The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - "Happiness Is Like A Leaky Tire" from Immigrantly

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

We're bringing you an episode of Immigrantly, where Laurie joined host Saadia Khan to discuss the psychology of happiness education and the expansive realm of happiness. Is happiness a fleeting moment or a sustained state of being? Can it be actively cultivated, or is it an innate aspect of human existence? How do our backgrounds, personalities, and choices influence our perceptions of happiness? Laurie and Saadia openly discuss cultural considerations when exploring happiness, the difference between contentment and happiness, Gen Z’s perception of happiness, and how to achieve zen mode. Immigrantly is a weekly podcast that celebrates the extraordinariness of immigrant life. They do this by providing their listeners with authentic, unvarnished insights into the immigrant identity in America. Immigrantly has garnered significant recognition and has been featured in renowned media outlets such as the Nieman Storyboard, The Guardian, The Slowdown, and CNN. You can get more information at http://immigrantlypod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. entrepreneur, and the founder of Immigrantly Media. She and I had an incredible conversation where we explored the origins of happiness. We talked about whether happiness is just a fleeting moment or whether we can sustain it over time. We also explored how our backgrounds, personalities, and choices shaped our perceptions of happiness. I really enjoyed the conversation, so I hope you do too. Hello and welcome to Immigrantly. I am Sadia Khan. This week on Immigrantly, I embark on a journey into the vast, vibrant and unpredictable world of happiness. Is happiness a fleeting moment or a lasting state? Can it be actively pursued or is it intrinsic to human existence? How do our backgrounds, personalities and life choices shape our experiences of happiness? And what is this elusive state

everyone seeks but seems hard to grasp consistently? And lastly, is happiness a universal language that transcends different lives and cultures, or is it as diverse as the individuals seeking it? Yes, we will address all those questions and more in our today's episode. According to my today's guest, Laurie Santos, a cognitive science and psychology professor at Yale, happiness isn't just an emotion you feel, but something that can be taught, almost like a muscle that can be worked out. Santos saw that her students were increasingly anxious and depressed and decided she wanted to give them some tools on not just how to be happy, but how they can make themselves happier using science.

Her course, Psychology and the Good Life, became the most popular course in Yale's history when it launched in 2018, with about one-fourth of Yale's undergraduates enrolled in it. She's also the host of the Happiness Lab, which has over 90 million downloads. I'm honored to interview Laurie today, so let's get started. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Thanks so much for having me on the show. How is your heart today? How's my heart today? My good friend from college was just in town this morning with her daughter. They're on a college tour. And so I just had breakfast with her. And so I think my heart

is in a warm place this morning. It's kind of nice. It's been a good day. I was at a friend's house yesterday and I told her about the interview and she was freaking out. She was like, oh my gosh, you're going to interview Laurie Santos. She was like, I listen to her podcast every single week. You've become very, very popular. How are you handling it? It's good.

I mean, it's really humbling, right, to see the fact that sharing these strategies for improving happiness can really help people, right? I mean, that's one of the reasons I got into this, but it's so nice that it's actually working. I think a challenge of it is really there's so many more demands on my time, right? There's requests to give talks and podcasts and these things. And so I've had to be very careful about what I say yes to. And it's really a challenge to say no to things that are great, but to just say, I have to protect my bandwidth, I have to prevent burnout, you know, and so that can be really tricky. But overall, it's just been an incredible experience. Before we delve into the science of happiness, let's go back to your childhood. Can you talk a little bit about where you grew up

and what are some of the happy memories from your childhood? up and what are some of the happy memories from your childhood? Yeah, so I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is a large working class town. It used to be the richest town in America when whaling and those kind of things were going on. But nowadays they don't really have whaling as an industry. So it's been a kind of struggling town when I was growing up. But I had, you know, an incredibly happy family situation, at least for the kind of first part of my life. You know, I remember like we had a house that I would have a little yard that I could run around in and things. You know, my brother is four years younger than me and he was a kind of constant playmate. You know, I had fun just kind of being a kid, being unscheduled,

coming up with my own weird activities, whether that was like making up little games for me and my brother to play in the basement to just kind of like creating and doing things. I feel like I wrote like lots of fake books and, you know, this little kind of camera. So we would, you know, make little videos and things on it. And so I remember my childhood as being incredibly fun and incredibly creative. What were those fake books about? Well, I think they were kind of massively taken from some of the cartoons I watched. You know, one of them was called like The Cat and the Mouse, which I think was a basically plagiarized version of Tom and Jerry. I didn't never try to publish it, you know, so the plagiarism wasn't an issue.

