The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Do We Need a New Word for 'Happiness'? Katie Couric talks to Dr Laurie Santos

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Laurie swaps seats in the studio to be interviewed by none other than Katie Couric. In this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Laurie's asked to define happiness; outline the best steps to reach it; and give an honest appraisal of her own struggles to flourish each and every day.  Listen to more episodes of Next Question with Katie Couric wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's 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.

Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. If you're a regular fan of this podcast, then you're probably used to me sitting in the interviewer's seat. But I recently had a chance to switch things up a bit and get interviewed myself. In fact, I had a chance to sit down with none other than the legendary Katie Couric for her podcast, Next Question. I'll be honest, it was pretty surreal to sit across from Katie in the studio. I mean, she's interviewed some of the most important and influential people on the planet.

But I quickly learned that Katie's got a lot of her own thoughts about happiness, and she pushed me to think more critically about the science behind my work. I did worry that I wouldn't be as exciting a guest as Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or some of the other amazing people that Katie has interviewed, but she still seemed pretty happy with our conversation. And so I wanted to share it with you here today. I hope you enjoy it. I'm Katie Couric, and this is Next Question. You know, having a podcast on happiness,

teaching a whole class to Ivy League students, generation after generation. Yeah, I mean, I think that we get happiness wrong. Happiness, that feeling of joy or contentment that we all seem to crave, can also seem totally unattainable in this day and age. In fact, maybe we need to replace the word happiness altogether. True flourishing is taking on challenges, embracing failure, navigating these negative emotions that might be normative.

And so I think it would be better to have a different word, but in some ways, we're stuck with happiness. Dr. Lori Santos is a cognitive scientist who's been studying happiness in the lab, as well as through the class she teaches at Yale. But she's the first to admit even she isn't happy all the time. Some of us are kind of genetically lucky to have a little bit of a predisposition to happiness. I'm probably the opposite. I think I was born on a rainy, like, wintry mix kind of day. So what do we need to understand about happiness? Why is it so difficult to come by?

And why is true happiness such freaking hard work? Why is true happiness such freaking hard work? By the way, if you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call, by going to katiecouric.com. Lori Santos, come on down. I'm so excited to be talking to you. Ditto, ditto. Let's start with the basics. What exactly is happiness? We could take a very long time answering that, Katie, but social scientists tend to think of happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life

is like you've just got lots of positive emotions. There's like joy and smiling and laughter, as opposed to kind of negative emotions like sadness, anger, and saying, it's not saying you have no negative emotions. It's just that the ratio is pretty good. That's being happy in your life. But being happy with your life is how you think about your life. It's the answer to your question, like all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? And if you say yes, then that's pretty good. And I love this definition because, you know, we all know that there are times that those two things dissociate, right? That, you know, you're doing something that's making you incredibly satisfied with your life. You know, maybe you have a new baby or a new job, but it's hard. You know, in your life,

there's a lot of stress and things like that. And I think we've all met people, you especially, being, you know, with the rich and famous folks where, you know, in their life, like, you know, you're flying first class and great food. But with your life, there's a real sense of emptiness and a lack of meaning. And so we have these misconceptions when it comes to the things that make us happy. Are we using the wrong word? Should it be contentment? Should it be fulfillment? I think the Greeks, you know, and the ancients as usual had it right. You know, they talked about eudaimonia, flourishing, and that I think would be a better word because to have true flourishing, it's not like you're happy all the time. Like true flourishing isn't toxic positivity where you're like

smiling like some terrible yellow emoji where you're like, oh my gosh, I'm happy all the time. And so what I try to do is to explain to folks that true happiness allows for the normal kinds of spots where you're not going to feel great. Like that's typical, that's normal. That's what you need for a good, ultimately happy life. But people probably should think about the word flourishing or fulfillment, contentment. It just seems much more stable. Happiness seems like at the high end of the emotional scale, right? And that's unattainable because nobody's happy all the time. like three minutes left to live. Like it's just not a destination. And I think that's another thing we get wrong. We think I'm going to do something and get there. You know, I'll get married and I will be happy or I'll get this new raise and I will be happy. Or, you know, my college students, I'll get into the perfect medical school or get the perfect grades and I

