The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - From Decoding Women's Health: Decoding Happiness in Midlife

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Midlife can be a period of immense change and, sometimes, challenging emotions. But it’s also an opportunity to cultivate deeper, more lasting happiness. Dr Laurie recently joined another Pushkin podcast, Decoding Women's Health with Dr Elizabeth Poynor, to share insights on how midlife women can thrive. Dr Laurie breaks down the components of happiness, explains why we’re often mistaken about what makes us happy, and provides practical tools and habits to boost wellbeing, manage negative emotions, and navigate burnout. On Decoding Women’s Health, Dr Elizabeth Poynor makes the science of women’s health accessible—from hormones to metabolism to longevity—so you can thrive at any stage of life. A world-renowned gynecologic oncologist and advanced pelvic surgeon, Dr Poynor speaks with leading physicians, researchers, and educators to share the latest science on wellness, disease prevention, and what it really means to age on your own terms. Because mid-life isn’t a crisis—it’s an opportunity.If you like what you hear, find (00:01:15) Decoding Women's Health wherever you listen to podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, you're in for a treat. Because in this special episode, we're switching things up a bit. On most episodes of the Happiness Lab, you get to hear me interviewing experts about the science of well-being. But today, I'm the one in the interview seat.

In this special episode, I sit down. with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer for an episode of her new podcast, Decoding Women's Health. And we talked about a topic that doesn't get nearly enough attention, happiness in midlife. If you're a fan of the Happiness Lab, you may have heard me share that I recently turned the Big 50. And so these days, I've been thinking a lot about happiness in midlife. But you certainly don't need to be middle-aged or even a woman to get something out of this conversation with Dr. Pointer. We dig into what research shows about how happiness changes across all our lifetime. why it dips and rises when it does, and the strategies that we can use to boost well-being at all

different ages. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, make sure to follow Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer wherever you get your podcasts. This show is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It is for informational purposes. Please consult your health care professional with any medical questions. There are lots of structural things that make midlife hard. But a lot of what makes midlife hard is that we have very high standards for ourselves. Like the world has high standards, but we mirror those standards. And sometimes we're worse than the world. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer. Today on the show, we're talking about happiness. There's a lot of attention given to the negative parts

of midlife. And there's no denying that it can be a challenging time for many women. feelings of invisibility, identity shifts, a sense of time speeding up, and the pressure to peak professionally, all compounded by hormonal changes. But midlife can also be a move toward deeper happiness, a time of stronger, more meaningful relationships, growing professional confidence, a clear sense of self-trust, and a feeling of becoming more fully yourself. Getting there, however, takes some work. And many of us were never given the tools to really cultivate happiness during the stage of life. If any group has been overlooked, it's midlife women. And if any group needs these skills, it's us, which is why I am so grateful that we have a renowned happiness expert here to help light the way. I'm Laurie Santos. I'm a professor of psychology at Yale and also the host of my own Pushkin podcast, The Happiness Lab.

Before studying happiness, Lari's focus was actually on evolutionary psychology. But about a decade ago, everything changed for her. I became what's known as a head of college on campus. And so this is a faculty member who lives on campus with students. So my house was in the middle of their big quad, like just right in the center of the dorms. I was eating with students in the dining hall and kind of hanging out with them really closely. And that was when I saw the college student mental health crisis up close and personal. It's kind of embarrassing as a professor to admit I was up at the front of the classroom and I didn't really notice what was going on in the community.

But it was really in this new role where I saw just how much students were struggling. Right now nationally, more than 40% of college students report being depressed. Over 10% have seriously considered suicide in the last six months. Like, this is what's happening nationally. And I was seeing it in this small community. And so that was when I did a new deep dive into this work on the science of happiness. You know, the field of psychology has all these strategies we can use to feel less stressed. feel less burned out, deal with our negative emotions in more effective ways. And I felt like our

field wasn't doing such a hot job of telling people this stuff that we knew as facts from our field. And so I decided to first teach college students about this stuff. I made a new class on campus called Psychology in the Good Life, which was like aimed at giving students all these practical strategies. And that had this funny history where it went a bit viral on campus over a quarter of the entire Yale student body decided to take the class the first time I taught it, which so is that college students are feeling pretty burned out, and they want some strategies to feel better. But the other funny thing that happened was that the class really went viral off campus, right? There were just lots of conversations saying, well, these 19-year-old Yale kids need a class on happiness.

What about the rest of us? What about folks in midlife who aren't going through their own problems and aren't going to college parties every week? And that just made me realize that, you know, so many people need these practical strategies for what they can do to feel better. So this was over the past decade. And is this an uptick, actually? I mean, have people always been unhappy? Yeah, I think there are two things going on. One is like, you know, just like midlife, college is a time of a lot of transitions, a lot of new stresses, a lot of life changes that can feel particularly stressful, right? And so as a time of transition, it's tough. And that's been true just historically. But that said, there's also been a spike in really specific mental health stuff that goes beyond the typical things that students go through. through during these transition periods. And this is the kind of thing that folks like Jonathan Haidt and others have talked about. It's often referred to as this sort of hockey stick pattern, where around like 2007-ish,

kind of around the time that smartphones came out, interestingly, you see this big spike in things like depression, anxiety, suicidality, all these negative mental health indicators just seem to spike up. And there's probably lots of reasons for it. Technology is probably part of the puzzle. It's not the whole, you know, story. But definitely these things are increasing. College-age students are showing the lowest rates of happiness that they've shown since we've been recording people's happiness.

