The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Q: "Are We Born to Work? Or Born to Live?"

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Listener Niki Walker has a question... in our busy, career-driven, money-oriented live, are we forgetting to make time for more important things?  In our first episode fielding questions from fans of The Happiness Lab, Dr Laurie Santos looks at the world of work and how we can prioritize purpose, fun and human interaction to make our daily lives better.    Laurie is joined by Professor Cassie Holmes (author of "Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time and Focus on What Matters Most). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. And I think we maybe have a couple minutes for questions. I'm looking at Katie to see. As a happiness expert, I give a lot of public talks on the science of well-being. I've kind of lost track of exactly how many I've done, but at this point, it must be in the hundreds. At the end of every lecture, I usually try to leave at least a few minutes

to take questions from the audience. Hello, you said you spent a lot of time with the students in the correlation of too much alcohol use and nightlife, not enough sleep. So what did you find there? Yeah, so the question is about... Those Q&A sessions, they're my favorite part of speaking. I can pretty much guarantee that someone will ask a question

that'll make me stop and think again about the challenges we all face to become happier. We've been focusing on the younger generation, but a lot of surveys indicate that as you get older, you get happier. And because I love these Q&A sessions so much, I've always thought it was a shame that listeners to this podcast have to miss out on them. And so I decided to change that. I put out a request for any and all Happiness Lab listener questions on my Twitter and Instagram feeds. And immediately, I had a ton of great ones flooding in.

Questions like this one. Hey, so my name is Nikki. I love the Happiness Lab. I've been listening for a few years now. And my question is, are we born to work or are we born to live? Seems like it should have a simple answer, right? I mean, obviously we're born to live, but we don't always act like it. I'm going through my own work-life transition right now. Over the last year, I've sensed the

signs of burnout creeping into my day-to-day life. So I decided to take a year off from a lot of my academic duties at Yale so I can focus on other projects like this podcast. And so Nikki's question really jumped out at me. To help me respond to it and to get some advice for myself, I decided to recruit an expert on how we can spend our time in ways that nourish us, both on and off the clock. I am Cassie Holmes, and I am a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and I wrote the book Happier Hour, how to beat distraction, expand your time, and focus on what matters most. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn

how to avoid getting too worked up about work. You're listening to the Happiness Lab's Listener Questions Special Edition with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Happiness Lab listener Nikki Walker was kind enough to join me and Cassie for recording. And to start things off, I wanted to know what made Nikki ask about work-life balance in the first place.

So Nikki, I absolutely loved this question because I think it's something that I've struggled with too, right? How much of our identity is built into our work versus built into the rest of our lives. Do you want to expand on why you asked that question? Yeah, it really started during COVID for me. After about a year of working from home and having just life turned upside down, I sort of just raised my head one day and I was like, what am I doing here? Why am I still doing this? Do I really enjoy what I'm doing? I feel like I have been idling, wanting certain things, wanting to pursue a certain lifestyle, which for me is to be closer to nature and closer to the outdoors

that I love. I mountain bike a lot, hike with my dog. And so I quit my job. I actually just finished moving from Washington, D.C. to Denver, Colorado. It's something that I've wanted to do for a while. I call myself a recovering type A person. I think you're not alone. I think so many people are having this question during COVID. This is why we're going through the great resignation. This question of should we all jump off the busyness treadmill? And if we do, what does that mean? And it's one of the reasons I'm so excited to have Cassie here today, because in some ways her whole book is about a lot of these questions, but also in part because Cassie, it sounds like you went through the same kind of

should I completely jump off the busyness treadmill too? This was the story that started your book. Do you want to tell me about that moment, that scary moment? Yes, I absolutely was about to jump off the busyness train early in my career. So I was an assistant professor at Wharton and I had a new baby at home. I have a husband who I love very much, friends who I wanted to spend time with. And I was on the late night train home because despite having a four-month-old, I agreed to give a talk at Columbia's business school. And it was like this crazy hectic day. I'm like waking up in a hotel room, rushing from meeting to meeting. And it was on the last train that would get me home. I was just exhausted. And I was like,

can I actually do this all? The busyness at work, trying to get actual work done amidst meetings and emails, And then also wanting to be present with my family and with my friends. And that's not to mention when you get home from work, all the work that has to happen to keep your household going. And I was about to give it all up. I'm like, it's too much. And I'm like, okay, I want to figure this out because it's not just me that has this experience. And being a social psychologist, we can put these questions of how we're feeling and the choices we make to test. And so I was like, okay, if I were to quit so that I would have endless hours a day to spend exactly how I wanted, would I be happier?