will be happy. And that's just not how it works. My late husband used to say that I was born on a sunny day, which I thought was such a nice compliment. And it made me wonder if some people are hardwired for happiness. Is there a happiness set point that varies from person to person, from biology to biology? Yeah, there's some evidence that that might be at least partly the case. And the evidence comes from these studies on what's called heritability, right? What is it called? Heritability. It's just not irritability. Not irritability. Heritability, which is this like big word of saying, you know, how much of the variance that we see in the population, you know, some people are happy, not so happy. How much of that is due to your biology? How much of that is due to kind of how you grew up, right? And the way we test

heritability is to look at twins, right? Some twins are identical. That means they're genetically exactly the same. Raised the same way. Raised the same way, right? Some are fraternal, which means they're genetically different. Like they're just as similar as regular brothers and sisters. And so if happiness is really built in, then identical twins should be much more similar in their happiness level than regular brothers and sisters. Tons of studies have looked at this, and what you find is that's true, but a little bit. Heritability estimates are at about 30 percent. And that's like, you know, it's there, but scientifically speaking, it's kind of small. What does that mean? It means there's something to be said for, you know, being born on a sunny day. Some of us

are kind of genetically lucky to have a little bit of a predisposition to happiness. But it's not as much as we, I think, assume. So it sounds like nurture is more important than nature when it comes to happiness. That's exactly right. And I think it's important not to discount nature, right? There are some people who have a harder nurture than others because they've got to put more work in. But everybody can put the right work in to change things. Well, I wanted to ask you, what sets you up for happiness? I mean, is it a secure home life,

loving parents, financial security, positive affirmation, success in however you define it? I feel like I'm really lucky, honestly, Lori, in all those categories. I think of people who have parents who didn't give them unconditional love and how that really kind of reverberates throughout their lives. impact, right? You know, trauma, which is the kind of thing you're talking about, right? Where parents, you know, your abusive parents or withholding or exactly, or, you know, they could even be affluent, you know, successful parents, but just very distant or really harsh, right? I mean, we all kind of grow up with different levels of that. And you can look at levels that are pretty extreme and scientists do that, right? This is a lot of the work on trauma and what's often called post-traumatic stress disorder. You know, many of us have heard about that, right? This is a lot of the work on trauma and what's often called post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of us have heard about that, right?

And it comes from the fact that when you experience trauma, sometimes that can have a longstanding effect. But even though post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, gets a lot of airtime, scientists have also looked at what you might consider the opposite, which is called post-traumatic growth. You go through an awful, terrible incident that you never would have wished on yourself or anyone else. And some good comes from that. You feel like you come out stronger. You feel like you come out more resilient. You feel like you come out more socially connected to the people you really care about. And this is what's called post-traumatic growth. And I'm kind of curious, I mean, you know, you and I are talking after you've been so helpfully public about your breast cancer diagnosis. You know, that and I are talking after you've been so helpfully public about your breast cancer diagnosis. You know, that could be a trauma that leads to PTSD. You know, individuals who experience cancer diagnosis have to go through the process, you know, terrible and awfully traumatic.

But do you kind of resonate with that, this idea of the post-traumatic growth a bit? I mean, I think because I've had so much experience witnessing cancer much more severely in both my late husband and my sister, who also passed away. And I became so knowledgeable about cancer. I have a very, really healthy and solid understanding about my particular situation. And instead of being traumatized, it actually increased my gratitude because I know, unlike them, both my husband and sister were diagnosed with stage four cancer. Mine was discovered early when it's not only treatable but curable. And so if anything, it wasn't traumatic. It was actually weirdly life-affirming. It was a death sentence for my husband and my sister when they were diagnosed. And the fact that it was 2022, the fact that science has really progressed, I felt grateful.

