look at a sunset or it's a beautiful thing in nature.

Those are the kinds of things that can make us feel like it's not about us, right? There's something bigger than us. And I think this is a main message of a lot of the work in happiness. Whenever we can get out of self-focus and get to other focus, whether it's doing something nice for somebody else, having a sense like it's not all about us because look at nature or look at, you know, a spiritual figure or something like that. all these things wind up making us a little happier. You want to talk about rest, right, Penn? That's sort of the next.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can we talk about that? Yeah. I mean, rest, I think this is, you know, you mentioned this distinction between a human being and a human doing. I think it takes a lot for us to shake ourselves out of doing mode.

And that means that we often don't prioritize rest. We don't prioritize just having some free time. But the data really show that that matters a lot. In fact, research shows that kind of financial, wealth affluence is not as important for our happiness as what's often called time affluence, which is just having a little bit of free time. In fact, that if you self-report the opposite of time affluence, which people call time famine, like you're starving for time, if you report being time famish, that's as bad a hit to your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed.

So like, lose your job tomorrow, probably a big hit on your happiness. It's the same if you're just busy, busy, busy all the time. And I think this is a big one that parents get wrong when it comes to teenagers and middle schoolers and probably a distinction of what it was like to grow up in the 90s like I had a lot of free time on my hands

I would goof around with friends like I studied and stuff but like they always free time I feel like I look at today's 12 year old schedules and like there's no free it's like you know practice in the morning then you go to school

then you go this thing and then we have played date and then we do this and it's like and then I'm on my screen like my brain never never a moment off you know that actually reminds me

so I've been thinking so much about the use of screens and how I think sometimes we lack a lot of specificity when we talk about screens and technology. We make these casual generalizations about phones. And it's like, no, guys, the phone actually could do so many alleviating things. Right. I mean, look at the things we've talked about so far.

Right. Social connection. I could use the phone as a phone. It's not called I-Email or I, you know, texting or whatever. Like we could use it to connect with other people. We could use it to write in a gratitude journal. We could use it to use a meditation. listen to a fantastic podcast.

Sure. Feel transcendent awe, the wonderful stories that come out of stories that we tell and so on. But usually we're using it not to do any of those things. You know, so much data looking at just the presence of phones and social connection. One study, again, by Liz Dunn, who I mentioned earlier, checks whether or not people who are on their phone connect less well, like in crowds. So you're in a waiting room and you either have access to your phone or not. what happens to smiling that happens in the room

and you see things like 30% less smiling and you get it right like if I had my phone in the waiting room I'd be clicking on my phone you're not smiling at your phone but like multiply that by like walking around in New York City with these phones right and just the positive emotion right

and so I think what we don't often realize is that our screens and our phones are opportunity costs on other things whether that's connecting with people in real life whether that's just being present to notice like the beautiful autumn weather that we experience are just like things in nature,

things around us, being with our own thoughts so we can be present with our emotions, be they good or bad. So I think you're totally right and that like we could be using our phones in all these happiness-inducing ways. Problem is we like, we don't.

And that's because of design as well. I think we should recognize. The happiness-inducing ways, they don't always make as much money as the not-happiness-inducing ways. Never. It all goes back to capitalism, doesn't it? It does indeed.

It's just the fact that we don't know what it's like to sit and just let your brain be in a continuous train of thought anymore. It's like this phone interrupts so frequently. I mean, that has to be doing something to like just everything. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of evidence that we don't get bored as much, right, because we just pull out our phone, which has all these kind of fascinating economic indicators. One of my favorites is that sales, of gum in grocery stores have gone down,

like by like thousands of percentages. Like, why? Because when would you buy gum at a grocery store? Yeah. You're just standing in line, you're looking around, you see the gum. Now no one sees the gum because they're like looking at their phone, right? But that's like a stupid consequence.

But for us, you know, our creativity comes when we're bored. Our moments of like, oh, I should check in on that person, right? These positive pro-social thoughts come up when we're bored. There's so much that we're kind of losing by never having these moments. But what's worse is I think, you know, the phones and what's on the other side of phones have done a good job of kind of beating out in real life when it comes to interestingness of kind of content or things to do. You know, so take, you know, the kind of typical situation. I'm at dinner with my husband. My husband's this philosopher, another professor at Yale.