And so I recruited some wonderful colleagues, Marissa Sharif and Hal Hirschfield to address this question. And we looked at huge dataset, American Time Use Survey data, which basically captures how individuals spend their days as well as how satisfied they feel. And we wanted to see what's that relationship between how much discretionary time or free time one has in their day and how satisfied are they overall so that I could know if I had a lot more discretionary time, would I be happier? You're like trying to find the empirical sweet spot of not full jumping off the busyness treadmill, but where do I want to be in the balance of work versus feeling overwhelmed? Yeah. And I didn't actually even know that there would be a sweet spot. I thought

it would just be like more time is better, more free time is better. But what we found in the data is that there is a sweet spot. There is such thing as too little time in our data set, at least less than about two hours a day of discretionary time is associated with less happiness. But what I didn't know, and is really important as we're making these decisions of do we quit, is that there is such thing as too much time. Beyond about five hours of discretionary time in your day, you actually see decrease in life satisfaction. So that's to say, to Larry, your point, the sweet spot, it's like between two and five hours, which is actually quite a decent range. And two hours, I will say that sounds totally unattainable. But two hours for me seems, I don't know where those are magically going to

come from hours 25 and 26, but yeah. Right. But when you start actually calculating within your day, how much time are you spending in ways that are fulfilling? So Nikki, you talked about riding your bike or getting outside. Like how much time are you already spending in those ways? And it's likely that it's two hours is not completely out of reach. This is one of the things I love about your story is that you kind of made this decision based on the data, not to throw in the busyness towel completely, but to find ways to use your time better, to kind of invest it better. Why do we need to start thinking about time as an investment? How does that help us? The way we spend our time, those hours, some up to our days, some up to our decades,

some up to your life. Time is this resource that doesn't only sort of signal how we're doing in life, it literally is our life. And so where do we invest that so that we feel fulfilled? And it's not just about relaxing on the weekend or on vacation. Our data suggests that day in and day out, having a whole lot of time of relaxing, that that's actually associated with less satisfaction because people feel a lacking sense of purpose. So we don't want to feel so busy and productive, like we don't have time to breathe or to notice, but we do want to feel like we're investing our time in ways that feel worthwhile. Nikki, I'm curious what you're thinking,

having heard Cassie's reaction to the busyness treadmill, come to Jesus moment. Yeah, right. I mean, I think that when Cassie started talking about investing your time, that really resonated with me because, I mean, I did not make the decision to quit lately. You know, I think that by investing my time and energy into shifting my life in this

really big way, that I'm investing in myself. I think our culture leads us astray in this really funny way, which is one might assume that we know how to invest correctly, right? That we put time and energy into the important stuff. We have the right balance, the meaningful stuff versus the grunt stuff. But I feel like, Cassie, one of the things you point out in your book is that that balance doesn't come naturally. We often get that balance wrong. You talked about this possibly apocryphal story of a professor doing a demo for his class. I'm wondering if you could share that here because I found that quite profound. So the room is full of students and a professor walks in and on the desk, he puts a big plastic clear jar and then he out of this bag, pulls a bunch of golf balls and pours them into the jar,

fills it up. And he asked the students, is the jar full? And they all nod their head. And then he's like, ha ha ha. And like goes back into his bag and pulls out pebbles. And then he pours the pebbles and they sort of move around the golf balls and fill the jar. He's like, is the jar full? And they're like, yeah. And then he, from the bag, pulls a bunch of sand and sort of pours the sand and that fills the jar in between. And he's like, is the jar full? And they're like, yes, the jar is definitely full. And he goes on to say, if he had put the sand in first, the golf balls wouldn't have fit. And then out of the bag, he pulls two bottles of Corona. He opens one and then he pours a beer into the jar. And he's like,

this jar is your life. And the golf balls are the things that really matter to you. And the sand is everything else, this sort of thoughtless ways that we spend our time. And if we let the sand fill our time first, if we let all this sort of stuff just happen, we don't put our golf balls in first. If we don't prioritize our time for them, then there won't be time.