But it was kind of, you know, drawing the pictures of the cat and the mouse and kind of coming up with these sort of fun stories and things. And so, yeah, so I kind of enjoyed doing all that stuff creatively. Very fast forward to today. You are a professor. Why did you want to become a professor? What led you to that path? Well, I've always been interested in psychology and sort of how people work. And I think when growing up, I really just thought that the way you were a psychologist

is you were kind of a clinical psychologist, like you'd have to be a therapist or put people on a couch. But when I realized there was like this field where you could try to understand how the mind worked and how people thought and that you could do research and publish, I was like, oh, man, this sounds amazing. And I really only learned that when I first started college. I had a great grad student mentor who kind of showed me the ropes and even honestly explained that, like, you know, and actually, you know, many PhD programs, like they don't even charge you. Like you can go for free, you get your education for free. And I was like, wait, this is amazing. You know, it was kind of in that phase that I learned that being a professor was a possibility. What I really wanted to do was to find ways to study the mind. And I realized like, oh, this is a career where you can do that. From being a professor to being a professor of the most sought after class at Yale. Tell me about that process. So I've been teaching at Yale for over two decades now, which makes me feel very, very old. Honestly, the time goes by very fast. And for most of my time at Yale, I was, you know, a professor at the front of the classroom. I taught classes about

my research, which focused a lot on animals and what makes the human mind unique. And I thought college life was a lot like what college life was like when I was in college, which was fine and mostly happy. You know, there was some stresses, obviously, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the kind of thing we're seeing today. But I was kind of blind to really what, you know, young people are going through today. And then I took a new role on campus where I became what's called the head of college. And so heads of colleges at Yale are faculty who live on campus with students. And so I lived on campus with students. I ate with them in the dining hall and kind of hung out with them. And that was when I really first started to see the college student mental health crisis up close and personal, where right now nationally, not just at Yale, but nationally, more than 40 percent of college

students report being too depressed to function most days. More than 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year. I mean, it's like a really terrible crisis that our young people are going through. And that was when I realized the need for a class about strategies that all my students could use to feel better. I really wanted to teach them, okay, what does the evidence say about how you can behave in different ways, develop different mindsets, ones that will really make you feel better. I really wanted to teach them, okay, what does the evidence say about how you can behave in different ways, develop different mindsets, ones that will really make you feel better. And so that was how the class was born. You know, what's interesting about your class is you're looking at happiness through science. And when I think of happiness, when I was growing up,

or even now, in my conscious mind, happiness is a very visceral emotion and it comes when it comes and I can't really control it because a lot of times our happiness hinges on external factors, whether it's relationships, career, and sometimes different types of happiness almost conflict with one another, right? So happiness in career may conflict with happiness at home. How do you teach balancing all those different aspects of happiness? Well, I think, you know, one of the ways the scientific approach can be really helpful is that it tries to just get people to notice what all those factors feel like, right? It tries to get you to notice, OK, what are some of the kinds of things that help you feel happy?

And the way that people take a scientific approach is really just to ask people, hey, how are you feeling right now? On a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? You know, let me give you this list of positive emotions. Have you felt those today? So ultimately, it's a scientific approach, but it's a scientific approach that really takes into account people's subjective experience of how things feel like, how things feel like in people's lives, so kind of their emotions and things and how they think their life is going. And it really just encourages people to maybe do little experiments to ask like, OK, did you feel better in your life when you were hanging out with family or when you were at work or when you had a little bit of free time in your day versus when you were packed, packed, packed to the brim? Right. And so you're kind of doing these experiments to

just notice subjectively what feels good and what doesn't feel as good as I expected. And I think when you do that, you get some really interesting hints about how to balance all those competing factors. I think the first is that we often put our kind of like career achievements in the domain of happiness. Right. We think like to be happy, I need to be successful or I need to be rich or I need to get this promotion at work. When researchers get people to start paying attention, what they quickly realize is that those kind of career accomplishments don't really make us as happy as we think, especially money. It really doesn't make us as happy as we think, you know, with the caveat that you have to have enough money to put food on the table and get by, right? If you're, you know, living below the poverty line, that doesn't work. But, you know, for at least many of the people listening right now, if you can put food

on the table and keep a roof over your head, getting a lot more money doesn't really make you as happy as we as you think. That's what a lot of the data show. And so I think that, you know, as you start to pay attention to what this research shows and again, the research is just you subjectively thinking about, OK, what really does matter when I pay attention? What you find is that the career stuff maybe needs to get kind of downplayed relative to the social connection stuff, the kind of true relationship stuff. Even when we think about what makes us happy at work, what we often find is it's not our achievements professionally, it's the relationships we develop at work. This new study that just came out in 2023, which took data from this big job website, Indeed, they found that one of the biggest