That rate of depression I mentioned, that's doubled since 2015. So that's among college-age people, right? So how does that translate into broader age categories in terms of increases in specific areas of depression and lack of happiness? Yeah, we have some interesting data on this. In the U.S., especially, this comes from data sets like, the World Happiness Report, which is this very representative study that tries to look at happiness across different countries. And the story in the U.S. is a pretty depressing one, unfortunately. It's pretty much in every age category you look at. People are showing more markers of

negative mental health, less happiness. That's especially true in young people, but it's also seen in midlife. And this pattern is worrying because it goes against what we typically think of as the patterns related to Asian happiness. So historically, people have often talked about what's called a U-shaped function of happiness, where you tend to be happy early in life as a kid and a teenager, you're spry and excited about things, and there's lots of wonder and so on. And then you start going sort of down the U and happiness drops and drops until you get to the nadir which happens in midlife. In some studies, this is somewhere between 48 to 50 years of age. That's like the lowest point in happiness, not great for midlife happiness.

But historically what happens with this U-shaped pattern is that happiness tends to go back up, right? So, you know, as you enter your 50s and 60s, happiness is getting higher and higher and stays really high into the late parts of life, which is sometimes shocking to people. I think we think of our 70s and 80s as a time of lots of health problems, lots of griefs as your friends are passing and so on. But for most people, historically, that's been a time of relatively high happiness. What these new data are showing us is people are less happy than they have been before. Hopefully we can give people strategies to prevent that. Yeah, hopefully people like yourself, get the mechanism for people to find happiness, which leads me into my next question,

what is happiness? How do you define it? Are there different types of happiness? Like, what exactly is it? So I'll give you the social scientist definition of happiness, which I like, is that we can think of happiness as having two parts, a cognitive part and an affective part. This is loosely translated into how you think your life is going and how you feel in your life, what researchers have called being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So let's take those two parts, right, first the emotional or affective part of happiness, there's something that it feels like to be happy, right? You know, there's happiness in the moment. There's, you know, joy and laughter and lots of positive emotions versus anger, sadness, anxiety, overwhelm, the kind of negative emotions we experience.

And part of the definition of happiness is having a decent ratio between the two of those. That's sort of being happy in your life. But there's a second component of happiness, which is the cognitive part, how we think our life is going. That's the answer to the question, all things considered, are you set? satisfied with your life? Do you have meaning, purpose? Do you think things are going well? And the best case scenario for a social scientist is that we're boosting both of those at once. We're kind of making it feel better in your life while at the same time making you think your life is going better. And I think it's worth noticing that there are lots of times where those things dissociate.

First baby, right? You know, you're a newborn in your life for the first time. Maybe in your life there's dirty diapers and less sleep and that's feeling kind of frustrating. but with your life, you feel the sense of meaning and purpose that's different, right? You know, you can have it dissociate that way. But I think we can also think of lots of people in our life that have the other dissociation. Maybe folks have every hedonic pleasure. It feels really good in their life, you know. And by hedonic pleasure, I just mean this idea of like experiencing all these positive moments

in your life, like flying first class and the best wine and restaurants or whatever. I think people often start thinking of happiness as just the part about in your life. We want pleasure. We want all the hedonic things to feel really good. And we sometimes do that so much that we forget that there has to be kind of a there there. We forget that there has to be a sense of meaning and purpose that goes alongside it. And just focusing on the hedonic parts of happiness isn't necessarily a recipe for getting the bigger cognitive parts of happiness. It's not necessarily a recipe for thinking that your life has meaning or purpose. And so I like to think of both of these parts together as building towards what I called my class, right? Psychology and the good life. It's really about finding the good life. This is the kind of thing that philosophers back in the day like Aristotle called eudaimenea, the sense of having a fulfilling, rich, good life overall. And you often say that our mind lies to us in telling us what will make us happy. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, I think the pursuit of happiness would be super easy if we knew what we were going for and we knew how to get

there. And the sad thing is it's not just that we don't know. It's not that we're ignorant about how to become happier. It's that we have these mistaken ideas of the stuff that's going to matter. So we're pursuing stuff that we believe is going to work to make us feel like we're happy in our life and with our life, but we're going about it the wrong way. I think a big one is salary and success. People want to become richer with the idea, I think, that if they were richer, they would be happier. And that is true for some people, statistically probably for most of the people listening to this podcast right now, getting more money won't make you as happy as you think. We often give up so many important things in our life, whether that's

social connection or free time or sleep, to work harder and achieve success and achieve money. And it's probably for many of us just not going to do what we assume it's going to do. Another one is just changing our circumstances. I'm going to buy this new thing. I'm going to get this promotion at work. I'm going to get into the perfect relationship. And I'll be happy then. We sort of think of happiness as almost like this Disney thing of like happily ever after. I'll achieve this thing. I'll get this new circumstance and then I'll be happy forever. And there's sort of two problems with that.

