The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Five Tips to be Happier at Work (Dr Laurie at SXSW)

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Work is a worry. Are we paid enough? Should we be getting promoted quicker? Is artificial intelligence about to replace us all?  Speaking at SXSW 2024, Dr Laurie Santos argues that because of all our career woes we often neglect our happiness. She walks through her top five tips for improving our workplace wellbeing - which will not only make us feel better, but might even cause our salaries to rise!   Suggested reading from this episode: Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN by Tara Brach Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach The Business of Friendship by Shasta NelsonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. and be happier at school or in college. But when I attended the 2023 South by Southwest conference, I had a chance to take part in a great panel, which talked about the challenges of maintaining our well-being at work. So at this year's South by Southwest, I returned to give a special talk about what science says we should do to thrive in our rapidly changing workplaces. The audience in Austin really seemed to enjoy it, so I wanted to share that talk with you today. I hope you enjoy it.

Hello, hello South By folks. Today we're going to be talking about the future of work, because the landscape of work is changing. You know, take the fact that we're kind of dealing with technology changes, right? We're all trying to figure out how these new tools like ChatGPT and AI are going to change the landscape of how we do our creative work, how we do knowledge work generally, right? This is something that's kind of on our mind about the future of work. On our mind about the future of work is also the question of where we work, you know, like the fact that we're no longer in these big office buildings that so many companies have paid for, like the fact that we wind up working at home with a lot of, you know, distractions around us all the

time but beyond that we also have questions about how the economy is shaping the future of work and the fact that you know some of us might not be working in the same place that we were working you know a couple years ago what does that mean that these things are changing around especially for the folks who might have been laid off or had some career changes but also for the folks that are in the same career that they were in before. If your mindset is on your worries about leaving work, if your mindset is on quiet quitting, what is that doing to the nature of work and how we focus on it? But this is a session on happiness and well-being.

And so we're going to be focused on the question of what the future of work says about happiness and how our own mental health and our well-being might be involved in the future of work in ways that we actually don't expect. And I think it's fair to say it's been basically a dumpster fire for the last couple years when it comes to our collective well-being. You know, for a variety of reasons, we have just gotten through a global pandemic. We are facing a climate crisis that is unprecedented. We have all these technologies that are coming in that are spooking us about how we're going to change work around. Like we're coming up on a really terrifying election that's going to be taking up all of our bandwidth, right? 2024 has been a mess. But I also think 2024 has been a mess when it comes to thinking

about work. So many of us are feeling much more burned out, much more overwhelmed, much more anxious about the certainty of our work and the certainty of our workplaces than ever before. And as an expert on the science of happiness, this is actually something that worries me about the future of work. Because we know a lot about what happens to people's work when their well-being takes a dive, when they're feeling a little bit burned out, when they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed. And the answer is that it's not good. And so when I got invited to kind of come out to South By to have a conversation with you about the science of happiness, I really wanted to focus on work in particular, because when I do the thing that most South By presenters do, we kind of put on our South By glasses and we look

to the future. And my goal as a speaker is to give you, okay, what are we gonna know? What do we know right now that's gonna change the future of the workplace in five years from now? What do you wanna hear today that you're gonna take with you when you leave this place that's gonna prepare you for the next five years,

the next decade and so on? When I hear that question, I actually don't wanna talk about AI. I don't wanna talk about layoffs. What want to talk about is happiness and mental health. And the reason I want to talk about that is that if you look at what the science suggests, what the biggest priority should be in the workplace of tomorrow, like how we want to think about the workplace of the future, I think science gives us a clear answer. And it's not that we need to focus on technologies or some new kind of industry movement, whatever. The thing we need to focus on is happiness. And that's because so

much data in the last few years have started showing the importance of happiness for our workplace performance. In fact, what science shows right now is that our happiness seems to really matter for our productivity, for our flourishing in the office, for what we do. How do we know this? Well, we know this from some older studies. These are studies from the 90s and the early 2000s that looked at the kinds of things that predict your performance bottom line, right? How you do in the workplace. Things like, what are the kinds of things you can do to make sure you're going to get a job? We all think of the normal, like, LinkedIn things, right? You've got to boost your resume and get certain skill sets and so on. We don't tend to think that the thing that you should prioritize is your happiness and your

mental health, but the data seems to suggest that's actually an important thing to prioritize. One study by the University of Virginia psychologist Ed Diener actually looked at the kinds of things that predict people's job obtainment, not necessarily right now, but at times in the future. And the thing that Ed Diener decided to study was people's level of cheerfulness. He measured cheerfulness in his undergrads at age 18 and used that level of cheerfulness to predict whether or not those undergrads got a job, not when they were age 18, but when they were age 27 and later at age 37. And what he found remarkably in a very famous paper is that your

cheerfulness at age 18 is predictive. It's predictive of whether or not you get a job, whether you get a job that you like, but also whether or not you get a job where you're making a decent amount of money. We often think that money matters for happiness, but we don't think that the causal arrow goes the other way. Like if I was happier, I would be making more money. But the data actually seem to suggest that that seems to be the case. Now you might worry about this statistic. Some of you might be in the HR field and you might be saying to yourself, wait, are we paying the happy people more money? That seems really sketchy. We got to get on top of that. Like, no, no, no, no. That's not actually

what's happening. What's happening is that happy people are performing better. Pretty much by every metric of innovative performance, it seems like happy people are actually doing better in their jobs. One of my favorite studies that looked at this looked in a particular industry profession. They brought doctors into the lab, medical doctors, and gave doctors a sort of tough medical diagnosis. If you're a fan of these like TV shows where doctors do these weird things like House or way back in the day, Quincy MD, where they have these like weird medical things. I watch these a lot. I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, so I'm familiar with these. These are the problems that they gave doctors in this study. These kind of hard, like hard to figure out problems. But half of the doctors in this study. These are kind of hard to figure out problems.