predictors of your happiness at work isn't your salary or how good your manager is. It's really whether or not you have a best friend at work. You know, so even at work, our social relationships seem to matter for feeling good. Yeah. So I think we get some hints about how to kind of bring balance to all these different competing factors in our lives when we start to genuinely pay attention to what feels good. You know, what you think makes so much sense, but unfortunately, especially living in a capitalist society, I still see people are unable to make that conscious connection. And I can give you so many examples, even in our house, where my husband and I have had these arguments about what makes us happy. And he looks at happiness differently, more in the context of career,

in the context of development. It may be immigrant mentality, but I think it is very common across the board. I wonder how do we make that cognitive shift? How do we really teach our brains and almost reorient ourselves to saying, I can be happy if I am not extremely successful in career or if I'm not making money beyond a certain threshold? What is the process of achieving that Zen mode? Well, I think it's really tough. And I think this is something that I definitely see in my students. You know, we cover some of the studies, like literally showing that more money doesn't make you happy. You know, I make my students read these studies. And at the end of every lecture where I talk about money and happiness, I'll have a big long

line of students who want to like, you know, well, that can't be true. Or maybe if you spend it differently and so on. And what's interesting is, you know, yeah, we just have such a diverse range of students. You might think that pushback would be from the students who were themselves really wealthy or grew up in a really privileged background. But the pushback I often get, interestingly, is from students who haven't had that sort of privileged background or they're coming as a first gen student or from an immigrant background. I think for immigrants, there really is this mentality of like push, push, push, you know, pull your stuff out by your bootstraps, you know, and maybe even like sacrifice part of your mental health to get that kind of typical capitalist success. Right.

So, again, those are kind of anecdotal data of just which students I talked to. But yeah, I mean, I think these kinds of misperceptions are alive and well in the kind of immigrant mind, you know, there's this idea that you kind of push for money, push for external success, push for accolades at work. And that will be the thing that brings you a sense of this sort of Zen peace. But when you look at the data, what you find is it just doesn't work that way. And so your question is really like, how do we overcome this, right? Like, how do we fight this bias?

And I think it's really tough. Like, it's tricky myself. Like, I'll say, you know, I know all the data about this stuff, but I still share these intuitions, right? You know, every time I say no to a talk that was going to give me a nice honorarium, I'm kind of like, oh gosh,

I'm like saying no to money. What does that mean? Or every time I turn down the opportunity to do something more and more and more at work, I know the research, but I kind of have this twinge of like, oh, am I going to regret this? You know, is this going to be the last opportunity I get? Right. So I completely get it. I think something that's really helped me is like knowing what the science says, right? Like I can look at the graph and be like, oh, I see. I'm not going to be that much happier if I double my income. Or I've read the studies showing of what's called the arrival fallacy, where we think I'll be happy when I'll be happy when I get a

promotion or I'll be happy when I make this much money. And study after study shows that we just misperceive that we just are wrong about what our predictions about what's really going to make us happy. And so for me, hearing the studies can be kind of helpful because you're like, OK, I know the research shows that I'm wrong. Like I can't change my kind of intuition that I have about this stuff, but I'm going to kind of not follow my intuition. I'm going to kind of follow what I think is right. And then often when you do that, you get new data to be like, oh, actually, that opportunity that I turned down so I'd have more time with my family, that was actually a good move, right? Like that actually did make me happy. Or like that no, I said in my calendar, that feels great when I kind of noticed like, oh,

that was when I was supposed to take that trip or I was supposed to have that meeting. It's like, oh, this feels great to have a little bit more free time. And so I think when you start to see the outcomes of doing things a little differently, you can get your own data like, hey, this is working better than I expected. Laurie, you said something so interesting about looking at the data, looking at graphs. Are you ever concerned about over-pathologizing the science of happiness? One of the things that's great about this particular form of science, right, is that it's based on people's subjective reports. In some ways, these are people who are saying, you know, hey, at a scale of one to 10, this is how I feel about happiness and so on. That means it's kind of taking away some of the experience, right? If I

had richer narrative reports, obviously, we would learn more about, you know, all the nuances of people's subjective experiences. But because like what the research is doing is really getting people's actual opinions of what's going on, I think it can actually be a powerful way to really understand how people are feeling. So I'm a little bit less worried about the kind of pathologizing. I think it definitely is missing something about people's complete experiences, obviously, but it does let us get a kind of important glimpse that I think has been, at least for me, really helpful as I kind of puzzle through what's the right way to live a healthy and a happy life. You know, this is a great segue into bringing culture and cultural nuances into the idea of happiness. Now, I grew up in Pakistan, a collectivist society. Happiness is defined