One is that circumstances in our life don't make us as happy as we think or for as long as we think. It might be that if you get that new promotion, you have a little blip of happiness, but it's not as big as you assume and it fades super quickly. The other problem with the arrival fallacy is we think once we've got there, we're done. You know, happily ever after, like can dust yourself off. and you don't have to work on it ever again. But as my colleague, Dan Gilbert, this professor at Harvard is fond of saying, happily ever after only works if you have three minutes to live. Like, you just go back to baseline really quickly and you need to start working on it again.

So how do you educate people about this in terms of like, you know, more money is not going to make me happy and more success necessarily is not going to make me happy? Honestly, I try to take the approach that you do so well on this podcast, right, which is to give people the evidence. But these misconceptions are deep. You know, I'm the professor that teaches this stuff, and I still have to remind myself, like, oh, you know, if my podcast does really well and it gets a ton of listeners, that's probably not going to make me as happy as I think. I do lots of professional talks. Should I take on another talk, you know, which would earn me some money, but it's going to make me miss out on this event with my family.

My instinct is like, oh, my gosh, more prestige, more money that will work. But in practice, that's probably not going to work the way we think. So you can help educate people by teaching them the science, seeing the data and realizing like, oh, this might not work in the way we think, but that sadly is still not going to overcome the full misconception. Even the people that know this stuff have a hard time overcoming these biases.

So if our minds keep steering us towards the wrong things, what are the right ones? Dr. Lari Santos and I will get into this just after the break. We talked a little bit of, about the things that won't make us happy, right, or don't make us happy in terms of a better job, more money, that type of thing. One of the things that do make us happy. Yeah, well, the good news is that there's lots of stuff that we can do intentionally to improve our happiness. And I like to think about these as being divided up into behaviors that we can engage in to feel happier and then

mindset shifts we can engage in to be happier. So let's start with behaviors. Community is a huge one. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They physically spend more time around other people, and then they also prioritize their friends and family members. It just seems like social connection is a necessary condition for high happiness. But other people impact our happiness in a second way, too, which is that we tend to be happier if we're focused on other people, especially if we get to intentionally choose to be focused on other people. And there are lots of studies showing that if you force people to spend their money and their time on other individuals, they wind up feeling happier than if

they spent that same amount of money and time on themselves. Another behavior that I think matters a lot for happiness, maybe especially in midlife, because it might be harder for folks in midlife, are the healthy habits that I know you talk a lot about on the show. Just things like sleep and exercise. Not running a marathon, not becoming a fitness influencer, but just moving your body a little bit can actually make us feel a lot better. And sleep is really a huge one.

For every hour less of sleep that you get than the recommended amount, your incidence rate of getting depression, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, it just takes up a little bit. And so I think as a basic behavior, we just need to get back to the healthy habits that we know are good for our physical health, but we forget are so good for our mental health. A final baby that we know is super important for happiness, and I think one that's particularly relevant at midlife is prioritizing a little bit of free time. There's lots of recent social science work on this new concept of time affluence, feeling wealthy in time. And we just talked about how feeling wealthy with money doesn't necessarily.

matter for happiness as much as we think, but feeling wealthy in time really does matter. Researchers like Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School have been promoting the idea that maybe what's going on with low incomes negatively affecting happiness might actually be less about money and more about not having any free time. You know, if you think about low income individuals having to work multiple jobs and commute really far, like they're monetarily impoverished, but they're also temporarily impoverished. But the problem is that that's not just true for people at very low incomes, even people at very high incomes, even people who have a lot of wealth tend to be really famished when it comes to time. And Ashley Willens's work shows that if you self-report being time famished, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-reported being unemployed.

Probably a lot of people that are listening right now who have employment, like, you know, be very sad if you lost your job tomorrow. Just feeling like you have no free time is as bad. How do you correct that? I mean, how do you do schedule free time for yourself? Like free time is kind of active, right? Yeah. It's not passive. I think we forget that we have more agency over this stuff than we think, especially if you do it over longer time horizons, right? So right now, go in your calendar and block off, you know, some time in like, I don't know, February, March. There's just an

hour that just says time affluence. I promise when you get to that hour block, it will feel amazing. And this is kind of a funny trick about time affluence is that the study show it's not about the objective amount of free time that we have. It's our subjective sense that we have free time. And that means something interesting. We don't have to open up a lot of free time to feel like we have some mental space. You know, I was teaching this whole class about these strategies. And I was going to give students a whole lecture about time affluence. It was going to take, you know, an hour where I shared all the studies on this stuff. And I thought just how ironic that was, because I'm going to be lecturing these students on time affluence who are themselves feeling overwhelmed all the time. And so I did this

funny thing where students came to class and instead of getting a lecture from me, my teaching assistants handed out this little flyer that said, you know, today I'm going to teach you about time affluence. And to teach you what that is, I'm going to give you some. No class today. You have a free hour and a half that you didn't expect. But what was amazing was one student who got this flyer and burst into tears. And she was like, this is the first free hour and a half I've had all semester. And I think especially in midlife, so many of us feel like that. Another thing the studies show we can do well is we can use the fact that in midlife we are often at a high point in our career, we're often making more money than we were maybe in our 20s and 30s, and we can use that to buy back time. Lots of research coming out of Harvard Business School shows that the more you spend money to get back time, the happier you are.