And so this is what we hear a lot, both with kind of diagnoses like yours, but even cases where individuals find out they have a terminal situation or things that you couldn't even imagine. There are accounts of parents who've lost young children who obviously, you know, the most traumatic thing any parent could imagine, you know, obviously they're not happy about it. They wouldn't wish it again, but they'll say en masse, more good things came of it than I expected. And that is a profound thing about human psychology and human nature. The worst thing possible that we could ever imagine happens and we say, there are parts of this at least that I'm grateful for or there's parts of this that I wouldn't change. I've grown from this. from this. This is one of the biggest mistakes that we make about happiness. We think it's only our circumstances. If things go well, I'll be great. And God forbid things go badly. But in practice, when these things actually happen to people, we're much more resilient and we often take much more meaning and purpose from those events than we often expect. And I think my

resilience, you mentioned going public, just as I try to spread awareness and educate people about colon cancer prevention and encourage them to get colonoscopies and got one on television myself, I knew that by being a public figure and talking about it, I had the potential to actually save lives. And so for me, translating it into, I don't mean to sound cheesy, but some form of service, it actually is very grounding and satisfying and fulfilling for me. And that's what I think sometimes we get wrong about happiness. I think resilience is finding strength within. So sometimes we are in a situation that we're unprepared for, and you find yourself digging deeper into something that you didn't even know you possessed. More after the break.

Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's 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. I'm an artist in New York City, so when I'm creating or discovering, that's where I find my happiness usually, most of the time. So happiness, you can try and find it, you can try

to inspire it. I also think you gotta give energy to get energy. So through that, you can find a find it. You can try to inspire it. I also think you got to give energy to get energy. So through that, you can find a lot of happiness. We're back with Lori Santos. All this focus on quote unquote self-care, which I think to a certain extent we need to focus and take care of ourselves and the oxygen mask and all that jazz. On the other hand, it seems like we have become so self-focused that we're missing the point about serving others, being kind to others. Those things are proven to increase your happiness, right, Lori? Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest cross-cultural universals in happiness science right now is that

doing nice things for other people makes you happier. If you look at people who are controlled for the level of income they have, people who donate more of their money to charity are happier. People who just tend to just be more self-focused are less happy than the people who are out there doing stuff for other people. And even if you force people to do nice stuff for others, they wind up feeling happier. And do you think this whole emphasis on self-care and wellness has had the adverse effect in some ways? Have you looked at that? Yeah, definitely. Because it's a relatively new phenomenon, isn't it? I mean, I feel like sort of the self-care wellness industry has really blossomed in just the last five years. Yeah, I think it's problematic in two ways. Again, one is this focus on the self, right? You know, me, me, me, when again, all the data suggests that doing for others would be better. I think another problem is it like reflects

this notion that we have that like our circumstances matter for happiness, right? If I could just like have it be, you know, bubble baths and rainbows and first class flights, then my life would be great. And it's really missing out on the things that can actually matter for our happiness. We're in some ways even just a simple act of spending our money. We're doing it wrong spending on things that we think are going to make us feel good, think are going to bring us joy. And they might not bring us the joy we think. We're in New York City, the epicenter of type A strivers, right? center of type A strivers, right? And I think if there's one thing that has hurt my happiness quotient, if you will, is always striving. Because once you get something, it's like, okay, what am I going to do next? Where am I going to go? How am I going to achieve something

more? Talk about how these type A kind of super driven people, because I'm transitioning to your Yale class where you had them in droves, how that impacts your happiness. I mean, it's sometimes funny to people when they hear I teach this class on happiness to Yale students, because the layperson's assumption is like, Yale students haven't made, they're 19, you know, many of them are wealthy or at least well-connected, yet one-fourth of them decided to take a class on happiness. What year did you start teaching it? First in 2018, and it became the largest class ever in Yale's history.