But half of the doctors in this study got to put in a good mood first. They just got to watch a couple of silly cat videos on YouTube. What happens to people's performance? What the researchers find is that the doctors who are in the good mood wind up statistically coming up with the better solutions, the more innovative solutions. Just being in a good mood winds up allowing us to think a little bit more creatively. Now, I'm telling you the study on this, but in some ways, I didn't need to tell you that study, right? Think to the last time that you were feeling the opposite of that cat video mood,

where you were just kind of super overwhelmed and kind of, you know, just really depressed or anxious. You weren't thinking creatively. You were triaging. You were sort of taking all your ideas in the, like, tiniest form possible, right? Our minds narrow in when we're not feeling good. And the data suggests that if we're not feeling good at work, our minds are going to narrow in in ways that might negatively affect our performance. And that finding a path to positive emotion might be one of the best ways to increase our productivity at work. And so that's all the science showing that happiness matters for our performance. We've kind of known about that in little fits and starts over the past few years, but in just the last year or so, we've been getting

a different metric of how happiness affects our performance, which is that it doesn't just affect the performance of individuals. Happiness at work seems to be affecting a company's profits. And this is the time when I think people start paying attention, because as soon as it starts affecting the real bottom line, like how much money a company is making, all of a sudden now people are starting to pay attention. And I think this data is best shown in a really cool recent working paper. This is my favorite working paper of the last year in 2023. And it was a paper that was put together by researchers at the University of Oxford and a company that's of high prominence here in Austin, Indeed. Some of you might know Indeed. Some of you might have

been on Indeed. If you haven't been on Indeed, Indeed is this job website where you can look for jobs, but also you can rank everything about your current job, or you can rank your salary and your compensation, your work-life balance, but also your happiness. And so these researchers at Indeed had this idea. They said, hang on, there are 15 million posts plus on Indeed about people's happiness at work. Has anybody ever actually looked at what that happiness at work predicts? For example, does it predict how well companies are doing in terms of their profits? Is there a correlation between people's happiness at work

or average happiness at work in an individual company and the profits that that company is making? And so they took these 50 million plus data points over thousands of different companies, and they looked, and it turns out, these things are correlated. I'm showing you right now the graph from their working paper and what you're seeing is the gross profits on one axis and this

indeed well-being score, which is kind of a metric of people's happiness at work, their sense of purpose and so on. But basically what you see is this lovely correlation where the companies who have the happiest workers are making the most money. Now all of a sudden the C-suite folks are paying attention because this is mattering for their profits. But these researchers didn't just do that. They actually did one other thing that I love. I can't help, again, but kind of nerdily share with you the graph. They said, well, if this is true that the happier companies are making the most money, maybe we need a different economic index. You know, some of you might have heard about like

the S&P 500, right, which is like, you know, these top 500 companies where if you invest, you'll probably make some money. They said, what if we make a kind of S&P 100 of the top 100 happiest companies in the Indeed data set? And we plot how the stocks of that company did against maybe the S&P 500 and all these other indicators of economic success. And that's the graph I'm going to show you now. You'll see on the bottom are these orange, purple, and green lines. That's the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ. Those are the normal things we see in the Wall Street Journal that are the indicators of economic success. And I'm looking across time as though you'd invested a thousand bucks back in January 2020 in these companies. How would your money be doing over

time? But you'll notice there's that blue bar that tends to be at the top of this graph. That's this Indeed top 100, kind of S&P 100 of the happiest companies. And what they're finding is that pretty much at every point in the economic cycle over the last couple years, these top 100 companies were beating out in terms of how much money their stock were making, all these other kind of indicators. What does this mean? This means that what the research is showing is that happier companies make more money.

If your employees are happy, that might be a critical factor in whether your startup is going to succeed or whether your company gets out of the economic slump that we're all in right now. These things matter. And so that's why I think with my kind of South by glasses on, we need to be paying attention to well-being. Yeah, AI and worries about the economics and all this stuff, that's important.

But I think that over the next five to 10 years, smart businesses are going to start paying attention to their employee well-being. Hopefully partly out of kind of doing the moral thing for a company because you want your employees to feel good and succeed. But I think partly out of a like fully, you know, purely capitalistic move

of like how are we going to make the most company? How are we going to make the most money? We make the most money by having the happiest workers. But there's a question of like, how do we do that? And that's what I'm going to talk to you about in the rest of this talk. We're going to kind of dig into like, okay, how do you make a happy workplace? And how can we as individuals improve our own happiness in the workplace so our individual performance can flourish and thrive and

so on? And so we're going to walk through the five tips that science shows us about how we can do that, how we can improve our well-being in the workplace. And each of these tips, I should say, each of these tips have this feature where we're going to walk through a misconception we have about this, right? We're going to see where our mind gets it wrong about happiness in the workplace and what we can do to do better. Starting with tip number one, which is if we want to be happier in the workplace, we need to find ways to acknowledge and use our negative emotions a little bit more wisely, right? Like we're all feeling a little overwhelmed. We're all emotions a little bit more wisely, right? Like,

we're all feeling a little overwhelmed. We're all feeling a little anxious. We're all feeling a little bit upset, frustrated by what's going on. That's kind of the general state of these things. That's why in this conference where there's so many other cool sessions this morning, y'all are filling the seats in this one because we all want to deal with these negative emotions. The problem, though, is that we have this misconception about how we should do that. I think we all think negative emotions, not good at work, not good in general, don't feel good, I'm going to squish them down. You know, stiff upper lip, hustle culture, I'll just pretend I'm not feeling that overwhelm or that sadness or that frustration or whatever. It turns out scientists have gone out and studied what happens when we suppress our emotions that

positively affect our performance. Turns out no. We know this from some clever studies. One of my favorite comes from the neuroscientist James Gross at Stanford. He does these studies where he brings subjects into the lab and has them do the opposite of watching that funny cat video. He has them watch really sad videos. But he tells subjects, whatever you do, make it so that no one knows you're feeling sad. So trying to suppress their emotions. The question is, what's the consequences of doing this? And he tests a few consequences. What happens to subjects' performance on a memory task, on a decision-making task?

