The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - BONUS: A Happier Christmas

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Accept our gift of happiness this holiday season! It can be a hectic and stressful time of year... but it's also full of opportunities to feel happier. Dr Laurie Santos brings you science-based tips so you can have yourself a merry little Christmas.AlSO: The Happiness Lab returns with four special New Year shows to take you into 2020 - beginning 6 Jan.To sign up to our newsletter visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

If there's one holiday I adore, and you can ask anyone who knows me well, it has to be Halloween. The candy, the costumes, all the general creepiness. I love it. Sadly, I've never been all that enthusiastic about Christmas. It's never really been my thing. I also know a lot of people who have a really tough time during the Christmas season. And so I wanted to do something to change that. So even though we're busily working on a special New Year season of the Happiness Lab,

one that will launch January 6th, I wanted to bring you a few super, super quick tips for how you can feel a little bit happier this holiday season. So without further ado, welcome to the Happiness Lab's very, very short guide to having a merrier Christmas with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Christmas season provides lots of opportunities for improving your well-being. Things like getting together with other people, taking time off to celebrate and relax. All of these are practices that science shows

can make us feel happier. But the holidays can also be really stressful. And so here are some useful things that might help. The first lesson involves the power of giving. Finding Christmas presents for everyone on your list can feel like a stressful chore. Or a distraction from the thing we really want to do, which is buying stuff for ourselves. But research shows that this might be another spot where our minds lead us astray. Merry Christmas!

Liz Dunn, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has done some great research on this. You know, I don't think treating ourselves is a terrible idea. Like, spending money on ourselves can be good. It's just that spending money on somebody else could actually be helpful, I think is especially easy to overlook. She asks people to spend money, either on themselves or on a gift for someone else. People predict that treating themselves will feel the best. But it turns out they're wrong.

Subjects who buy nice things for others report feeling happier at the end of the day than people who buy nice things for themselves. And that effect holds even when relatively large amounts of cash are involved. Liz also finds that doing nice stuff for others doesn't even need to involve money. In fact, she's run these same kinds of gifting studies

with very young children using the kiddie equivalent of cold hard cash, goldfish crackers. And so we gave these little kids a windfall of goldfish for themselves as well as a chance to give some of those goldfish away to a puppet named Monkey. Even children under the age of two seem to exhibit pleasure from giving their resources away. exhibit pleasure from giving their resources away. It's kind of just reassuring. Like as many problems as we have in the world right now, it's like the tiny humans are starting out with this proclivity to derive joy from giving their stuff away. Like that to me, I don't know, it makes me optimistic again about the world. So the big happiness lesson is that giving feels better

than our lying minds realize. And science shows that the price tag isn't the important part. It really is the thought that counts. My second Christmas tip is about the kinds of gifts we should be giving others. It turns out that there's one kind of holiday present

that can be super valuable and hugely happiness-inducing, and that is the gift of time. Psychologist Ashley Willans from Harvard Business School looked into this. So we ran this experiment where we gave people $40 in one week to spend in a way that would save them time, and $40 in another week to spend on a material purchase for themselves. And what we found is that on weeks where people made this time-saving purchase, they felt happier, less stressed. But it wasn't about the objective amount of time they saved. It was that these time-saving purchases, getting a house cleaner, ordering takeout, helped people feel like they were more in control of their time.

And that was what was driving the happiness benefits. Not the fact that people saved an hour and a half from cooking, but that people all of a sudden felt like they had a windfall of time, that they were more in control of their schedule. Our third holiday tip is to take time this Christmas season to experience gratitude. The reason, according to gratitude expert Robert Emmons, is that feeling thankful can give us the strength we need to weather tough situations. For me, I think the most important good of gratitude is that it helps us live resiliently.

There's no resilience without gratitude. I mean, it's just impossible. Gratitude is absolutely indispensable for, I think, you know, just for growing an unshakable center, a core of calm, strength, and happiness. And it helps us deal with the slow drip of everyday stress, as well as the massive trials and tribulations. And also, it widens our perceptual field. It helps us see the big picture and the opportunities in it. And of course, it connects people together. Robert's work has shown that taking time for gratitude can have an important impact on your happiness, whether you're trying to navigate the usual seasonal aggravations or even facing a more profound sense of holiday malaise.

So take a second to jot down a few things you're thankful for each night this season. Or steal a fantastic gratitude tip from my colleague here at Pushkin Industries, the economist Tim Hartford, who has a fantastic new podcast called Cautionary Tales, which I hope you'll check out. Tim's holiday gratitude hack is making his children write a thank you letter whenever they open a present. Not at the end of the whole pile, but each time an individual gift is unwrapped. I really love this idea. It lets Tim and his family savor more time together by slowing down the whole unwrapping process. It forces Tim's kids to think about what receiving each gift feels like.

And the act of writing a thank you note, organizing our feelings of gratitude, and setting them down on paper, that's great for our happiness too. Now this might seem like a hokey family ritual, but that gets to my final Christmas tip, which is that if we want to be happier this holiday season, then we need to embrace dumb rituals just like this. In fact, research from Harvard Business School professor Mike Norton shows that rituals have a way of making us feel a little bit more connected during the holiday season. If you report having a ritual, you're more likely to keep getting together with your family for the holidays. And it's more likely to go well when you do get together. If you've ever been to a family holiday after a few years,

sometimes it occurs to you in your head that you have nothing in common with these people. You know, they have different political beliefs. They have different lifestyle choices. You're kind of wondering, why am I related to them. It seems as though rituals provide kind of a framework for the fact that we're a family because we've always been eating Nana's rolls for the past 50 years. So I guess it's something that we all do together. The other thing that rituals do for family events like that is, which is almost as important as they tell you what to do at each moment. So again, if you've ever been to a family holiday, mainly it's people standing around awkwardly, hoping that arguments don't start based on something that happened in seventh grade. Rituals tell everyone exactly what they should do at all

times. So it's you and you go out and do that. And then we'll do this in the kitchen while you do that over there. And then we'll get picked together at four and watch the thing. And then dinner's over at six and then we're done. And it actually allows the day to happen where everyone kind of sorts themselves in a way that's optimal. And then suddenly it's all over and nobody killed anybody. Ah, yes, the true meaning of Christmas. We got through it and nobody killed anybody. Anyways, I hope you found these short tips helpful. The Happiness Lab will be back on January 6th for four special shows exploring how you can become happier in 2020. I hope you'll join me in the new year to learn how the science of psychology can boost your well-being.

And if you can't wait, sign up for our newsletter right away at happinesslab.fm. So until we return, happy holidays from the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Bye.