very differently there. It is less materialistic in some ways, right? So spending time with your parents, with your grandparents, siblings, having extended relationships is in a way manifestation of happiness. And then you come to the U.S. and I felt very lonely in the beginning. I felt disoriented. I recognized my depression and anxiety more in the U.S. than in Pakistan because I was always surrounded by family and friends. What differences have you seen across different cultures, especially Eastern versus Western cultures? I think this is a really great question. It's actually one we're starting to get, you know, a better handle on, right, where you're doing the right studies with big enough samples

of people from different cultures. One of the best research tools that we have to look at this comes from this report that's known as the World Happiness Report, where they survey all these things about people's emotion and happiness across all kinds of different countries. And what they find in the report is pretty interesting. You know, first of all, there is great variance in happiness across cultures. They do this thing with the World Happiness Report where they rank the different countries in terms of their happiness, which I think gets a lot of headlines, but misses a lot of the nuance. But when you do those rankings, you often find that Scandinavian countries kind of come out happiest, you know, Norway, Denmark, those are the ones that are happy. But then

countries that you might not expect, you know, so countries in South America, places like Costa Rica and so on, tend to be a little bit happier and so on, at least relative to the U.S. And so often what you get from that is to say, OK, what are the happier countries doing a little bit differently? And what you find is they're prioritizing some of the same things you noticed about your kind of home life back in the day, which is that like you're prioritizing things like social connection. Family is, you know, kind of considered more valuable than work. When those two things come into conflict, family is always going to win out. People are around other people more often. So there's much less loneliness, much more social connection. And there's cultures that tend to be happier, tend to be a little bit

more on the collective side. Right. You know, you think of Scandinavian countries and they have things like universal income and like allowing to kind of help other people. Right. It's not kind of like, you know, live and die by your own sort of hard work alone. Right. It takes a village kind of approach. Right. Yes, exactly. And so I think when we start looking at those cultural differences, one thing we can say is like, hang on, maybe the values that we have in the U.S., this kind of super individualism and capitalism at all costs, you know, maybe we're kind of missing something that really does matter for our actual happiness. And so I think these kinds of comparisons across countries can be really powerful. I think another thing we see in these comparisons across countries is that it's not all about the individual happiness. Like what's happening politically obviously matters a lot.

You know, so the equality of a country seems to matter a lot. The trust that people have in government matters a lot. That's actually one of the reasons in the United States that we've dropped a lot in our rankings of happiness is because there's less and less trust in the political process, trust of our fellow man with all the political polarization we see in the country. And so I think also these kind of cultural comparisons make us realize, hang on, you know, a lot of the strategies are about, well, hey, you, you know, you change your personal behaviors and your personal mindsets. But also we need to think about the structural issues that people face and the political issues that people face if we really want everyone to be as happy as they can be. I want to circle back to young folks.

There's so much to talk about when we think about Gen Zers in terms of their politics, right? They are looking more and more towards their friends as being politically aligned with them, morally aligned with them, right? So that's a measure of how they choose friendships. How do you think that redefines happiness for them? Because they are putting a lot of pressure, not just on themselves, but on their friends and friends of friends.

And also, how does social media play into all of this? Like they think they are not lonely because they are on social media and they're scrolling, but then they're basically doom scrolling, right? It's like enragement is equal to engagement kind of deal. What are some of the things you're seeing, Laurie, within that realm? And what is your advice to any young person who's listening to this podcast right now? So I'll take the second one first, this idea of, you know, how is social media and our technology in general, honestly, kind of affecting our happiness? You know, one of the biggest predictors of people's happiness is our sense of social connection, our sense of true social ties,

having people that you can count on, that you really care about, and just being around other people in real life. You know, in theory, social media and our technology, our phones in general, we're supposed to help with that, right? We're supposed to be able to, you know, even be more socially connected. That's why it's called social media. But I think by and large, what these tools are doing is more disconnecting people, at least in real life or especially in real time. It turns out you don't necessarily need to connect in real life to get the kind of social connection, nutrition that kind of comes with being with other people. But you need to do it in real time. You know, you and I are right now talking, you know, we're not in the same room, in the same studio.

We're talking across the podcast software. And research shows that's pretty good, right? Because we're kind of, you can see each other's facial expressions. We're kind of talking in real time. Doesn't work as much if you're just like texting or posting, you know, a comment on someone's Instagram feed or, you know, scrolling through TikTok videos or something. That's not as nutritious in terms of our psychology of what we need for social connection. And so I think that one of the biggest hits that people get from social media is that it's just an opportunity cost on hanging out with each other in real life. You of what we need for social connection. And so I think that one of the biggest hits that people get from social media is that it's just an opportunity cost on hanging out with each other in real life.

You know, how often have you seen a group of young people or honestly a group of adults for that matter, like sitting around a dinner table and everybody's got their, you know, they're with each other in real life, but they're not connecting in real life because they're looking at their phones, right? And so that's a big hit.