And what he finds is that subjects do really bad. If you're using all your energy to hold down those emotions, you can't remember stuff. You can't perform well. Our performance tanks when we're suppressing our emotions. But we also have negative consequences for our bodies. It turns out Gross measures people's cardiac stress in this short little laboratory task. And he finds that even suppressing your emotions after this really tiny negative video, you can actually see evidence that these subjects are going through cardiac stress, right? Point is, our theory about how we deal with negative emotions is kind of wrong. We think, squish them

down, pretend they're not there, we're going to be fine. And the data suggests that doesn't work. The data suggests we need a new way to think about negative emotions, both at work and kind of in general. And the way I think we need to think about negative emotions is not to avoid them, but to use them as the signal they are. Evolutionarily speaking, you know, natural selection doesn't build in extraneous stuff to our psychological systems that we don't need. Our negative emotions are kind of like the alert system on our car. You know, if your brake light goes on, your gas light goes on, that's kind of a pain in the butt. It means you have to deal with something, but it's an important alert because if you don't deal with that thing, worse things are

going to happen. You're going to run out of gas or your engine's going to blow up on the highway. That's what negative emotions are doing. They're trying to be an alert signal that we need to pay attention to so we can ask ourselves, how can we nurture ourselves? What can we do to take care of ourselves? That's how we need to reframe emotions, both in general and at work. Our signals of overwhelm are telling us something important. They're telling us we need to take care of ourselves? That's how we need to reframe emotions, both in general and at work. Our signals of overwhelm are telling us something important. They're telling us we need to take something off our plate. Our signals of anxiety or sadness are telling us something important. They're telling us that something is amiss, that we need to take action and change. And if we ignore that, it's kind of like ignoring the gaslight. You're going to run out of gas.

And so the question, though, is, well, how can we do that? What are some practical strategies we can use to kind of notice those emotional signals, acknowledge them and kind of use them more wisely? And one of my favorite super practical strategies comes from the meditation teacher, Tara Brack, a psychologist and meditation teacher. I'm going to flash up some of these books. And I think these are like essential reading if you want to learn more about your well-being. But Tara Brack actually has a meditation practice she uses to kind of allow and non-judgmentally kind of allow your emotions. And it's a method that she calls RAIN, which is an acronym for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And so let's say you're at work and you receive some email that makes you

feel really frustrated. Or you look at the news and you read, I don't know, literally anything, and you start to feel sad and anxious and so on, right? You remember, oh yeah, at South By, that Yale lady said I could use RAIN. And you've already achieved the first step, which is the R, to recognize. You just recognize what's happening. I'm experiencing a negative emotion right now. And you get really curious. You categorize it. You say, is this frustration with a side of anxiety? Or maybe it's pissed off with a little spirit in there of loneliness, right? Like get really creative and use your adjectives about how you're feeling so you can really describe it carefully. That's the R step. But then you follow that with the hard step, allow. You say, all right, I'm going to take five minutes. I'm just going to sit here,

non-judgmentally allow these feelings to be there just as they are. I don't have to love them, but I'm going to sit with them. The famous poet Rumi once talked about negative emotions as this visitor who knocks on your door that you didn't want to show up, kind of the annoying neighbor, right? But you don't kick them out. You sit them down. You invite them in. They're going to eventually do their thing and go. That's the allow step for your emotions. You just commit to hanging out with your emotions for a bit. But you kind of want to give your mind something to do when you're doing that allow step. And that's the next step, investigate. You say, all right, how does it feel in my body when I'm feeling pissed off with a side of lonely?

Maybe my chest is getting tight. Maybe my brow is farrowing. Maybe I have this enormous craving. I want to eat something or I want to have a drink or check my email. Don't act on those. Just like, huh, that is where my brain and my mind goes when I'm feeling this stuff. And the beauty of the investigate step is that so much evidence suggests that emotions are kind of like a wave. This is, in clinical practice,

what's often called urge surfing, where if you pay attention to an emotion, you'll feel it a little bit more. It'll kind of go up like a wave, but then it'll just kind of crash down and do its thing. The problem is we never hang out with our emotions non-judgmentally long enough for them to do that. That's the investigate step.

But the key is that you don't stop there. There's one more letter in this RAIN practice, N for nurture, and that's to do something nice for yourself. Negative emotions don't feel good. What can you take off your plate? What can you do to help yourself, take care of yourself, right? Practices like RAIN I love because they've actually been studied in laboratory settings. RAIN, but also a whole host of practices like RAIN, where you allow your emotions and non-judgmentally say, I'm having a tough time, but I'm going to sit with it. And research has shown that they can reduce burnout in domains like palliative care workers and in industries like for first responders, right? These are folks who are dealing with negative emotions really on a daily basis, and practices like these can help.

So there are practices that can also help us in all the industries that I'm seeing in this room, right? Finding ways to acknowledge our negative emotions and use them wisely. That's tip number one. Now we get to tip number two, which is a mindset shift. We have to overcome misconceptions we have about our own productivity. And that is the tip that we need to rethink not just productivity, but how much we're protecting what social scientists call our time affluence. What is time affluence? It's kind of a strange term. Well, it's a term that social scientists like the researcher Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School have gotten really obsessed with lately. It's defined as the subjective sense that

you feel wealthy in time. You've got lots of time on your hands, right? Some of you are already furrowing, I can see. It's the opposite of what many of you probably experience, which is time famine, where you're literally starving for time. And the research shows that time famine works a lot like hunger famine. It puts our bodies into flight or flight mode. It's also really terrible for our well-being. In fact, Ashley Willins' research suggests that if you self-report being time famished a lot of the time, that's as bad for your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. You know, you lost your job tomorrow, that would suck. Just not having any time or feeling that you don't have any time is as bad for your well-being, which is bad. Some of you are watching your faces like, you know, that's me. I feel so time famished.