He's awesome. So many interesting things we could say. But I could choose conversation with him or my phone, right? And even though my phone, if my phone is binging and doing things and giving me notifications, that's bad enough. But even my phone is just sitting there, I know that on the other side of that phone is some, like, really interesting stuff. In one episode where I interviewed this researcher, Liz Dunn, she mentioned this analogy. It's like, imagine if to dinner with my husband, instead of my phone, I took a wheelbarrow. And that wheelbarrow was filled with printouts of my email since 1998, like photo albums that have gone back to, like, the early 2000s, like a bunch of videotapes of, like, celebrities doing things or porn or whatever.

Some porn on the side. Like, whatever. Like, imagine the overflowing. wheelbarrow. And like if I was at dinner with my husband, the wheelbarrow was there, I'd be like, oh man, I just want to like peek at this photo album. I just want to check my email from like whatever. Like your brain isn't stupid.

Your brain knows that on the other side of that device is that wheelbarrow. And we expect to kind of stay as interested and as present within real life. And it's true. Obviously in real life can't compete with that. Even the best forms of in real life. Like when you're at a Taylor Swift concert or you're like

the parent who's there with your newborn baby interacting for the first time, right like we pull out our phones to kind of jump into that wheelbarrow so much that i think we're missing out on like real life and what the benefits that presence can provide given that you apply not just like your own brain but it seems like you know you're part of this sort of network of people applying the sciences to this to our happiness and to which has to do with our social evolution how do you feel about the future I'm actually surprisingly hopeful in lots of ways.

Again, because I see all these young people, I talk to them, right? I think they kind of have done the Wizard of Oz move of looking behind the curtain of so many of the structures and goals that we have that are kind of off kilter a little bit. And they have said, like, hang on, this seems wrong. This seems not right. I think they have very quickly clued into some of the problems of work life culture, the problems of capitalism, the problems of the, like, hustle culture and the goals we've set for ourselves. And when I talk to them, I get hopeful because I think so many structural changes come from young people. And it seems like young people have figured this stuff out. And excitingly for me, in my like nerdy psychologist's way, I think young people are really taken by the evidence, right?

You know, like they hear that this isn't just a bunch of platitudes about being nice for other people and like doing things for others will make you happy and be present. They're like, no, there was a study. Like, you know, they kind of resonate with that evidence-based approach. And that makes me hopeful that they're going to understand this stuff better. and they're going to design structures that fix things. And when you talk about these young people who you're both seeing in real life and also imagining in the future, do you see people who would describe themselves as happy or maybe galvanized by knowing that it's possible and sort of like needing to work towards it?

Or those are interrelated probably. Yeah. I mean, the sad thing is that younger generations right now are more unhappy than they've ever been, right? The mental health crisis that you see in college students is just like shocking. in like how bad it is right now and it's bad very recently so the number of college students who are depressed

has doubled since 2009 and that's not like oh it's less stigmatized now or did it like these are like real numbers and incidentally talking about technology if you map the number of young people who self-report being depressed at high school levels or college levels and you map just like number of iPhones in pockets like correlation doesn't equal causation but like

looks pretty bad something's up right just as I said have you read that book iGen, which sort of said, yeah, I think it's such a good, I mean, I read that and I was like, I had the iPhone. Yeah. It's like, yeah. I mean, again, like technology we can use in lots of ways, but it would be nice to change the incentive structures that people make the apps on the technology.

Of course. Yes, this is never about technology. It's about the way it's designed within our. But all that said, I think, you know, I think young people in part because of that crisis are really motivated to do something better, right? I mean, this is one of the reasons we need negative emotion, right? when you're sad, it prompts you to try to connect with people or do something different. When you're angry, it prompts you to take action in like social justice context and otherwise.

Our negative emotions are catalysts for action. They're like putting our hand on a hot stove and we're like, ow! And you move your hand, negative emotions say, hang on, this is not right. This doesn't feel good. And I need to make a change. So as devastating as the kind of current mental health crisis that we see in young people is, I actually think it'll be a catalyst for change. Change in two ways, change for asking, okay, what really matters for my happiness?