And one-quarter of the students enrolled, right? And again, that tells you that these type A, very driven Yale students are voting with their feet. Especially at Yale, they've gotten everything they've wanted. You know, probably since these kids were 12 years old, they dreamed of getting into an Ivy League school and now they're there and it's still not doing what they expected. Which only proves like all these things that we talked about are not necessarily the key. What's missing for them? Yeah, I mean, it's often the things that they are having an opportunity cost on because they're so driven at their academics. It's simple things like sleep and taking care of their physical health. It's often social connection, right? These are students who are working on homework into the night. They're not getting the same social connection that you expect. And honestly, it's just having this kind of mistaken

idea that more, more, more is going to be good, Right. It's not stopping to kind of, you know, smell the roses and reflect on the accomplishments you've gotten. Because they're thinking about what grades are going to make and how are they going to get into a good law school and how are they going to get that job at Goldman Sachs or, you know, all those things that I would imagine detract from from just being present and enjoying the moment. Exactly. There's work on what's known as journey mindset, right? Which is this idea that you're not kind of going for the next thing. You're not looking at what you're arriving towards. The goal is not that. It's not law school or Goldman Sachs or even getting into Yale. It's kind of what you're going to learn and get along the way. It's really being present across that. And I think that we've raised, honestly, not just my Yale students, but a generation of young people that have dropped the journey mindset, right? They are careerists from as early as we can detect. And that means that they're just going to jump

to the next accolade. How can we tamp down this tremendous pressure that's really detracting from being a happy whole person? You imagine if Yale and Harvard and Stanford and all the big schools got together like a nuclear de-escalation. And we all said, you know what? Here are the minimum standards you need to be a good Yale student. Once you meet this minimum standard, you go into a lottery and you might get in or you might not. I think this would be, first of all, I think it would be accurate. But I think it would also allow students to see that, like, you know, you don't have to keep hustling. And I think the hustle starts earlier and earlier.

I think, you know, what you said is correct. I think parents really have a role to kind of scale this back. And I think, you know, it can sometimes be really tough for parents because they obviously want what's best for their kids. You know, if there is a kind of accolade out there that your child doesn't have, it's so easy to kind of want them to strive for it. But I think working with your kids to kind of back them up, talk to them about what they're learning along the journey, make it clear that you're going to love them no matter what. And don't push them just because you want that Yale sticker on the back of your car. You can buy one even if your kid doesn't go to Yale.

So I'm curious what you heard from your students. You talked to so many of these kids. I mean, you had a whole case study every semester. What did they talk about and why were they taking your class? There's lots of evidence that this generation, and this is true at Yale too, is just facing the biggest mental health crisis that we've seen in the history of the human species. Like right now, there's rates of depression nationally at colleges are at levels like 40% of students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% say they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide. So if you're looking at a group of 10 college students, one of them might be contemplating taking their own life, right? Like that's really how bad the mental health situation has gotten on campus. But that doesn't

even tell you what you're just seeing in the low grade kind of stress and disappointment these students are facing. You know, I'll run into a student in the courtyard and be like, hey, how's it going? And they'd be like, oh, if I could only get to midterms or if I could only fast forward to the summer to get out of this. And I would have kind of two reactions to that of like, oh, like college is so precious and so short. Like, how can you be fast forwarding this? But then my other reaction is like, oh, yeah, if we could only get to midterms. You know, so I was like realizing like, wow, you know, these are misconceptions that I was having, too. You know, even though it was so acute in my students, the kind of overwhelm and stress they were facing, I kind of saw it in myself, too. You know,

I worried that we weren't being good mentors for them to help them out of this. You know, I guess maybe because I'm a big fan of self-flagellation, but I do wonder if people of my generation, parents, fucked up. Well, it's, yeah. Because, you know. They did the best they could. Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah. Yeah. And I wonder if my generation's style of parenting has contributed to this because, you know, the everybody gets a trophy. You have to fix things for your kids. You can't have them suffer because it's too painful for you. You can't have them be disappointed. And are the chickens coming home to roost? I think so. Although I think there's also lots of evidence that, you know, society and a lot of these structures changed, right? You know, the last 20 years were also the time when the news was talking a lot about stranger danger.