What can I do? Well, I think to figure out what we can do, we need to understand the misconceptions that drove us here. Why are we feeling so strapped for time? And I think it's not because we're masochists. I think we feel strapped for time because we think that working as much as we work all the time is essential for kind of achieving the things we want to achieve in life. We want to get to 11 in our careers, in our kind of creativity, and so on. And we think, push, push, push, and I'll just keep working all the time, and then I'll be, quote-unquote, productive. But does that really work, or is this a misconception? My favorite recent articulation of how much this is a misconception comes from this fabulous book by Cal Newport called Slow Productivity. I just interviewed Cal from my podcast, The Happiness Lab, and I think this book is also

essential reading for everyone. But Cal kind of walks through this idea that, like, you know, these days we don't really have a great sense of what productivity is. We used to, right? If you think back to the industries that humans used to engage in, like think like agriculture, we had a good way to determine productivity. It was like amount of time and resources per like corn. Like it was like, it was really easy thing you measure, like big corn, that dude's doing good, right? Or fast forward to industries like the assembly line and kind of making stuff. That

was another domain where we had some pretty good ideas of productivity, right? Amount of time per numbers of car top parts getting put on these, you know, Chevys, that was a good measure of productivity. We had those back then. But now fast forward to the kind of knowledge work that most of you in the room do, and our definition of productivity gets a little bit trickier. Like, you know, I'm a knowledge worker in the podcast space. I'm a podcast host. So like, what counts as productivity for me? Is it number of episodes I make per time?

Is it the ratings? Is it the amount of ad revenue I make, right? Like, we don't have these good measures of productivity. It's not as easy as with corn or when we're producing cars and so on. And Newport suggests that what we've done as knowledge workers is that we've developed a sort of proxy for our own productivity. It's what he calls pseudo-productivity or just extreme visual busyness. We feel like if our GCALs are filled with all these meetings and all this stuff to do, that must be productive. You know, we even pick a particular time to do it, you know, kind of nine to five where we fill that time, even if that's not our best, most productive time, because that's like what you do. And Newport

argues that this is problematic because it means that what we're going to reward ourself with, or we're going to kind of make kind of secretly feel like we're being productive, is whenever we're just like doing stuff that looks visually active. He argues that this is why we load our days filled with like email and Slack messages and meetings at work and team meetings because it feels like we're doing something. The company can see us. We're actually doing something, see? But he's like, that's not the real knowledge work you want to get done. We don't even know if this stuff is actually contributing to the big projects you want to get through, but it looks really visually busy, so you feel kind of good about it. His argument is that these kinds of things can be what he calls productivity termites, where they kind of, all those emails and Slack messages go into your calendar, and just like a

termite eating away at the house, they eat away at the foundation of the free time you have, such that when you kind of go back and say, all right, I'm going to do the big project and that big, deep knowledge work I want to work on, you can't do that because the whole structure of your calendar is broken down by all these slack and message answering and these tiny meetings and these things. And that means that we're not being as productive as we could be. Why? Because we've made ourselves so time famished. In an effort to kind of feel productive, we've killed our own time affluence. And so the answer is that we need a new way to think about our time and our productivity.

But how do we do that? Well, I argue that the way we do that is that we try to embrace a little bit more time affluence. As uncomfortable as that might be, and as many things as that means, we need to take off our plate to feel like we're a little bit less time famished. Strategies for doing this involve kind of thinking about whether you can kind of get rid of some of those productivity termites. What can it look like to kind of push email or push Slack messages only to sometimes in the day so you can feel like you have these big stretches that feel quite productive when you can work on things. Another one of my favorite suggestions comes from the psychologist Gal Zuberman, who talks a lot about what he calls the yes-damn effect. So the yes-damn effect is like, you know, months and months ago, somebody's like, hey, can you do

this project report? Or hey, can we set up this meeting for a couple hours? Or hey, can you go to this conference? And it seems like it's so far away, you're like, yes. But then time goes on, and that date shows up, and you look in your calendar, and that stupid thing is there, and you're like, damn. That's the yes, damn effect. Zuberman suggests we should embrace a different effect, which he calls the no, yay effect.

And the way the no, yay effect works, as you might guess, is that person's like, hey, can you do this project report? Can you do this thing? You commit to saying no. You literally put on your calendar how many no things you want to have, and you have to tick them off the list. But you don't just say no. You say, and when was that project supposed to be due? The one I said no to, when was it due? Then you go in your calendar, and you put that on that date, you know, Monday, three weeks from now, you were supposed to have that thing that you had to do.

And you look, and you're like, I don't have to do that thing. And you say, yay. That's the no yay effect. The point is that what we're doing is we are aggressively protecting our time. We are thinking about our time in the same way we think about our money, where we want to prioritize it. And in fact, research from Ashley Willans and her colleagues suggest that the more you focus on time and put your investment into time rather than money, the happier you'll be. Most of you are at South By because you have at least some discretionary income to come to events like this. Willens' work suggests that the more you spend your discretionary income to get back time, that you give up money to get time, the happier you will be. And we can do this in really silly ways that we often don't even think about. I'm sure at some

point some of you in the working day have gotten takeout or something like that. We don't think of it as a savings in time, but the research suggests we should, right? You know, say you go out and get pad thai or whatever. That's noodles you didn't have to cook, you didn't have to look up the recipe and go to the grocery store to get the peanut sauce. You probably saved what? Hour and a half? Hour 45 minutes? What'd you do with that hour and 45 minutes? So that's spending our money to get back more time, but also making sure we're framing things like that.

A final way we can protect our time affluence is to make good use of the time we do have. Our time, as you heard, in these productivity termites, sometimes breaks our time up into these little tiny chunks. This is what journalist Bridget Schultz calls time confetti. You know, these little pieces for, you know, five minutes when that Zoom meeting ends or 10 minutes if your kid falls asleep. We think those are just such tiny periods. We don't do anything with them. But Schultz suggests that we might want to invest in that time confetti because when you add it up, you know, it's a huge sheet of paper that is like

kind of broken into these tiny pieces. And so she recommends making what she calls a time confetti wish list. This isn't like work to-dos, but like for you to-dos. Maybe that's when you do your rain meditation or some other self-care practice. The key is that instead of blowing that little piece of time confetti, scrolling on Reddit or Instagram or something like that, you actually do something useful with it. It makes you feel a little bit more time affluent. So that's top tip number two. We need to rethink our idea that productivity is about visible busyness. It's a filled calendar. It's all that stuff. No. To feel better, we need

to embrace a slower form of productivity, one that says no to a lot of the stuff so that we can have a yes for when we really need it. But it's worth noting that as folks in the current culture that we're in, where, you know, busyness and hustle culture and girl boss and internalized capitalism reigns supreme, that's hard, right? The act of doing that, saying no more, is hard. And that's why we need tip number three, which is another mindset shift that can help us with this, which is that if we really want to protect our time, if we really want to work better, we need to motivate ourselves in the way that science suggests work best. And that's by motivating ourselves with what we're going to call self-compassion. As we mentioned, we all want to push ourselves. We all want to get to 11, right?