What can I really do to feel better? And then how can I change the structures so that they are better suited to kind of make me feel like I'm flourishing? Maybe this is like a little bit of a hot take question, but that is it responsible to medicate people who are anxious about a world that is like socially ill rather than like also creating spaces where people can think about how to change that change that way to change that how to change that way to change that. change that world instead of become like numb to it. I've been seeing variations of that a lot recently. Yeah. And we talked about the feelings too. Yeah. And change it and talk about it as well. Like your experiences are valid. I mean, this is an interesting ethical question, right? In so many domains, right, I'm often talking to middle schoolers and college students who are depressed and overwhelmed and burned out. And I know that's a lot because of the like college

admission practices and the things, the structural expectations that are placed on them. I do a lot of work with doctors and who are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout after COVID, right? And a lot of that has nothing to do with the fact that they're not meditating. It's just like, you know, the structures of the way the medical system works is just terrible, right? And so there's this ethical question about, like, is it okay to be giving people these individual happiness strategies of like, okay, write in your gratitude journal and meditate every day when like it's really much more the structures that are at fault? And one of the reasons I've come around to the fact that it is okay, partly it has to do with just like, you know, the life raft situation of like, let me just, you know, throw you a lifesaver so you can kind of get through this tough time. But beyond that, there is work looking at this question.

You might even call it the sort of Pollyanna question of like, if I'm happy myself, will I just like ignore everything that's going on? I think of the like meme with the dog where he's like sitting in the fire. He's like, this is fine, right? If you're happy, are you more likely to say this is fine? And researchers have studied this Konstantin Tkushleff at Georgetown has some lovely work on this, where he looks at, okay, who is taking action against climate change? Like, you know, it's one thing to say you're really anxious about it, but it's another, like, go to protests and put solar panels up and donate and, you know, like be sustainable. And what he finds is that individuals who self-report having less positive emotion are more

mental health issues, say they're more anxious about climate change, which kind of makes sense. Like anxious individuals are also anxious about climate change. It's a big thing to be anxious about. But if you look at who's taking action, it tends to be the people who self-report the most positive emotion. It's not the people who are most anxious about. It's the people who feel better. He does the same thing with, for example, going to a Black Lives Matter protest. Who's taking action against social justice? It's the people who self-report feeling the least depressed, having the most positive emotion and so on. And that, when you think about it, it makes total

sense. If you're just like totally depressed and you can't get out of bed and just feeling overwhelmed, even if you're really busy, you're not doing any of the stuff to fix the terrible structural problems of the world. You got your own stuff you're dealing with. And this kind of fits with why some of these individual strategies might be a first step to kind of fixing some of the structural issues. It's not all this stuff, the advice I've just given, isn't instead of fixing the structural stuff. It's in addition to it. And maybe as a first step to kind of give you the bandwidth and the self-care you need to sort of fight the big fights. And this is kind of really how I think about young people. I see, you know, giving these

kind of free resources out to young people with my chorus and the Sesame Street stuff as a like, kind of giving them the resources they need to do this stuff later. It's not it instead of, it's like, kind of it's like a necessary part of it um i think it's audrey lord i'm going to mingle the quote is like this idea of self-care is a political act yeah yeah and i think that all these happiness individual strategies are a political act so so it's emphasize emphasize this isn't an instead of this is a help you to kind of get the bandwidth needed to to do the hard stuff right we have this kind of incorrect notion of negative emotion that it's like something bad definitely feels uncomfortable i'll give you i've been depressed i've had sadness i've been angry like i've been

frustrated and disappointed it doesn't feel awesome but it's telling you something important right it's a signal that you need to make a change but the second thing is i think we assume that like because it feels awful the only way to get rid of it is to is to get rid of it is to suppress it you know to kind of take a pill to avoid it um and evidence suggests that that might not be the best way to get out of all negative emotions especially not initially if you're feeling clinically depressed or having panic attacks like there's certain thresholds that feel different, right? But for the kind of garden variety negative emotions, really the best way to get through them is to go through them, is to like sit with them and allow them and not suppress

them and run away. Why do we know this? Well, we know emotion suppression is bad. It's bad. First of all, it doesn't really work, right? You're kind of like holding the beach ball underwater and eventually it's going to fly out. And if you're like, my mom, it's going to hit your brother in the face, you know, kind of like in the 12 year olds in the pool kind of move, right? But also it's bad for our thinking. If you're suppressing your emotions, say, like, in a simple laboratory task, I bring you in, you watch some sad videos, and I say, try to act like you're not feeling sad. You do worse on a memory test. You do worse on a decision-making task. Even that little laboratory test of suppressing your emotions from some dumb YouTube video, like you're seeing

changes in your cognition and your thinking. You're also seeing changes in your body. You can see evidence of cardiac stress just from those simple moments of suppressing emotion. So it's not working and it's hurting us. But the other strategy we can use, instead of suppressing our emotions and avoiding them, is to say, hey, I'm going to sit and allow these emotions to be there just as it is. You know, spiritual traditions call this things like acceptance. It often goes by a practice of like allowing or urge surfing in the clinical literature. But, you know, say you're just feeling really sad or you're feeling really lonely or you're pissed off.