I think social media is also a big hit. We know for young people, just in terms of their sleep. Making sure you're getting the appropriate amount of good sleep is super important for our mental health. And these days, what you find is many students claim, many young people claim not to be sleeping as much because like they're on their phones and they're staying up late at night watching TikTok videos and other kind of screen time things. So I think there's lots of reasons our social media is hurting happiness generally. And that hit on happiness is especially bad for young people. But I think the loneliness hit that young people are going through kind of gets to your first question about kind of, you know, what's happening with young people kind of feeling like it's, you know, harder to kind of

connect with people across the political divide. I think that's a generation that's heading the most hit of the political polarization we're experiencing. And I think that's a generation that's heading the most hit of the political polarization we're experiencing. And I think that that winds up being really tricky because it means that we're not kind of getting the usual social connection we get. I think that people feel really limited in the number of friends they can make and who understands them and so on. And I think that just contributes to the loneliness crisis that we're seeing among young people today. You've talked about third spaces for younger people. How important are those third spaces and whose responsibility is it to build those? The government, societies, individuals? So third spaces is a term that political scientists and sociologists use to talk about places that are not your home and not your work if you're an adult, that you can be around people you know and hang out with one another a lot, right? So I think of in my youth,

there were third spaces like the mall. In the 90s, you just go to the mall and people would be at the mall and everyone would see each other. It wasn't work. It wasn't, you know, a home or a school, but it was like a place that I could go that I knew I would run into people that I knew who were my age and similar like-minded things. I think even when I grew up in the 90s, there were less third places than there were in the heyday of third places, which is kind of in the 1950s and 60s, where you had lots of churches and lion's clubs and barbershops and just places where people got together all the time. The joke is from that 90s TV show, Cheers, of like, you know, the place where everybody knows your name, right? That's kind of what you're going for

with a good third place. And the evidence really suggests that third places have been going away from the 1950s to now. If you just plot the number of churches or bowling leagues or barbershops, right, those things have gone down over time to the point that our young people say, you know, one of the reasons I don't get together with other people is like, I have nowhere to go, right? We have to go somewhere where you spend money, right? Like, it's kind of, there's not these kind of free places you can go to just be around other people is like, I have nowhere to go, right? We have to go somewhere where you spend money, right? Like it's kind of, there's not these kind of free places you can go to just be around other people as often right now. And I think that, you know, the evidence really suggests that that's a bummer. It's a bummer for our loneliness. It's a bummer for our ability to like connect across

different kinds of people. If you're going to your church or your barbershop, you're likely to see somebody who like maybe has a different background than you, or maybe a different political belief than you and so on. And I think we just get that less and less often. We have less third places to kind of connect in these, you know, kind of comfortable, leisurely ways where we're not really talking about politics, but it kind of comes up in this sort of subtle way. And so without those third places, I think we're becoming more lonely, more politically polarized and so on. In terms of who should fix that, I think everybody should fix it. There's a role that we have as individuals to create these spaces. And I think we can do more than we often expect. I have a friend here where I live in Massachusetts who a while ago now,

it's kind of two decades running, started this thing that he calls Monday Movie Night. And every Monday Movie Night, like he just invites a bunch of people to come over and watch movies and people make a kind of collective, you know, kind of healthy meal, like a big chili or something, and everybody gets together. And it's really been so nice to be part of this because it's just like every Monday, I know there'll be people there. And, you know, you can kind of connect with these kind of interesting folks who are doing stuff. And so I think there's a way that we as individuals can set up our own third places and really kind of put time into doing that, making these spaces. But there's also lots of sociological research suggesting the power of governments being really involved in creating third places.

Right. And just organizations kind of doing that. Many of the most famous third places aren't ones that are necessarily created by an individual for like, you know, a social group around their neighborhood, but by institutions, you know, so things like the Lions Club or the NAACP or the kind of communal barbershop or something like that. Is there any such thing as a good argument anymore? One with sharp perspectives, fair and tough questions that leaves you free to come to your own conclusions? Thoughtful discussion is missing almost everywhere in our lives. Thank you. Tenley. Join us. Laurie, I want to talk a little bit about your own relationship with happiness. You've talked about how people should find happiness in little things. Do you seek happiness

or does happiness come to you through activities that you're just generally doing? Like, is there a conscious mind seeking happiness or it just comes organically to you? You know, if I've been having a rough week, one thing that I often do is to say, okay, how can I get a little bit more social connection in? Like, which friend do I need to call this week? Who do I need to see to kind of get that social connection in? And so in some ways, it's both organic to certain activities that we engage in that they feel good and boost our positive emotion and increase our satisfaction with life. But if we're not getting those kind of behaviors in naturally, we can really intentionally decide, hey, I'm going to do this more often. And the consequence usually is a

boosted sense of well-being. So recently, what is one thing that made you happy? I had this lovely breakfast with this friend of mine from college and I had a really good like bagel sandwich. And I took a moment to like savor like this is great. Like that bagel is really crunchy. Like just the act of that paying attention, being a little bit more mindful and presence. It can kind of boost your positive emotion and make you experience things like gratitude, this sort of thankfulness for having this interesting experience. And that's just a sort of small retuning of our attention to pay attention to stuff that feels nice. And then all of a sudden you start feeling better. Do you differentiate between being content and being happy? And is happiness really a need or is it a want?