What does that look like? You know, hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn, buy the pre-chopped veggies, get some takeout, right, healthy takeout, just these little moments of spending money to get back time. can matter. The key is that you have to frame it that way. So the next time you buy takeout, you know, busy day might just pick up some pad tie on the way back from work. Think, huh, how much time did I save with this pad tie? If I had to cook this myself, that'd be an hour and a half. You know, I had to chop up the veggie. Like, ah, I just bought myself an hour and half. What did I do with that? Just that little reframe makes you realize that there's ways you can intentionally get little chunks of time back. And that does matter. Yeah, so don't feel bad about

spending the money, you're spending the money to buy back that time. So interesting. Exactly. Such an investment in your happiness. So midlife women face a lot of challenges in this area, you know, sense of communities changing. Kids are growing. Relationships are changing. Sleep is disrupted. Can you like review and point out some of the specific challenges that midlife women will have with binding happiness? Yeah. Well, I think even just, you know, these demographic patterns show those challenges are affecting us a lot. We just talked about that U shape of happiness and the bottom of you is like smack dab in the middle of midlife between 48 and 49. That's the lowest point you're going to get. I just hit 50. And so I'm like, oh, few, finally, I'm going up the curve

of it. But I think the reason we see those demographic patterns is for all the reasons you're just talking about. You know, let's just take community. A lot of people in midlife are just feeling lonely. Rates of loneliness in all demographic groups are going up. But I think we really see it in midlife. Why? People are really busy. You're doing child care. You're shuttling your kids around. You're often taking care of aging parents. You're at the height of your career. Something needs to give. Women in midlife experience lots of negative emotions normatively. Like it makes sense to experience those negative emotions. But a big one we don't talk a lot about is overwhelm. It just feels like there's too much on your plate all the time. And that can make it hard to squeeze in social connection.

I think it's normative to realize, like, oh, it makes sense that I'm going through a tough time right now. It makes sense that I'm feeling lots of negative emotions. It makes sense that I'm not as happy as I was at 30, at 25. Give yourself some grace because there are real challenges that women in midlife are facing. Anxiety and depression have a big uptick in midlife also due to hormonal changes, neurotransmitter changes and such. How do you recognize the difference between what is kind of normal, overwhelm, like a lot going on, loss of community or loss of sleep, and like real anxiety and real depression that needs some real attention paid to it. I mean, this needs attention paid

to it, but medical help. I think that's such an important question because the strategies we need to fix things if we're feeling a little overwhelmed, feeling like we're not flourishing, feeling like we're not as happy as could be, that looks really different than the kind of thing you need if you're experiencing true clinical depression, if you're experiencing suicidality or acute anxiety, then all the suggestions I'm making of like, get more social connection and more sleep. Those will be good once you're in the clear.

But no, you need a different kind of care. And I think we need to give ourselves the grace to seek out professional care if we're going through a really tough time. So let's talk about some strategies for midlife women. And I love this term third spaces for community. And I guess social media has taken that away from us a little bit or the Internet's taken this away.

Yeah, I'd love that you brought up third spaces. This is a concept that comes out of this idea of seeking community. First space is like home and a second space is like work. But historically, we had third spaces, you know, whether that's going to church or the barbershop or community center or just a place, you know, like in cheers that, you know, 80s TV show where everybody knows your name, these spaces where you go where you just have community. And, you know, even back in the late 90s, political scientists like Robert Putnam were talking about how these third spaces were going away.

And at the time, I think his work was really prescient, right? He was talking about the rise of TV, you know, making us stick at home and watch our screens instead of going out to meet other people. Nowadays, I think we could just scroll TikTok and feel like we're getting some sort of interesting social stuff happening. But in practice, that's not really nutritious for us when it comes to our psychology. And so I think one thing that we get from this work on community is that we really benefit from creating these kinds of third spaces. There's also lots of evidence from folks like Sonia Lubramerski and others that what we really need when it comes to connection is not necessarily in real life social connection, but definitely in real time social connection. You call someone on the phone and you're hearing their voice in real time. You know, you and I are talking over Zoom for this podcast and can see your expressions.

We're talking in real time. that feels like real social connection. When we're just texting or using a like group chat or scrolling on social media, it kind of just doesn't activate our normal primate psychology for how we'd normally be connecting in real life. And so getting back to these third spaces is a real way to get back to in real time social connection. But we have to prioritize them. And some great strategies I've heard for doing that would be to really carve out the time. You know, put in your schedule time to be at a third space.

if you have one that you haven't been going to, or the time needed to kind of carve out finding these things. The other is to try to set up your own opportunities for third spaces. My podcast, we talk a lot about this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is like a lot of us would love to have friends come over, but we feel like, oh my God, I got to clean the house, I got to deal with things, I got to schedule things. People are able to build these third spaces by doing that in a very scruffy way,

where you're like not going to clean the house, not going to worry about it. We're just going to like have people over and kind of connect. So those kind of moments of building your own third spaces can matter a lot when it comes to happiness. So as physicians, we say, you know, find some community, go exercise, eat right, find a sense of purpose, right? So we know how to counsel on nutrition now. Most of us, many of us know how to counsel on exercise. But, boy, finding a sense of community, like, how do I do that? Like, what do I, that is so easy to say, go find your community.

And it's very difficult. So I love the scruffy hospitality. Any other ideas, some examples, some advice, and how to find your community? Yeah. I think one of the examples I really love is this idea that we often get social connection wrong. You know, we often get focused on whether social connection is coming to us, right? Like, I feel lonely. I don't feel loved.