You just say, all right, I'm just going to sit with this and pay attention to it for like five minutes. It often, one practice that's been popularized by the meditation teacher, TAR BRAC, goes by the acronym of Rain, which stands for, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. So bad emotions there, recognize. What is it? Is it overwhelm? Is it disappointment? Is it sadness with a side of pissed off? Like, try to use your SAT words and, like, figure out what you're dealing in.

But then you say the A step, which is allowed, and you say, all right, I'm just going to sit here. Okay, emotion, you go. It's kind of like when, like, the nosy neighbor comes by. You don't want to hang out with them, but you're like, you don't kick them out. Like, it's like, all right, frustrated guest. All right, you're here. Let's chill. And but you chill with this step of the eye, which is investigate.

You say, okay, I'm feeling pissed off. How does that feel in my body? What do I want to do when I feel pissed off? I, when I notice this, I want to like check my email. I want to look at my phone. I want to be anywhere but with that emotion. Don't act on it. Like, huh, okay, but that's my brain's go to when this emotion comes up.

My chest gets tight. I'm furrowing my brow. And you're just like looking at it. And the way emotions work is they're kind of like waves. When you look at it, it might feel a little bit more intense. But like your body's not going to stay in that same state for a while. Like it's going to, you're going to start to get bored with it. It's going to kind of tail off.

And so if you can just be there and investigate and stay with that urge, you can kind of get through it. But you don't stop there. The last step of this recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture rain is the nurture, which is like, all right, I sat through that emotion. How can I nurture myself? Maybe I got to call a friend. Maybe I've got to take something off my plate. I got to do something nice for myself or someone else, right?

Maybe it's like time to journal or meditate or whatever. How can I like take care of myself compassionately? Research shows that practices like rain improve burnout and things like burnout in first responders and health care workers. It's odd like the strategy of actually like I'm just going to sit with the terrible emotion now sometimes can allow you to kind of let it run its course. I think the big problem with negative emotions is a lot of time. We don't let it run its course or we get in this sort of rheumidative pattern where we're like, we don't just say all right I'm just going to sit with it

just like hang out with it and just deal with it right now yeah what are because I totally can feel the difference and know what you mean and have experienced both how does one different

like what what are the factors that lead to somebody ruminating and wallowing or raining you know like what's the I think part of it is like

well first of all I think we're busy right when I look at like when I'm suppressing my emotion It's often because, like, just going to time to deal with that right now. I just got to move like, you know, like that email came through and I'm really pissed, but my next meeting's walking in. Like, you know, parents, for sure, right?

You know, teenagers are just moving on to the next thing. Like, you know, our live is running at a clip, and so it's very hard to take time to do that. But I think part of it is like, I think if I actually sit with this, I'm just like, I'm going to be destroyed. I'm not going to be able to handle it. I'm going to, you know, I had this recently where I had like a kind of mean critique of one of our podcast episodes. It was actually along the lines of the social justice stuff we were talking about.

Somebody was accusing that, like, you talk about all these individual strategies. That means you're ignoring the structural stuff. And I was like, no, we just haven't had the, that episode wasn't about that. But I definitely, and so I was feeling really kind of attacked and sort of guilty. And I was like, you know what I should take my own advice and sit with this. And like, it's like, like, first two minutes, it sucked. I did not want to sit with what that felt like. But then, like, I noticed like, oh, I can learn something about what it feels like.

I definitely learn about my urges. I want to eat something. I want to check my email. I want to, you know. But then it was like, it took its course. And after I felt much more like, ha, like it was like a kind of breath of fresh air. You know, just simulate my like, you know, middle school stuff.

This might be TMI, but I used to have really terrible like menstrual cramps. And sometimes when the menstrual clamps end, it's like this like, oh, so happy that's done. That's kind of what I felt like with my emotions. It's like, ha, I'm so happy. That's like, that's over with. That's great. We talk about periods here all the time. Yeah.

Period friendly podcast. Love it. We will let you go today, we promise. But there is one area that we haven't asked you anything about, and we did get a lot of questions. And just what is the relationship between food exercise and happiness? Are there foods that make us more, happy, less happy, sort of? Yeah. And in the physical health domain, I'm going to sleep because we're talking to middle schoolers.