When I think of happiness, I think of it as kind of being almost like happiness with a capital H. It's kind of equivalent to sort of living a good life, living a happy life. And it has these kind of two components. One is sort of an emotional component where it's kind of how you feel in your life. And the second part is sort of a like thinking component, like how you think your life is going. If you kind of feel good in your life and think your life is going well, you're living a happy life. This term is sort of this kind of big capital H term happiness is often equivalent to what like the old ancients like Aristotle thought about when they thought about things like eudaimonia, this idea of a good life generally, right? So that's kind of what I think about when I use the term happiness. When I think of something like contentment, I almost see that as like one of

the positive emotions that makes up happiness. Contentment is just the sense that you're kind of at peace in life. It's a kind of like low arousal, but really high positive state, like joy or surprise or sort of laughter might be a kind of high arousal, high positive state, whereas contentment is like low arousal. You're just chilling and everything's fine. But things feel good when you sort of reflect on how they feel. And so the way I think of the connection between the two is contentment is an important but one of many important emotions that you want to get in to sort of have a happy life, to have eudaimonia or a good life. Laurie, I wonder if other emotions like grief and loss inform people's happiness differently.

People who've experienced, say, grief or loss look at happiness differently than people who haven't. Have you seen that in your studies? Definitely. There's a lot of work on a topic that researchers call post-traumatic growth. You know, so many of us have heard this term post-traumatic stress. You go through some terrible, stressful period and you have these consequences, you know, high arousal, high anxiety and things later on. But post-traumatic growth are cases where you go

through something terrible, you go through loss and you go through grief. But on the other side, you experience like a sense of growth, right? Like it's not something that you choose and, you know, it sucks and it's like worth recognizing the bad part of it. But like on the other side, people self-report feeling a deeper sense of connection, a deeper sense of spirituality. You know what is meaningful in life, your deeper sense of purpose and kind of a deeper sense that you can sort of go through things. I think this term resilience, as I know you've talked about in your podcast, is a really, really complicated one. But people who've gone through to the other side often say,

I know what I'm capable of now. Again, I wouldn't have chosen that. You know, it's awful. But like, I feel like I've grown and I'm stronger on the other side. This is what post-traumatic growth is. And I think one of the cool things about the research on post-traumatic growth is it shows that that kind of like positive thing that you get at the end had to come through the struggle. It had to come through the dark times and so on. And I think this gets to a misconception that we have about positive emotions. I think, you know, one big misconception I see when people come to my work in happiness is they kind of embrace this sort of toxic positivity approach that, you know, a good life, this happy life is positive emotion all the time. But when you look at the science, what you find

is like, that's not true. A good life involves some anxiety, involves some loss, it involves some grief, it involves some frustration, some justified anger, right? The way you get to a good life is to not just have these negative emotions, but really learn from them and push through them to see like how they're teachers. And so I think this is another misconception. We have just like, oh, money and successes matters for happiness. I think people think a happy life has none of the bad stuff,

but a happy life includes the bad stuff. The bad stuff is really important for getting us to kind of grow and become, you know, the people we really want to become someday. You're absolutely right. And bad stuff is part of human existence, right? We experience so many different emotions throughout our lives.

How can we disregard the bad, the ugly stuff? Because that makes up who we are. Do you think paying attention to the present also matters? Because a lot of times we look at the past and then we look at the future. Yesterday, I had an argument with my husband. I went to bed a little angry. I woke up in the morning. I wasn't thinking about it, but it was part of my subconscious self. And then my husband

and I talked and we were like, okay, now we're fine. And it changed my mood. How do I start thinking about today in this moment? Well, it takes some work, right? I mean, I think we have brains that are just built to kind of mind wander, to kind of think about the past, think about the future, we're anywhere about the present. But there are techniques and you can use to get better about being more present. One is a technique that's just called savoring, which is just what it sounds like. That was kind of what I was doing with my bagel this morning, which is like, what does this taste like? What does this feel like? How would I describe this? You just like become, force yourself to become curious about whatever is going on in the moment. And

interestingly, that includes when things are bad. One way that we can get through bad emotions like grief or anxiety is to really pay attention. Like, okay, how does this feel like? My chest is heavy. Like, you know, my face feels tight, right? Like I feel like I have pressure like pushing on me, right? When you really kind of get to know and be present with those negative emotions that can actually help you feel better. So being super aware of negative emotions or positive emotions for that matter. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think we just kind of don't notice our experience, right? Kind of. And that means we don't really get to learn from it or get to really feel it.