I don't feel like I have friends. But the answer to that often comes from being loving, being a good friend, being the type of person that reaches out yourself. you have to wave first. My colleague, Nick Epley, is fond of saying everybody waves back, but you kind of need to be the one that waves first, right? And that means that a really easy way to kind of seek out community for yourself is to bring community to others. And this can start with something simple.

Just text a friend. I'm thinking about you. I'm paying attention to you, right? When you start up conversations, even with a stranger, ask questions. Becoming a good listener, becoming the type of person that reaches out can build opportunities for bridging these connections back in. Why don't we do this stuff? Well, one is that we feel like it's going to be awkward. People don't want to talk to us. But there's so many psychological biases that show like why that's wrong. There's something I like to tell my

students about the liking gap, which is that we assume that people just aren't going to like us as much as we think, whether that's a stranger or even a good friend. But study after study shows that when you ask people questions, you say hi to them, you try to reach out. People like that more than you think. We're not as annoying as we assume. Another bias I love to tell my students about is this thing called the beautiful mess effect. We assume if we ask for help, if we show our vulnerabilities, if we seem messy that people won't like us. But in fact, people like that a lot, right? People feel kind of excited that you've reached out to them to share what you're going through, right? People sort of enjoy that more than we expect. And so I think one of the secrets to

forming community is to be the one that waves first, is to take the first step, to put yourself out there and show other people love and connection and compassion and listening. And we're just a reciprocal species. People will start doing that back to you. Because we all kind of in general want the same thing, right? We all kind of want attention. We want love. So it goes back to the recurring kind of bot pattern that, oh, nobody's going to come to this party if I have it or nobody's going to come to dinner or if I invite them over, but realizing that everybody else wants that sense of community or wants that human connection, right? Yeah. So for individuals, for women who may be stuck, who are overwhelmed to start out with, and then, oh, gosh, now I've got to go find

a sense of community now to help myself, right? That's like a lot to get unstuck from. How do you get unstuck? I'm so glad you asked this question about getting unstuck, because this is something that we've been thinking about a lot, especially as the new year is coming up, we're actually doing a whole season of the happiness lab on how you can get unstuck in the new year. So definitely top of mind for me. But in terms of how you can get unstuck, you know, we talked before about these behavioral shifts, but there are also mindset shifts that we need to make to be happier. And a big one is a mindset shift of self-compassion, which starts with the idea of recognizing your common humanity. You are just human. Midlife is tough for everybody, right? This is why we have

a whole podcast on it. Like, everybody is having a tough time with this. Just give yourself a little grace. And that means that when you think about these strategies we're talking about, you know, particularly the community stuff, but all the strategies, baby steps, tiny change. Like, I'm just going to reach out to one friend and that will count as a win. I don't have to be perfect at this. And so I think that to get unstuck, a big way that we do that is to just recognize, I don't have to do this perfectly. There's lots of things about midlife structurally that make it really hard.

But a lot of what makes midlife hard is that we have very high standards for ourselves. Like the world has high standards, but we mirror those standards. And sometimes we're worse than the world. Sometimes midlife is hard because we're these terrible drill instructors that are screaming at ourselves in our own head about how much we need to exercise and how much we need to see our parents and how perfect we need to make the dinner meals and so on. And if we can just relax some of those expectations, the irony is that we wind up performing better because we perform better when we're not miserable and being so ungraceful to

ourselves makes us pretty miserable inside. And so I think a big mindset shift that helps us get unstuck is just to recognize that, to give ourselves some grace to remember, this is just hard, I'm just human, I'm doing the best I can, what can I do to take care of myself, what do I know about what I need right now? Those kinds of strategies can help a lot. It's time for a short break. After this, Dr. Santos and I explore how negative emotions can actually work for us and not against us. We'll be right back. You're a happiness expert. Do you feel pressure to be happy? We can't be happy all the time. You can't have that without some sadness, right? No, definitely feel some pressure.

I mean, in some ways, it's nice to be the happiness expert because, A, I know what I should be doing, and B, I have this community that can help remind me when I'm not doing it. But, yeah, I know. I think there can be real pressure to be happy. And I think part of this comes from these misconceptions we have about happiness, that it's really about this positive mood or hedonic pleasure, being happy all the time.

But I think one thing I've learned from the research is that if you really understand what it takes to build a good life, you're not going to reject negative emotions. Negative emotions, I like to think of them as this very important evolutionary signal. You know, natural selection built in these feelings that feel not very good. And it wouldn't do this just to make us miserable. It did those because those feelings are functional. It's almost like the feeling of pain you'd experience if you touch a hot stove, right? If you touch a hot stove, that doesn't feel good.

But it's telling you something really important as a signal of what you need to do to change your actions. Get your hand off this hot stove immediately. I think our negative emotions work a lot like that. We need to see them like that. We need to see them almost like the dashboard light on our car that tells us if our tire is low or if our engine light has come on. Those are our evolutionary engine lights. When you're experiencing sadness, that's an evolutionary engine light that tells you something's amiss.