I think that's always been true, but lately in the past five to 10 years, we've developed some mindset notions about how we do that best. And I think those are best summed up in the past five to ten years, we've developed some mindset notions about how we do that best. And I think those are best summed up in the idea of hustle culture, right? Keep pushing yourself, sleep when you're dead, all these things. These are the mantras that we pick up because we assume that's the best way to motivate ourselves. But the research is starting to show that that just doesn't work, that all these kind of mantras that we have in our head is kind of Instagram, like, you know, latching onto our brain of how much we need to work more and keep grinding. It actually doesn't work. It causes us to procrastinate. It causes us to engage in a lot more self-criticism because we feel like our work is our worth and it's sort of never enough,

right? You kind of just keep pushing yourself and pushing ourselves. And so this is the misconception, that the way to motivate ourselves is to kind of scream at ourselves like a drill instructor and like some hustle culture warrior. It kind of doesn't work in the way we think. So how do we fix this misconception? We need to develop a better way to motivate ourselves, a better way to think about how we motivate ourselves. And the way that we get from a lot of recent science is that we need to motivate ourselves better through self-compassion.

Another fabulous book, if you're interested in this, is a book by Kristen Neff, who's a professor here in Austin. She's at UT. She has this book about self-compassion. And a lot of her work suggests that if we want to engage in self-compassion to motivate ourselves, we need to remember that self-compassion has three parts. The first is something that should be really familiar from tip one, recognizing your negative emotions. It's the practice of mindfulness. You got to know what's going on. This sucks right now. I'm having a really hard time. I'm feeling really anxious. I'm feeling really ashamed. That's mindfulness. You're recognizing what's happened. First step of self-compassion. But the second step is you do something with that mindfulness. You then say,

but that makes sense because I'm only human. This is something that everybody goes through. It's normal to fail. It's normal to screw up. It's normal to feel overwhelmed. This is normal. It's a common human experience. That's step number two, common humanity. But you don't end there. You ask yourself what you can do to be kind to yourself. You say, what can I take off my plate? How can I help myself right now? What do I need right now? You talk to yourself as though you were a friend who'd showed up at your house having the same problem, and you talk to yourself like you would talk to that friend. And I love this idea of talking to yourself like you'd talk to a friend, because sometimes when we think of practices like self-compassion, especially from the hustle

culture mindset, we sometimes worry that it's like self-indulgence, like I'm being too nice to myself, I'm letting myself off the hook. But if you think about how you'd really talk to a friend that was struggling, if they were really screwing up, you probably wouldn't let them off the hook. You wouldn't scream at them like some hustle culture warrior. You'd talk to them kindly, with curiosity. You'd be like, I don't know what's happening, but I'm really worried about you. What can we do to fix this? You'd be curious, and you'd be problem-solving.

That's how you talk to yourself, not self-indulgence. It's a form of compassion, and it's a form of compassion that the research suggests really works. In fact, Kristen Neff has tested all the benefits of this practice of self-compassion, and it has some incredibly compelling ones. She's, for example, done work on whether or not practices like self-compassion can reduce PTSD in combat veterans. And she finds that both with Iraqi and Afghani vets, teaching them these strategies of self-compassion ahead of time can reduce the rates of trauma that these individuals come back with, right? These are really negative, nasty emotions, but being nice to yourself

through it can be incredibly powerful. Kristen Neff also finds that being nice to yourself can make it easier to be nice to your future self. She finds that people who engage in self-compassion eat healthier. They save more for retirement. They're better able to prioritize their future selves, and that includes a future self that has to work at something that's a little scary. She finds that practices like self-compassion can reduce things like procrastination. So it's a way to get more done because you're not screaming at yourself when you don't do things the way you think. She also finds that self-compassion is a great way to practice compassion for other people. So people with more self-compassion show more self-compassion in their romantic relationships with their kids, with their teammates on the job. It's just a powerful

way of feeling better. And so sounds great, but what are some practical strategies we can use to find more self-compassion, especially if we're kind of infused in that hustle culture? And one way that Christian recommends that looks cheesy, but it works, is to engage in compassionate self-touch. So think about the last time you had a bad day. You know, if your parents are still around, you might have, you know, called your mom, maybe saw her for coffee, she gave you a hug or something, or you saw a friend, your spouse. We tend to comfort each other with a certain kind of touch. Kristen Neff says, just do that to yourself. Looks stupid, but it works. Turns out your brains are dumb. They don't know who's touching you, right? It's useful in other contexts too, as we know, right? But you

just do this to yourself. And because we need practice, I'm going to ask all of you in the room now to kind of do a little self-hug, a little kind of stroke on the arm. But then that is a signal to you to engage in new self-talk. This is why I like this touch practice. It like reminds you, I got to talk to myself differently. And you talk using those strategies. Mindfulness. This is really hard right now. I'm struggling. This sucks. I'm not doing well. Common humanity. But that's normal. It's just human. Stress is a part of life. Everyone struggles. And then self-kindness. What can I take off my plate? What do I need right now? Just asking that question to yourself when you're struggling can be so powerful.

What do I need right now? Again, the research shows that even though we don't think it, this kind of self-kindness and self-compassion is a much better way to motivate ourselves than all that hustle culture self-criticism. So that's top insight number three. We got to motivate ourself with self-compassion. The question is, of course, what is it we're motivating ourselves to do?

What things should we be doing more of at work to increase our flourishing and reduce our risk of burnout? You'll hear my best two tips on happiness at work after this short break. So far in my South by Southwest talk on happiness at work, I've covered the importance of recognizing when we're feeling sad, why we should differentiate between actual productivity and stressful busyness, and how we should occasionally give ourselves a comforting hug. In the second half of my talk, I turn to the topic of tackling burnout. And that gets us to tip number four, which is that if we really want to fight burnout, the research shows we need to craft our job a bit so that it becomes a calling. Burnout is something else that everybody's talking about at South By because it's a thing.