You know, in some ways that's really kind of sad, right? That we're sort of fast forwarding our life or rewinding our life and never kind of just playing it right there. So I think, yeah, so savoring and just kind of being part of the present moment is powerful. But then a second technique we know works from the researchers, you know, so many spiritual techniques for kind of being a little bit more present. So practices like meditation or prayer, all these practices where you really kind of pay attention to a particular mantra or a particular set of words and so on. Like those rituals that the research shows can really build up your presence over time, particularly practices like meditation, where the practice is really all about intentionally noticing the present moment without judgment. Those kinds of practices over time, like literally change your brain. You literally change the amount of gray matter in your brain, even if you just start meditating as a novice.

I'm glad you mentioned spirituality. I feel like spirituality is almost frowned upon when I'm feeling low or when I'm feeling anxious. I do pray and it calms me down. There's actually lots of research, you know, studying kind of happiness in people of different religious faiths and religious backgrounds. And one of the clear patterns suggests that religious individuals tend to be happier. It seems like that happiness, though, comes a lot from religious practices. Yeah. So it comes from the, not the belief part, but the prayer part. The rituals. to services, right? You know, taking time off, whether it's a Sabbath or whatever, right? And what's interesting is it kind of doesn't matter which religion it is. You see boosts of happiness in people of Muslim faith or Buddhist faith or Catholic or, you know, Jewish faith all over the

board. It kind of doesn't matter what rituals you're doing. It's just that you have rituals that give you a sense of connection to something bigger than you that seem to matter. And so, you know, I think as we, you know, become a more secular society, at least especially here in the U.S., in some ways we do that at our peril, right? We're missing out on a real path to happiness. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to become religious, but it means that if you're not getting your sense of purpose and connection from religious faith, you might, in those rituals, you might need to find other rituals and other ways to get a sense of purpose. What are some of the other rituals that you've seen people follow to replace religion? There's a great kind of religious scholar, Caspar Turk Kyle.

He also has a fabulous podcast who's actually been doing work on these kind of other traditions that look a lot like faith traditions. For example, he writes a lot about CrossFit, which sounds kind of funny, but it's like, you know, people go every week and it becomes a third place and it becomes something that, you know, you have a whole set of values and meaning. It becomes a spot where people wind up doing things for each other. You know, he talks about these cases of, you know, somebody in your CrossFit group gets sick and everybody rallies and, you know, makes food for them and things like that. And so what he finds is that you can sometimes get these other organizations that work a lot like faith traditions that have a lot of the same, obviously not all of the same benefits, but some of the same benefits.

That's so fascinating. As humans get creative, we can come up with lots of versions that work that way. On a scale of zero to 10, how happy are you in your life and why? Well, I'm usually around like a seven or eight. And I think I wasn't that way before. I think I'm at a seven or an eight in part because I do engage in all these practices a lot. My instinct is not to engage in as much social connection. I'm really not a present person.

I'm much more ruminativity and stuff. social connection. I'm really not a present person. I'm much more ruminativity and stuff. Like, but I think as I've studied this more and more, I've recognized how important it is to act this stuff. Like happiness is possible, but it takes work. You know, it's just like having a fit body, right? Like, you know, like it's possible to eat healthy and go to the gym all the time and move your body, but you got to put some work in. My analogy is that happiness works just like that. Like you can do it, but it takes kind of constant work and constant practice. And that's the thing I think too, is that it's just like my colleague, Nick Epley is fond of saying that happiness is like a leaky tire. You know, it's like you were happy, but then it kind of goes down and you have to do something to pump it up. And so remembering

that your mental health is something that takes kind of constant work has been helpful for me because it's really allowed me to put that work in. And the act of doing that has made me happier. So I say, yeah, I'm like a seven and a half, eight out of a 10 point happiness scale. Give me one habit that people should make part of their life to feel happier. Another great one that I think we haven't talked about yet is the act of feeling a little bit grateful. This is a mindset shift that this science shows is really powerful. We're real complainers. And I think we become complainies socially.