You might need to get some social connection. You might need to look for some joy in your life. When you're feeling angry or frustrated, that's an evolutionary engine light that's telling you there's some of your values that are being compromised here. Like there's something that feels unfair. Really important one when we're feeling overwhelmed when it's like, I can't even because there's way too much on my plate. That is an important evolutionary signal that you,

need to get some stuff off your plate. And just like the dashboard light in our car, those emotions don't need to be acted on immediately. They're kind of not like the hand on the stove in that respect. It's kind of like your tire light. When it comes on, you're like, oh, tire light. Maybe after work today or tomorrow, I'll make sure to give some time to fix that and go put some air in the tire. I think our emotions often work like that. You know, if you're feeling sad, if you're feeling overwhelmed, you don't need to deal with it today, but you kind of got to address it or just like your car is going to run down, you're going to run down. You're going to hit burnout and have health problems, not be able to sleep, have real issues because you're not addressing those negative emotions.

So often we want to push them away. Those are good signals. Sometimes I like to remind myself when I'm feeling really overwhelmed that I'm like, you know, slamming stuff putting in the dishwasher and I'm like really short with my husband. I like to have a moment we're like, oh, wait, thank you. Thank you, evolutionary signal for reminding me. Got to make some changes. There's something I got to deal with. It's great to have something telling us and remind you. minding us that we need to do that. How do you personally deal with these issues? Like, we all feel overwhelmed, right? We experience loss, grief. What are your mechanisms in terms of being a midlife woman? One is that gives space to mindfully notice, to not suppress it, to not reject it, to be like,

oh, this is what's going on. And then give yourself some space to try to figure out, how can you take care of this, right? How can you be kind to yourself? One of the very specific practices I like to use as a meditation practice. I like these very practical things that are like, here's the thing you do in 10 minutes to like deal with this, right? There's not always that to do for happiness, but sometimes there are these good techniques. And for negative emotions, one I really like is a meditation practice that's been popularized by the meditation teacher Tara Brock. And it comes with this acronym of Rain, R-A-I-N, which stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And so the idea is like, you notice you're experiencing a negative emotion. I'm slamming things in dishwasher.

I'm like, what's what going on? Take five to ten minutes to do this rain practice. And the first step of rain is R, recognize. I'm feeling really frustrated right now. I'm feeling at my last nerve, you kind of label these emotions and notice and get very specific. Don't just be like, I feel bad, be like, I'm really frustrated. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling a little lonely, you know, with a side of like anxious, right? Like really try to label it. That's the first step, R. Recognize. Then you do the really hard step, which is A, a, allow. You say, okay, you know, frustration at the point of my wits end. I commit to sitting with you for five minutes to notice what you feel like in my body. I'm just going to allow this emotion to be there

just as it is hard, but now you're giving your emotion some space to pay attention to it. And then you give your brain something to do while you're allowing that emotion to be there. And that's step three. I investigate. You say, okay, pissed off. What do you feel like in my body? I'm mad. Like my brow is furrowed, my chest is feeling tight, I have a strong craving to maybe have a drink or check my email, whatever it is. You're just noticing what that emotion feels like in your body. And the key to the investigate step, why I think it works so well is that we just never sit with our emotions. We're often just too busy or we don't think we can handle them. We run away.

But emotions are like waves. They'll take a certain course. You know, clinicians often talk about this phenomenon of urge surfing or craving surfing where you just notice some negative feeling. you'll notice it gets stronger like an ocean wave over time, but then that emotion will crest and go away. We just don't hang out with our emotions long enough to do that. But with this investigate step, you will. You'll be like, this feels strong. I'm noticing it. I'm sitting with my brow feeling furrowed. And then whatever happens, you're like, I have to figure out what I want to eat for dinner. You're like, oh, wait, I've stopped feeling so strong. Like, I just kind of let it take

its course. But you don't end there. There's one last step of this rain process, which is N, which stands for nurture. That's when you ask yourself, how can you take care of yourself? What could I take off my plate? A really good question for nurture. What do I know about what I need right now? Because sometimes if you ask what do I need right now? You're like, I don't know. I need so many things, but like, what do I know? Sometimes you'll get these little inklings when you ask that. It's like, I need to ask my husband for help about this. Or I need to really not have these meetings with this one colleague. I need to minimize that, right? Often we think of nurture as like, I'll have a bubble bath or like get a massage. And usually what we know about what we really need isn't that. Usually it's something

harder or more nuanced. That practice falls under a whole rubric of practices that are under this heading of radical acceptance where you're just like, I'm going to sit with what's really going on. Like this is tough right now. This is really hard. But if you commit to doing that, there can be lots of benefits. In fact, studies show that radical acceptance practices can reduce burnout and populations like palliative care workers and first responders, right? So it's a really nice set of practices for dealing with normative negative emotions. We're supposed to feel tough sometimes, but we need these strategies for being with our emotions and allowing them to take their course. So I definitely have had periods in my life where I could do rain like every 10 minutes.

So how often should you sit with your emotions? I mean, should you be a little proactive with it and not just always reactive? Should you sit down in journal and think about your emotions a little bit to get some insight or how often do you kind of recommend practices like this? No, journaling is huge, right? Any way that you can notice and sit with your emotions and get them down works. If that's a meditation practice like rain, great. If that's an expressive writing practice where you kind of write down what you're feeling, great. Really what you're trying to do is first to be mindful.