You know, you wouldn't be seen as a good parent unless you were trying to protect your children. Again, I think institutions like mine, you know, like focused on meritocracy in a way that's great. You know, anyone can get into Yale. But now anyone can get into Yale. Why aren't you giving your child the resources they need to do that? And I think that that focus on higher education and these next steps made it so that failure seemed scary. But I think that that did mean that the kids today are growing up with different kinds of norms when it comes to failures, different kinds of norms when it comes to parental involvement, different kinds of norms when it comes to what they're expected to know just at different ages.

We have college students who have never used an alarm clock. Their parents are their alarm clock. They call, you know, to make sure their child gets up in the morning, you know, at 19, 21 years old. Lily from New York. I'm a teacher. I think the pandemic really affected kids really negatively, and they're having a really hard time figuring out how to socialize in the way that we did when we were kids, when life was quote-unquote normal. So I think the socializing, the lack of social skills is, we're finding kids like really inverting and struggling to reach out to people. We'll be right back. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's 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. There's things within your control and there's things outside of you.

Focus on those things that are within your control and you'll do better. And we're back. You have just started an online course that's free to teenagers. It's called The Science of Well-Being. What prompted you to do that, Lori? Well, I had done this class, you know, live on Yale's campus, and we got tons and tons of press for it. But a lot of the emails I was getting from parents was saying, you know, could you make this available? Is there any way I could see the syllabus? I want my daughter, who's in

middle school, I want my son, who's in high school, to get this content. And it made me realize that, you know, a lot of the skills I was teaching Yale students, we want kids who are younger than that to learn these things. So is it different teaching teens than it is teaching college students? Yeah, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that, you know, teens face different kinds of contexts where these kinds of principles and these misconceptions come up, right? They're not worried about salary and, you know, getting married. They're worried about, you know, getting good grades and thinking about colleges and navigating how they're portrayed on social media, right? In some ways, there are lots of similar stressors, but they kind of play out in different ways. And so the new class really uses the same kind of

science concepts. Those things are the same, but we're kind of talking about them in a context that teens can really relate to them. You know, so if we're talking about your circumstances don't matter, we're not using examples of like getting promotions at work. We're using examples of like, you know, the grade that you got on your homework last Thursday. We're sort of talking about the kinds of things that are on teens' minds. Are there some basic skills that you're really trying to give both the kids in college and also teenagers? One of the great things that I've seen with the Yale students and so far with the teens who have taken the classes, they want an evidence-based approach. They don't want to hear a bunch of platitudes about what they should do. They were like, what does the science say? That's great. But then we just walk through just really simple behavior, thought. But if you can move your body a little bit more, if you can contact a friend, if you can get some sleep, take a walk. Or even, you know, think about what you could do for someone else. You know, getting back to this idea of being other oriented.

These, you know, behaviors that you could use in the moment to fix this. We also spend a lot of time on changing your thought patterns. I think we think we are our thoughts. Like, you know, they just pop up and that's reality. But there's so much evidence to say, no, that's just the voice in our head. And there are simple techniques we can use to change our thought patterns. You know, a big one for teenagers is trying to sort of shut off that self-critic in your head. Yeah, well, I think it's not for teenagers. I mean, I do negative self-talk all the time. And

some of my friends here at Katie Couric Media say, you know, you are what you say. And that actually is scientifically proven, right? Totally. I mean, there's so much evidence that what you're saying to yourself is affecting how you perform. For example, if you're really self-critical, it's very easy to procrastinate because you're screaming at yourself. You kind of set up this fear in your own mind. There's also lots of evidence that what you say to yourself can affect your physiology. The best advice is to talk to yourself like you would a friend. If your best friend was really screwing up, you wouldn't be like, oh, it's fine. You know, it's great. You're wonderful. Everybody loves you. You'd be like, you know, we need to deal with this. Like, what's

going on? Like, I love you and I really care about you. You wouldn't be like, you suck. Like, why are you? You wouldn't scream at your best friend and berate him or her. But you would, you know, call a spade a spade and say, hey, we got to deal with this. This isn't going well. And you would be curious. You'd be like, what's going on? Like, why are you doing this? Like, how can we fix this? You'd be gentle.