Like I use the analogy, you know, last time you hung out with a friend, like they asked, how's it going? Did you immediately list all the blessings in life? Like if you're in the US, probably no. You listed like, you know, all the you hung out with a friend, like they asked, how's it going? Did you immediately list all the blessings in life? Like if you're in the U.S., probably no. You listed like, you know, all the things that are going wrong. You didn't talk about any of your co-workers that you adore. You talked about the one co-worker that like gets on your last nerve. You know, in general, we have this bias, I think universally, but even more so in the United States towards what you might call under sociality. even more so in the United States towards what you might call under-sociality. Like we just don't realize the happiness benefits of being social, whether that's expressing our gratitude to other

people, complimenting other people, trying to help other people. We just don't realize how much these kind of little social mindset shifts matter so much for making us feel better. You know, when you mentioned grateful, my mind just went to what my mother says. My parents live in Pakistan and I talk to them very often. And every time I talk to my mom and if I'm feeling low, obviously she knows. And she always says this to me. She's like, be grateful for what you have. Just say it verbally, how grateful you are for all that you have. And I always brush it off, Laurie.

I don't pay attention. And I'm like, yeah, how will that make a difference in my life? Just saying I am grateful for X, Y, Z things. And now when you mentioned it, maybe that's a mantra, that's a ritual that I should probably incorporate in my daily life, right? Just getting up in the morning and saying I am grateful for X, Y, Z and then starting my day. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like your mom's reading the studies because like literally there's literally a study where you have people scribble down three to five things they're grateful for

every day in the morning or in the evening. And what you find is that within two weeks, people statistically report higher subjective well-being, a higher level of happiness after that. So like it's just this simple act. And it's because one of the problems is like we have this mind that's built to be very negative. You know, it made sense in our back in the day to like notice the bad stuff so we could kind of fix it. But that means that there's good stuff in our lives that we've kind of just gotten used to. We're not getting the kind of happiness benefit from all those good things because we don't take time to notice it. And yeah, the studies show that just the act of what your mom is saying, just take time to notice it every morning. Now, all of a sudden, you're

kind of paying attention and you can kind of get the emotional rewards that come from the good stuff in your life that you otherwise would have just taken for granted. So do you think our brain is conditioned to look at the negative only or at least for the most part? So we are almost fighting against it to achieve happiness. Definitely. I mean, I think there's lots of evidence for a negativity bias. There's even evidence that like three month olds and five month olds babies are more likely to pay attention if you show them a scene of something negative, they kind of lock on to the negative stuff. So it seems like we have this bias and it seems like it emerges really early. The good news is that you can

train your brain away from that, right? This is, I think, think is what the gratitude practice that your mother was talking about can be so powerful, right? You just force yourself to notice the good stuff. So you kind of push against this natural tendency. And I think that's the case in so many aspects of our lives. You know, I mean, we use the fitness analogy before, but I think it's similar, right? Like, I don't know about your general take, but my general take would be to like eat unhealthy stuff. I'm not like a kind of physically minded person. My instinct would be to stay on the couch and not push myself, right? Those are our natural instincts. But of course, we can push past those natural instincts that we

need to if we want to be a little healthier. And I think the same is true for our happiness. We have this natural negativity bias that might even be innate, but with a little practice, this natural negativity bias that might even be innate, but with a little practice, we can move past it. In the end, Laurie, if you were to describe the United States of America in the context of happiness, how would you do that? I think I would describe it, unfortunately, as going down right now.

And that's really what these recent data from the World Happiness Report show is that overall, happiness in the United States has been going down right now. And that's really what these recent data from the World Happiness Report show is that overall, the happiness in the United States has been going down. We've dropped out of the top 20 in the world for the first time ever since the World Happiness Report has started. And sadly, a lot of that increased unhappiness is because of young people, is because young people are feeling so depressed and so anxious. And so I think the way I would describe it is the United States isn't doing very well. But in that challenge, we really have an opportunity. This is a real opportunity we have to kind of follow what the science shows in our behaviors and our mindsets to feel happier.

Laurie, thank you so much for coming on Immigrantly. As I said, you are a superstar. A lot of people love you. And I am so glad that you're doing what you're doing because we all need the Happiness Lab podcast in our lives to feel happier. But thank you so much. This was wonderful. Such a great time. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm so glad I got to talk to Laurie. I've been listening to the Happiness Lab for I don't know how long. This was such an important, fun, introspective conversation.

And here's what I want all of you to do. On a scale of 0 to 10, rate your happiness. How happy are you in life? And what makes you happy? I really think doing these exercises, being intentional about how happy we are, how grateful we are, probably makes us happier.

And if not, it at least gives us a pathway to work towards happiness. This podcast was produced by me, Sadia Khan, written by Rainier Harris and me. The editorial review is done by Sheyu. Our sound designer and editor is Hazik Ahmed Fareed. Theme music for Immigrantly

is done by Simon Hutchinson. Come back next week when I have another incredible guest and try to be happy.