I think this is also something we have a lot of misconceptions about. We think it's just about emotional exhaustion. But the research shows that burnout can be more like an occupational problem. It's kind of an interaction between you and your job that we need to understand. And we know this from the lovely work of Christina Maslach. She is the scientific expert on burnout. And she's walked through the kind of steps that lead to burnout in an organization, the kind of factors that wind up letting us feel more burned out. And she's identified six. I think of the six, there's ones that we often think of. So things like workload, if your workload is too much, or maybe the rewards aren't too much, you're not getting paid enough for the work you're doing. But there's one on this

list that the science has really narrowed in on. It's particularly important. It's this last one, values mismatch. What's that? We get burned out when the values that we signed up for to do a job don't match the ones that we're experiencing in practice. I think this is something that's really problematic, for example, in lots of industries, but I'll just pick one, the healthcare industry. You're a nurse and you're a doctor, you got into it because your value is helping people, but on the ground it feels like you're saving money for the insurance companies or the hospital and you're getting patients in and out. It's just like there's a mismatch there and

that's the one that insidiously leads us to feel that yucky sense of burnout. And so what that means is that we got to get our values right, right? That's the thing we might need to focus on more than some of the other stuff. But we often don't know how to do that. But the good news is there's lots of research that's focused on how we can. And a lot of it comes from the work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who focused on what they call finding your signature strengths. Their research has basically looked at like, well, what are the values that people engage in, you know, to do good in the world, in their work, in their volunteerism, and whatever. And they've looked cross-culturally and identified about 24 different what they call

character strengths, basically this list of values. When you look at the list, you're like, oh yeah, like, you know, hope and persistence or self-restraint, zest for life and appreciation of beauty, bravery. They're kind of set of values that like we can all get behind. But as you scroll through that list,

there might be some of the things on the list that you're like, you know, yes, citizenship is good, but I'm really into creativity, or I'm really into humor, or I'm really into zest for life. There might be one that's like the particular one that you resonate with. That is what researchers would call your signature strength. But the question is like, okay, well, what if my signature strength is humor, or bravery, or citizenship, or whatever? Like, how do I engage that in the knowledge work that I'm doing at work, right? How do I do that a little bit more? And here,

we have the lovely work of Amy Resninsky, who's another faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies what she calls job crafting. Her idea is that in any job, you can look at your job description and figure out with flexibility ways that you can infuse these values in, no matter what your job description is. And I love Amy's work because she doesn't do studies with people doing creative knowledge work in the industries that I'm probably mostly seeing in the room. Most of her work on job crafting is with hospital janitorial staff workers, where you might think these folks don't actually have a lot of creativity about how they can move their job description around. These are people who are like washing linen in a hospital ward. But what she finds interestingly is that a third of these hospital workers, a third, it's

actually a pretty high number, say that they experience their job as a calling. They love their job. They wouldn't leave their job for something else. And the reason, she finds, as she digs into what they're doing, is that they're constantly engaging in one of their signature strengths. She tells these lovely stories of hospital janitorial staff workers who, for example, one who engages in kind of helping others and humor. Every day he worked in a chemotherapy ward. So if you've ever been unlucky enough to have to have chemotherapy or know someone who did, you know that people often get very sick. And so a lot of his job was cleaning up vomit, which doesn't sound like a job where you could get a lot of these

strengths in. But he's like, no, no, no, my strength is really humor. Yeah, I have to clean that up. But my real job is I make the patient laugh. I'm like a comedian and I'm going to get them to laugh even though their day has been really crappy. And he had his whole shtick that he used to do where he'd say, you know, when you come in to clean, he'd be like, you keep vomiting, I'm going to get overtime. And like, well, like, you know, the secret handshake, you know, we'd come into cleaning and be like, you keep vomiting, I'm going to get overtime. And like, well, like, you know, get a secret handshake, you know. And just like you laugh, the patient laughed. And he's like, see, that's my real job. Or another janitorial staff worker who worked in a coma ward.

So this staff member couldn't interact with patients. But every day he would move the paintings around in the room and like the plants, like switch them. And that was a strength of creativity. He just thought maybe it would help. I don't't know these are nothing managers are telling people to do it's just they're infusing their strengths into their job and they wind up loving their job loving a job that many of us would think would be a tough job to love in the ways that they love it but what's most important about job crafting is that the evidence suggests it can protect you from burnout it's a way to get your values lined up.

Even if they went askew before, you can bring them back to an alignment in a way that will protect you. And that is top tip number four. We need to find ways to craft our job. That's how we turn it into a calling. But there's one other scientific way that we can turn our job into a calling, into a job that we really love. And that gets us to top tip number five,

which is that the science really shows that if we want to feel better at work, we need to find ways to seek out more belonging. And we do that by getting a little bit more social than we're comfortable with. I started with that lovely study from Indeed. I talked about how companies with happier workers are making the most money. But what I didn't tell you was the key feature, which is what makes the workers happy? What are the factors that lead to more happiness at work in this big, huge data set where we have people's spontaneous ratings? Researcher Yann-Emmanuel Deneuve, he's the Oxford researcher who led this study, said, well, let's let economists guess. We have the data from the Indeed surveys, but let's let economists guess. What do you think makes people happy at work? And economists came up with their usual top three. They said money. People who get paid more

are probably happier at work. That was idea number one. Idea number two was good management. You know, we pay all these people to go to business school. Probably they're learning something to make people happy at work. And number three was some sense of like work-life balance or work-life flexibility. That's what people want. That's what people assumed made people happy at work. And these factors did matter, but in the list of things that mattered, they were kind of in the middle of the list. Kind of like number five, number six, number seven, that kind of thing. The thing that mattered the most, the thing that no economist predicted, was people's sense of belonging. And with the Indeed data, Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve could kind of dig into

what this belonging measure included. And it included three factors. The first is that you say people care about you at work. You're not a cog in the machine. You're someone who matters, right? People actually acknowledge you. You matter. The second thing is that the work you do matters, right? So you're doing something that matters to the company. You can sort of see your impact. And the third factor, which kind of nobody predicted, is that you answer yes to the question, do you have a best friend at work?