You'd be proactive. You'd be problem-solving oriented. But you wouldn't scream. You wouldn't be mean. And that's the kind of voice we're trying to kind of cultivate. But the evidence suggests that these practices really work. So what can we do with social media? I mean, is the genie out of the bottle? How are you talking to teens and to ladies like me about kind of monitoring it and moderating it? it and moderating it. Yeah. Well, in some sense, the genie's out of the bottle, right? We're not ever going to go back to, you know, the way we were, you know, when you and I were in college. We're always going to have probably these devices in our pockets that have the temptation of

comparison, that have these technologies available. I think what we can do, though, is that we can be a little bit more mindful about how these things are making us feel. And I think that that's important, right? Because we don't want to deny the benefits of these things. One of the strategies I teach my students comes from the journalist Catherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues you don't have to break up with your phone, but like couples counseling probably required, you know, for the relationship. And she has this acronym that she uses called WWW to help you be more mindful. It stands for what for, why now, and what else? And so she argues whenever you find your phone in your hand, you should like think, oh, WWW. Like what for? Was there a purpose? Like I was checking my email or I was going to text a

friend. You know, maybe it's just my addictive go-to, right? Why now, right? What was the trigger? You know, maybe again, you had something to do, but maybe it was, I was feeling anxious or I was feeling bored or, you know, for my students often it's I was feeling a little bit scared about engaging in real life social connection, talking to someone in the dining hall. So I just, you know, picked up my phone. But the biggest one I think is what else, right? What's the opportunity cost? What else could you be doing? Could you be just like taking a deep breath, talking to a friend, sleeping, right? What are you not doing because you're on your phone? And what are you missing? You know, sometimes if I land in a new city, I am going to the hotel and I realize I didn't even look around at this new place and take in

being in a totally different environment because I've had my face in my phone. And I think, this is so dumb. Why am I doing this? It is such a default though, Lori, you know, now. Yeah, I think it's a default. And often the thing we're missing is other people. That's right. Because it's distracting. Its very presence is distracting. It also prevents you to engage in deep thinking because it's interrupting you all the time, right? And it makes sense, right? Because our brains aren't stupid. Like they know on the other end of this device, you know, imagine, you know, we're having this lovely conversation here and it's very fun. But imagine if to the conversation I brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow I had

like my photo album since like 1992 and printouts of everything every politician or, you know, Kardashian has said. And the last week there was like cat videos and porn, just like this huge pile of stuff. And sort of food that you could learn to make. And like your brain isn't stupid. It knows that all that stuff is right next to you. But it's having a huge effect on our attention and our performance and our social connection. Let's talk about global happiness, because, I mean, look what you started, Laurie. Now there have been these worldwide surveys about happiness.

And what are we learning about those? I think so many interesting things. I mean, first, I think we're learning that just having a metric is powerful, right? This is the World Happiness Survey that goes around globally and tries to measure happiness using the sort of standard survey tools that we have. And then they rank countries. What we've learned from the metric so far, though, is that there are differences. There are countries that since this survey has been out there have standardly been around the top, you know, places like Denmark, Norway, you know, these Scandinavian countries. And they're otherwise very wealthy countries like the U.S. that have been surprisingly low on the list. Like 16th or something. Yeah, not at the bottom, but like not as high as we would expect, given that, you know, the pursuit of happiness is like literally in our Declaration of Independence. And I think that can be powerful because we can start to ask questions about like, OK, what are those nations that are doing well doing well and what are we missing out on? And have you learned anything? I

mean, is it sort of quality of life? Is it providing, you know, parental leave and accessible child care, things that reduce stressors for people? It's all of those things. I mean, I think it's actually having access to, you know, the sorts of things that we know mean for a good life. And so I think what these countries do well is that they build things into the structure of how they live their lives that make it easier to get things like social connection, presence, exercise, and so on. And what you have is a lot more equality. Surprisingly, COVID did not decrease the happiness metric in many of these countries, which says a lot about our resilience. And in fact, I think the pandemic in some ways was a reset for us.