That's that like recognized step. Like, this is hard right now. I am struggling right now. These are the emotions I'm experiencing right now. all too often we just don't have the bandwidth to see what our emotional emergency light is telling us. We don't take time to notice. So all those practices really let you notice like, ah, I've got a lot on my plate, right? And then you kind of just normalize it, right? You know, this makes sense. Everybody in midlife is feeling overwhelmed. Everybody goes through this right now. Just that act

of normalizing it, that it's not just you, that you're not screwing up, you can just be really freeing. and then just some space to really ask, what do I need? And you often realize that what you need is different than what you expected. Let's talk about burnout because overwhelm segues into burnout. You took a leave of absence for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So I love the question about burnout because it gets back to something we were talking about before,

which is, you know, the difference between kind of just feeling like you're not flourishing in a real mental health crisis because what the study shows that, you know, there's feeling a little overwhelmed and then there's feeling a little busy. and then there's burnout, which is this different clinical syndrome. Researchers who study burnout really find that burnout has these three pieces. One is a sense of emotional exhaustion, what we often think of as burnout, but this isn't like tired. It's not physical exhaustion.

It's emotional exhaustion. Like you couldn't handle one more thing on your plate. You are just emotionally spent. That's kind of symptom number one. Symptom number two is what's often called depersonalization, but it's basically just cynicism. them. People are getting on your last nerve. Your interpretation of people's intentions, whether that's your kids or your parents or your clients at work or the folks on your team, is just like, I am so annoyed by you. Like, I hate you. I'm so pissy, right? Just everybody

is bothering you. That's the depersonalization. And third symptom is what researchers have called a sense of personal ineffectiveness. But even if you did your job perfectly, it just like wouldn't be worth it or wouldn't fit with your values or it doesn't matter. anymore. There's just a sense that whatever you're doing just like isn't worth it. These are the clinical symptoms. And I know these clinical symptoms because I teach about them. And right at the end of COVID and my new role on campus, I was starting to feel like I was experiencing a lot of these. The big one I really experienced was this sense of depersonalization. And I had it with a student, which makes me even more embarrassed to admit. But the students in my role as ahead of college would

often ask for help on things. And I got an email from a student who was actually a student. I adored. He was one of my favorite students, and it looked like he needed a root canal, and he needed to get some sort of money so that he could afford it because he didn't have dental insurance. And I would like to think that my normal Laurie reaction in like normal life would have been like, oh my God, this poor student, like, of course I'll help compassion. But at this moment of burnout, my reaction honestly was like, oh, God damn it. Like I have to send another email. And I caught myself. I was like, whoa, like that is not the normal compassion response. I'm supposed to have to a student I love and like, what is going on?

And that was when I started to realize I was going through so many of these symptoms of burnout, especially the depersonalization, but also at the time this sense of personal and effectiveness. This was right around the midst of COVID when I was teaching students on a college campus, running this college community when students were taking Zoom classes. They couldn't go to the dining hall. It felt like I was working really hard to make their experience great, but it kind of was just crappy. Like I was putting all this time in to do something that felt like it wasn't worth it. And I saw these signs and realized like, oh, man, burnout doesn't get better if you ignore it, right?

These symptoms only get worse and really made the hard decision to not only take some time off, but step away from this role as ahead of college. So I actually stepped down in that role. It was hard to admit I was going through that. But I realized if I didn't get some space from this, things weren't going to get better. They were just going to get worse. Burnouts increasing in women right now. What do you think this is?

Yeah, I think there is lots of reasons. Christina Maslach, who's the main researcher who's the main researcher, who's done a lot of great work on burnout, talks about a bunch of factors that can lead to burnout. There are things like more work than you can do at work, so kind of feeling like you have too much on your plate, which I think just, you know, in 2025 a lot of people are going through, especially women in midlife where they're doing child care and dealing with older parents and working really hard and so on. Burnout also stems from a kind of lack of personal recognition. Women in midlife are doing a lot of emotional labor that they're not

really getting financial or emotional credit for, which is a big one. But a third thing that I think we see a lot is what Maslott called values mismatch, which is this idea that you're putting lots of effort into something, but it's not matching what you got into it for. And I think, you know, a lot of us at work are experiencing this values mismatch where, say, in the medical industry, it started with like helping patients, but now you're just filling out these insurance forms and there's all this bureaucracy. I think so many of our jobs have this kind of bureaucratic. it creep in, which can sort of make us feel like the reason we were doing something just doesn't match with why we got into this in the first place. But it's worth noting that, you know, the

studies on whether burnout is happening more in women are a little bit nuanced. In fact, some of the recent meta-analysis really showed that there's not the gender differences we often assume. There seems to be an interesting gender difference from some of the data on the parts of burnout that women experience more of the emotional exhaustion part, whereas men sometimes experience more of depersonalization part, the part that I was talking about. But honestly, these are really overlapping bell curves, and a lot of us are going through these tough times.

So what do you tell women who are going through tough times and who maybe can't step away from their position? What is the mechanism to handle that? The thing to remember is, like, when you're noticing these negative emotions, they don't go away unless you deal with them, right? That's true for burnout. It's true for all the negative emotions we talked about.