And I actually think one thing that if every middle schooler did today, that would honestly alleviate the mental health crisis, it would be to get them to sleep. If they just slept eight to nine hours every night, I think we would not have the, like mental health crisis that we have is it the same for adults do you think eight to nine years? Yes for sure adults can actually get a little bit less in part as we talked about before middle schoolers brains are building you need some sleep to get

your brains to build kind of well but true for adults too actually one of the things I say to my college students if you come in and you're feeling stressed and depression anxious I'm like what's your sleep like and what's your sleep hygiene like it's one thing you must be such a compassionate teacher because I'm like you better sleep more I think I think you must

be just I feel like you're very compassionate teacher. Yeah, I mean, I see it like, you know, I can see myself in them and I, you know, I know what they're capable of. And so, yeah, so anyway, so let's add sleep to the mix. But, and then let's do exercise. Tons of data, moving your body makes you feel better. You know, there's some evidence in meta-analys, which are these big, like, studies of

studies where you, like, pool all the data together that just like getting in, you know, a half hour of cardio every day can be as good as a prescription of an antidepression medication for reducing depression symptoms and reducing anxiety symptoms. And I'll say about both these things sleep and exercise, they're often the first things to go for teens too, right? You get busy, you stop sleeping and you skip the workout, right? And that's like actually the time we need it most. Yeah. On food, I think there's, food is tricky because like nutrition scientifically is just very messy. But I think the fast version is like generally treating our bodies better makes us feel better. And so I'm careful about talking about food because sometimes if I say, oh, food matters

for happiness, I think a like incredibly restrictive approach to food where you're really focused on it and assessed about it. Like that's bad, right? In fact, you'd be better off just eating whatever you wanted and giving yourself permission and self-compassion to eat whatever you wanted. But if you can, without like the crazy restriction mindset, like deal with what you're eating and feed yourself more intuitively, feed yourself stuff that makes your body feel good. Again, even saying like healthy stuff or non-processed food makes us get into like restriction mindset. But if you're just like feeding yourself what feels good to your body and paying attention to whether or not it feels good to your body, lots of evidence that that matters for your happiness, matters for your functioning, matters for everything. And so I think we forget that mental health is physical health.

So things like exercise, food and sleep really matter. But again, the key is to do that not in like this very type A way. I worry about that because I see my Yale students all the time where I give some suggestion. It's like, okay, I will gratitude journal every day. I will do it exactly at 7 p.m. And I will flagellate myself if I ever forget to do, you know. Definitely this happens in context with food and exercise, especially with teens, right?

So got to be careful. But in general, promoting things that feel good to your bodies will end up making your mental health better off to. I think we've just got to ask our final question, which is a personal one. If you could go back to a 12-year-old Lori, what would you say or do? I think best-case scenarios I could go back with like a time machine and I'd be able to sort of bring like a laptop or something that could plug into like, you know, 1980s, late, early 90s thing. But I'd honestly give her a copy of my course. I'd do like learn the stuff. I wouldn't tell her it was mine because I guess she'd maybe see me.

I don't know. She probably wouldn't think I was me, but at any case. But I would try to give her the tips that I would. give to not my college students, but these teenagers using the science of well-being for teens class. I would teach her this stuff that would hopefully convince her that they're, I'm sorry in middle school you didn't get these strategies, but those strategies are there. These are skills that you can build over time to take care of your and other people's emotional health. Hey, here are the skills. Listen to them and good luck. And I would also bring her a sample of really

nice curly hair conditioner to be like, stop brushing and blow drying the hair. Just put this in after the shower every day. I'd be like, here's this wonderful class and here's a little, you know, boost of lush product revive hair cream. Bye. Recognize, accept, investigate, and nurture your hair. That's all. You can follow Dr. Lori Santos on Instagram at Lori Santos official or at Lori Santos on Twitter.

Her podcast, The Happiness Lab is available wherever you listen to podcasts. You can take her class, The Science of Wellbeing on Coursera. Coursera? Coursera. I had the same thing happened to me. When I turned 13, I, like, suddenly, I was, like, very thin and had straight hair. And I suddenly gained, like, 25 pounds in, like, a week. And my hair got really frizzy.

It was, like, the wildest. It was, like, what happens in hormones? Like, when the, like, thing kicks and it was like, boof. But, yeah, terrible stuff. Stitcher