I think so. I think there was a little bit of this idea of post-traumatic growth that we talked about before, right, where, you know, it caused us to socially connect more. It caused us to recognize our own resilience. It sort of brought back our gratitude for simple things. I think it also really taught us to reevaluate what we were doing with our lives. I think many people during the pandemic thought a little bit more great resignation, things like quiet quitting right now. I think people are re-evaluating their relationship with work and are maybe considering some kind of patterns that might be healthier. I think many people are starting to realize that they're frantically climbing up this ladder that they might not even want to be on in the first place. And they're burning out before they even graduate from college. And it's even affecting college professors like you, Lori.

Yes, exactly. Because you took a sabbatical because you were afraid you were going to totally burn yourself out. So did taking a step back, I know you're still working, but getting a change of scenery, etc., did it make you happier? a change of scenery, et cetera, did it make you happier? Oh, definitely. I mean, and I'm a nerd, right? So I take, you know, like literal data on this. I've gone up about a point on a 10 point happiness scale. Yeah. I mean, I was really, I really started to notice in the midst of this pandemic, all of the classic signs of early burnout, right? I was emotionally exhausted, not just physically exhausted, but just like kind of tired. Like if one more email came, like I was going to, you know, just lose it. It was just like too much. I was feeling really cynical, right? My fuse was really short with the people around me, especially my students. That was the thing that affected me

most. That's not normal for me. And that was really big. But the biggest thing I think I experienced during COVID on college campuses was the third kind of symptom of burnout, which is a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Like even if you did your job the best that you possibly could, it wouldn't be good enough. And I was like, wait, you know, I've read the papers. I know where this leads. I need to make some changes. And the good news is I think, you know, for me, at least the changes have been great. I actually made the very difficult decision to step down as a head of college on campus, in part because I was realizing that, you know, to do that job as well as I wanted to, I just didn't have the bandwidth anymore. Have you regained your happiness equilibrium as a result of stepping back? And,

you know, will it change when you re-enter the Yale campus? Will it change me? Yeah, I think I'll make, you know, some big changes. You know, stepping down from this role has been a big one. You know, I'm already sort of thinking about how I can have a better balance with some of the stuff I'm doing there. Again, you have to remember, happiness isn't this destination. This is going to keep taking work. And it's not a constant. It's not a constant. Let's close this out with some Laurie Santos happiness tidbits. One is, as you mentioned, it takes work. So what does that mean?

Like if you were saying, Katie, if you want to be happy and happier, this is what you should do. What kind of work do I have to do? I think the first piece of work is just recognizing that your intuitions are off, right? That you just have these normal things that you think, oh, I've had a bad day.

I'll, you know, I'll get a manicure. Oh, you know, this is what I'll do. Or I'll keep pushing at work, you know, for X, Y, and Z. We have these intuitions about the things that we should be doing, that we're supposed to be doing. I think you have to realize that those intuitions are wrong, right? You have to say the science says do something else. In really simple domains, right? You know, if you have a long day at work, you might have the intuition of like, oh, I just want to plop down and just like have a glass of wine. Which is a depressant,

by the way. Exactly. When, you know, so much science suggests that if you instead called a friend, went for a walk, you know, just tried to engage in something that was a little bit more challenging of a form of leisure than plopping down to watch Netflix. Take a pickleball lesson. Take a pickleball lesson, you know, just like on your phone, Duolingo, something, right? Like that would be better. Text a friend that you're a little bit worried about, right? Become a little bit more other oriented. When we're in these moments where we're feeling stressed, we're feeling overwhelmed, we're feeling a little sad, there are just simple behaviors we can engage in that are going to work better than what our natural intuition is. Laurie Santos, this has been so fun. Thank you for spending so much time with me.

Thanks so much for having me on. I just went to the therapist and I owe you whatever. A lot. Thank you, Lori. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you have a question for me or want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out. You can leave a short message at 609-512-5505.

Or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are me, Katie Couric, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising producer is Marci Thompson. Our producers are Adriana Fazio and Catherine Law. Our audio engineer is Matt Russell, who also composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode or to sign up for my newsletter, Wake Up Call,

go to the description in the podcast app or visit us at katiecouric.com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.