And it's worth saying that is inconvenient. Most of us don't have time to, like, you know, deal with our overwhelm or deal with our sadness or deal with our anxiety. That sucks. And it's a pain. But that's just the way negative emotions work. One answer is to really actually take time away. I think we need to start thinking of mental health issues where it's like you really need

time away to heal. And so thinking about potentially getting medical leaves and so on. And I have colleagues who've sought out medical advice to get time away from work to do that. So it is very hard. This is not like reducing how difficult this is, but sometimes it's possible. If that's not in the cards for you to take some real time off, there are other kinds of solutions. What we know from burnout is that it's not a personal issue. It's really a work issue.

And I mean workplace broadly. That could be the work you're doing for dealing with aging parents or child care. Often it's like your actual work, your actual job. that you're doing. But it means you need to develop a different relationship with your job. The burnout is really about an interaction between you and your job and your values. And so one solution is to really think about those values at work. Is there a way you can reframe what your job description is to get back to your real values? And here I love the work of Amy Resninski, who's a professor at Wharton Business School. She talks about this practice of job crafting,

which is really trying to look dead in the eye at your job description. and figure out ways that you can build in more of what you really value. And that could be social connection, that could be leadership, that could be humor, that could be finding ways to learn more and find adventure. You think through what your values are and then try to find ways to squeeze more of that in. But really what you need to do is kind of fix that values mismatch. Or if it's really tricky to do that, finding ways that you're putting your energy into

something that's not the workplace, even if it's just kind of where you're shifting your energy and your values. That can be helpful for dealing with some of these issues, too. But I think the real message is like, if you're feeling this, it sadly is not going away. And that sucks. But it's just the reality of the situation. You probably just need to take some time to deal with it. I think coming back to your core values, especially with burnout, it makes you define what your core values are. When there's dissonance with your core values, that's when problems occur. But then that's got to stream over to other areas of happiness. Just defining your values of who you are might lead you to happiness in other spots. Yeah, in fact, there's lots of works on sort of

using and finding what are often called your signature strengths. Research really shows we have these individual differences in the things we enjoy about our work, like the strengths that we bring to our work, the values that we bring. If you want to learn more about this, you can Google signature strengths test and you could do one of these formal tests to figure out like what are your particular strengths? Often if you just take some time to journal or brainstorm, you can sort of sort out what those are. But studies show that we perform better, we wind up feeling happier, we wind up feeling what we're doing as a calling if we're bringing in these strengths and these core values, no matter what that work really is. I love that concept of signature

strengths because, again, as physicians, right, especially in the longevity world, we'll say, you know, one of the common themes in prevention of cognitive decline, right, is that sense of purpose, but then you're like, find a sense of purpose. But that signature strength can lead you into your purpose, right, in terms of finding that sense of purpose to enhance your happiness in your life. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think when we think of a sense of purpose, like in our brain, that word is like capital P, like, purpose, you know, it's like figure out the meaning of life.

But in practice, meaning making, we should often think of it as almost like moment making. When I help a student as a head of college, when I get a good joke in, like in my podcast or when I'm teaching, those things feel really tiny, but actually they're the things that build up to be something bigger if we're doing things that really fit with our broader values and our strengths. So I think when you think of purpose, it can feel really overwhelming. It's hopeful to remember that you can build those tiny moments of purpose in to the little things in life. midlife can be hard we know that through psychology physiology and just basic common sense but that doesn't mean that you can't also feel happy both in your life and with your life the key is remembering our minds lie to us about how to get there in the long run it's not money big promotions or even flying first class that makes us truly happy happiness takes us

intention, the right mindset and the right habits. I love what Dr. Santos shared about scruffy hospitality. There's this pressure for so many of us to host and for everything to be perfect. But really, what the science says makes us happier than being the perfect host is just connecting with friends. I was also really taken with Dr. Santos' suggestion to schedule free time for yourself. Because we're learning more about this concept of time affluent. feeling wealthy in time and how it can impact your happiness in a meaningful way. And if you have the means, spending money to actually buy back time and framing it that way for yourself, it's all about investment in your well-being.

Negative emotions, however inconvenient, are actually very important evolutionary signals, and they won't go away on their own. When you're feeling frustrated, stop for a second. identify your emotion, sit with it, and allow it to crest, then get curious about what is trying to tell you. And lastly, burnout is real. If you're experiencing the tell-tale signs of burnout, consider taking a signature strength test online to help hone in on your values and your purpose. Coming up on the next episode of Decoding Women's Health,

you're in for a real treat. I'll be joined by an expert in midlife women's fitness, who is also my personal trainer, Robert Brace. Building your muscle has solutions for so many things. Lean muscle mass gives you the serotonin, gives you the endorphins to deal. with some of the anxiety and stress and also it helps regulate

your circadian rhythm, so you're able to sleep more. Decoding Women's Health is a production of Pushkin Industries and the Atria Health and Research Institute. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas. It was edited by Amy Gaines-McQuaid. Mastering by Sarah Bergher,

our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit, our executive producer is Alexandra Garroton, our theme song was composed by Hannes Brown, concept, creative development, and fact-checking by Shavon O'Connor. A special thanks to Alan Tish, David Saltzman, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Amy Hagdorn, Owen Miller, Jordan McMillan, and Greta Cohn.

If you have a question about women's health and midlife, leave us a voicemail at 455-201-3385, or send us a message at Decoding Women's Health at Pushkin.fm. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, and thanks for listening. Until next time. Guaranteed human.