If you have a best friend at work, you're more likely to say you belong and that the stuff you do matters there. This all surprised the economists, but it made total sense to someone who studies the science of happiness because we've seen for years that social connection and our social relationships are one of the most important things that matter for our well-being. So of course it would make sense

that these kinds of social relationships matter at work. I think the problem is that yet again here, like those economists, most of us lay people have a particular misconception. We think, okay, yeah, friends matter outside the work, but in the office, it's me working all the time. It's just like me kind of, you know, junking my head in. The heck with those like trust falls or like the silly office socials. Like, I'm just going to get my work done. And one of my favorite kind of versions of this claim came from this viral Boston Globe article that made the claim, Gen Z, my generation is not looking to make friends at work. Offices aren't social hubs anymore, and it's better this way. And this article was really

particularly painful for me because the author, Catherine Hu, was a student in my Yale happiness class. Like, she should know about it. I was like, what? Have I taught you nothing? Have I taught you nothing? I have a lovely interview with her for my podcast, which I'll kind of sum up in a second. But this is, I think this is a misconception that all of us have, right? It's a nice to have, not a need to have. But these data from the Indeed study suggests it's a need to have. Maybe one of the reasons we're all so disengaged at work, maybe one of the reasons quiet quitting seems so appealing, is that we're actively not investing in the thing that might matter the most for our happiness at work, which is our connection with other people. And so the question is, how can we overcome this misconception? How can we develop a new way to

think about connection at work? And here, I love the advice that comes from the kind of business professional Shasta Nelson, who has this lovely book on the business of friendship, where she walks through the ways we can actually make friends at work. Another great podcast guest on my podcast, The Happiness Lab. And she talks about three things we need to do to promote friendship. It's not what we think. It's not like oversharing, you know, over the water cooler. It's first, positivity. Friends are made at work when we have more positive interactions than negative ones. This isn't toxic positivity. This isn't be nice all the time. It's just like in the ratio of emotions that you generate for other people at work, make more positive ones than negative ones.

That's kind of data point number one. The second thing she recommends is that friendships at work come from consistency. You see the same people over time. You know that those interactions are going to go a particular way. It makes it easy to form the habit of friendship. And I think this is a tricky one because many of us aren't forming that consistent pattern in the office. I think some people are going back to work, but a lot of people are stuck trying to develop their social connection from remote work or hybrid work. What can we do to make that consistent friendship-like interaction in these times? I think if we answer that question by kind of putting more effort into talking to

people, not just in the normal meeting at Teams, but other ways of actually making that consistent connection, all the better. So that's number one and number two, more positivity, more consistency in interaction. But the third thing that Shasta suggests is that we need to get a little bit more vulnerable, not in the way we think, but just showing up as a real human who has opinions, who has frailties, all that self-compassion stuff I talked about, engaging with that and recognizing that you're a normal human is powerful. I think we sometimes think at work we need to be this like, you know, AI robot who doesn't experience emotions, who never has failures, who never asks for help, and so on. And that's what vulnerability is about. It's avoiding that stuff. It's really taking time to talk to your neighbors, to ask questions, to get feedback. These are the moments of vulnerability

that seem to really matter. And when you engage in them, the data really suggests that you make more friends at work and you wind up not just happier, but also, as we've been mentioning, performing better. And so that's top tip number five. I think we really want to experience our work as a calling. We need to overcome this idea that, well, you know, friendships happen outside the work and my work is just my work. We really need to engage in belonging. It's the factor that seems to matter for our sense of happiness at work, but also for our performance at work, and also for companies' happiness. So I think this is a tip not just for individuals, but for smart companies that are using the data, too.

Okay, so you got through the five tips from happiness. If you're like, oh my gosh, I want tips six through 10, you can do that. You can sign up for my online course for free, Coursera.org. Just show of hands, anybody taken the course already? Oh, my students, hello students. Thank you for coming.

And if you're like, oh my gosh, I'm burned out and overwhelmed, I don't wanna take another whole Yale class, we also have my lovely podcast, The Happiness Lab, which you should check out. And all the folks I mentioned and that you wanted to hear more about, they're all in the podcast. You can just Google their name and find it there. But what I hope I've done is to convince you that in their quest to kind of put the South by goggles

on and say, what's the future of work? What's going to matter? What really actually matters isn't the stuff we normally think about. What might actually matter more is our mental health. And so if we promote that and we get companies to promote that, we'll all be achieving in all the ways we want to succeed. And with that, I'll thank you. And I think we have a couple minutes for questions. So thank you all. And if you haven't given me my Slido questions, do that now. Yeah, so I'm seeing the questions pop up.

This is awesome. So first question, thoughts on the recent New York Times article that workplace wellness programs have little benefit. It seems contradictory. I think it isn't contradictory because I would raise the question of whether or not any of the workplace wellness programs I mentioned talked about this stuff.

A lot of workplace wellness programs focus on these kind of individual strategies that we can use to get better. So things like meditation, things like exercise and so on. It's not that those things are bad. It's that those things might not be achieving the stuff that really matters. What's the stuff that really matters? It's you finding your own values and finding ways to engage with them. It's you trying to figure out your vulnerability at work and really connecting with people. Most workplace well-being programs don't have that. It's you navigating and acknowledging your negative

emotions. I haven't seen any workplace well-being program that's like, well, we need to bring to the fore everyone's negative emotions, right? Those are the things that matter, right? That's just not what these programs are doing. And so I think it's not so much a contradiction. It's that these well-being programs are trying to do the best they could, but they might be missing what some of the latest science is showing. And that's why I think a more academic scientific approach, if you could bring this stuff into these programs, if workplaces could make this stuff a priority, all of a sudden I think we would be seeing some real effects. So that was question number one. So next question. Generative AI promises a lot of productive wins, but employees are scared, feel pressure to adopt it. What tips do you have for leaders who are managing this transition? I think the biggest tip is just don't pretend those emotions aren't happening. I think what happens as a leader is you say, everybody is freaked out, scared, feels pressured by this stuff, but we won't admit that. We'll just roll it out and pretend everybody's fine. We're just going to squish the beach ball of all our negative emotions about chat GPT under the ground and everyone will be cool,

right? You just saw that it'd be better to admit that. So I think as individuals, you need to kind of sit with some of these emotions. It's normative to feel a little freaked out in the creative industry that we have these tools that can like write podcasts and screenplays and make amazing art. It's normal to be spooked by that. It's normative. So I think we need to sit with that and allow those negative emotions. I think as a leader, you do well by admitting this stuff, just coming out and saying it. Like, I know this is probably freaking you out.

It makes sense that this is freaking you out. We're gonna work through those kinds of negative emotions together. I feel like there's some benefits of going through it, even though it feels a little scary. There are lots of things that are beneficial to us that feel a little scary at first. How can we acknowledge these negative emotions and get through it? I think the biggest problem was like, we're just pretending nobody's freaked out. It's just fine. No singularity here, like, you know,

rosy glasses. But I think once you acknowledge that stuff, recognize those emotions, you can use it, right? You can use that kind of engage, like the light on your engine to tell us how we should deal with these emerging technologies in a way that's honest, right? That recognizes maybe this is a problem for my engine and I need to think about it differently. So acknowledge the negative emotions there. Next question, anonymous. I love this person put it anonymous. I am that person who believes I don't want to make friends at work because the office gossip and pettiness. How do you move through that? First of all, you're not alone, right? That article of my students who went viral had like tens of thousands of comments,

most of whom were like, you know, rallying behind her, right? And I think it's important to acknowledge like the office gossip and the pettiness, that stuff feels kind of annoying. And it's true that it is annoying and can contribute to negative emotions. But that might not be everybody in your office, right? There might be other people you can connect with that aren't participating as much in that stuff, right? The idea that you have to make friends at work doesn't mean that you have to participate in that stuff.

It just means you have to ask people, hey, how was your weekend? I went to South By. Can I just tell you about this cool panel that I went to on well-being at work, and let me tell you about it. It's asking for help. It's getting curious about their ideas, right? That's what this friendship is about. I think we get wrong. We think friendship has to look like this terrible middle school clique, and that we have to go mean girls, and that's the only way we can make friends. But if you really dig into what the science suggests about friendship at work,

those are all our misconceptions. It's about positivity, just having normal positive interactions with another human, just like you might with your friend or your spouse or a family member. It's about doing that relatively consistently and kind of vulnerably sort of asking for help, getting curious and so on.

So it doesn't mean that you're embracing the mean girlsness at work. And I guess another piece of advice I would have for folks who feel that way, and there's a lot of you out there, not just here, but again in the world, is to like try it in baby steps. If it feels uncomfortable, pick one person who feels safe and try to have like one normal human conversation with that person, whether it's on Zoom or not, and then work from there, right? This is not dive into the like friendship at work deep end. It's like try it out a little bit and see how it feels. So that would be my advice. Next question. How can you communicate some of these elements upward to senior management to create more time for play and belonging, especially when they're resistant? I think if you show them data from 15 million workers and

thousands of companies across literally every industry shows if you show them data from 15 million workers and thousands of companies across literally every industry shows if you invest in happiness at time one, that investment will show as correlated with higher stock prices down the line. I think that's the kind of thing that's going to change the minds of senior management. They're not going to move when it just is like a nice to do thing. But if it's a need to have for the bottom line, if it's the thing that's gonna make us money, now all of a sudden it's gonna matter. I feel like I'm like, you know,

some South by panel in like the early 90s where I'm like the internet, it's gonna be a thing. And all the cool South by people were like, but my senior management doesn't believe in the internet. I'm like, well, it's gonna be a thing whether they believe in it or not. I feel like the 2024 version of that is I'm like, mental super matters for productivity. And you're like my senior, I'm like they're going to have to pay attention to it because if the science is showing what the science

is showing, they're kind of not going to have a choice. It's like lose money or pay attention to this. But share the graph, go online. You can Google just Indeed Wellbeing Workplace Study. You'll get it. You can share it. And I think slowly the C-suite folks are going to get on board. Last quick question. So much of the research in this area is correlational or based on small laboratory studies. How can we get more data on these causal relationships? Well, I think that's a great question. And I think one of the reasons I love the Indeed study is that this is a huge data set, right? 15 million workers. And it's not even people who necessarily thought they were going to be in a study. These are just people who are doing their

normal ratings on Indeed. They're just data kind of taken from that. And I think this is a spot where collaborations between academics and companies can be so powerful, right? If you work for a small startup or even a big tech company, especially if you have some infiltration in HR, folks like that, partner up with one of these researchers. You engage in a belonging intervention where you can do a randomized control trial in the workplace. And these things are starting to happen. There's a working paper now that just came out on remote work. What are the best practices for it? This is a research team at NYU that partnered up with a large company that was naturally rolling out their remote practices.

And they said, hey, can we study this? Can we look at happiness? Would you mind if we gave workers a choice so we can kind of RCT this, like randomized controlled trial to test this? And so I think the way that we overcome some of these kind of small sample sizes and these things that are more in the ivory tower and less in the real world is to partner with the folks who are in the real world, who have access to these big data sets. And then you can contribute not just to practices that we think will make your company better, you can also learn something that you can share with other companies too. And I think Indeed did this honestly in a nice way.

I've seen this making the rounds. I think people are talking positively about Indeed given that they were kind of able to share these data. And so I think the more companies that do that, the better. But I am at time, unfortunately. I hope I've given you some strategies you can all use to promote your mental health at work that you can share with your companies and your teams. And I hope I made you all a little happier. Thank you all so much. I hope I made you all a little happier. Thank you all so much. I hope you enjoyed that roundup of advice on workplace happiness. It's definitely a subject we'll be returning to very soon. But for now, the Happiness Lab will be taking a short break. We'll be back to celebrate the Summer Olympics with some shows exploring mental health and sports.

And we'll soon share a very special season that I've put my heart and soul into. So this is for a whole podcast season that we're doing on stuff that I'm bad at. Okay. This is a whole episode about boredom, because I feel like I'm pretty bad at boredom. You are. But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom. Yeah, no, I didn't do well with doing nothing. All that coming very soon on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.