And then someone asked, what's the beer all about? And he's like, no matter how full your jar is, you always have time for a beer with a friend. So this is about prioritization, right? It's like understanding for you, what are your golf balls? What are those things that ultimately matter? And for some of us, it actually might be the work we do,

but it's important to identify what they are so that you prioritize, you make the time for that. Because if you don't, then all the sand is going to fill up our days. And Nikki, it sounds like you were sort of feeling like really sandy. You're like, this isn't the life that I chose. And then you needed to clear it out so that you could start building on what's important to you. Totally. So Nikki, it sounds like you just need a life of golf balls now that you're off in Denver. But the real question is, how do we do this? Especially if we don't have the luxury of quitting a job that might be a little too sandy. We'll get to that question when the

Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Before the break, we were really talking about all the ways that we should be investing our time, making sure we fit our golf balls in before the sand kind of takes everything over. And you've come up with a nice exercise that we can use to do that. So tell me a little bit about the time tracking exercise. Yes. So this is to identify what are those activities that do make us feel happy, that do feel meaningful in our days. And sometimes they aren't what we would predict. Researchers have done time tracking and what they do is over the course of an individual's day, they ask people to track how they're spending their time as well as rate how happy or how

positive they feel while doing it. And with that data, you can identify what are those activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotion? What are those activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotion? What are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion? And the research identifies that on average, the activities associated with the most positive emotion tend to be those that involve connecting with other people. So spending time with your family and friends, the activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion are commuting. Check. Work. Check. Yeah. And housework. So Nikki, like your decision of, dude, I don't want to commute. It's reasonable because for the typical American, those are the least happy hours of our day. And one thing is that you did this time tracking activity yourself.

And I understand you found some surprises, even though you do this for a living. Yes. So I, for instance, knowing the research very well, I'm like, oh, social connection, time that I am with others should be my happiest. That was not true for me across the board. For me, it was a particular way of spending time with others. And for me as an introvert, I like sort of one-on-one conversations where I can get to know the person. My son, on the other hand, the extrovert of the world, he wants all people around

him. So like anytime other people are in the vicinity, that is actually positive time. So it's important for you to identify what are not only the activities, but the sort of features of those activities. So work, I really love my hours when I spend working where I am writing, digging into data, my door is closed, not talking to anyone. That is really fulfilling and happy work. Whereas email time, yes. then I am like the average American

where I'm like work is the worst. One of the things I think this activity also helps with simulating doing it in my head is just you realize that everything's an opportunity cost, right? All the time at work that I'm spending on email that I might hate is time that I'm not spending, say, in my office or with a close colleague having a conversation. It really highlights the fact that our time is a resource that if we're not using it right, is like going away. Yeah. I mean, it really helps you identify the sand, to be honest. All that sand that washes in and fills your time because you're not only looking at the activities that you're doing and how happy you feel while doing them, but you can calculate how much time you've spent on those activities.

And so for me, my sand, I keep referring to it as email. Email can literally fill one's entire days and therefore entire life. It will fill as much time as you give it. Among my students, when they do this, often the sand that they identify is actually time spent on social media.

They're like, oh, just be a quick check, thinking that'll be like a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Those few minutes add up to a big portion of one's week. TV too. And so while that initial 30 minutes where you're watching your show and all excited, you're like sort of on the couch, exhausted from the day. It's such a treat. But when that initial half hour bleeds into an hour, two hours, three hours, and then it's 10 o'clock and you're exhausted and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so tired. Are you even still having fun? Not really. That's one of the reasons that time tracking exercise is so powerful as we start learning what's fun and what's not. But then, of course, there's the next step, which is to use the information that we actually get from the time tracking exercise.

Totally. And I think that means hacking two things. First, hacking our leisure time. And then second, maybe hacking our work. And so let's talk about hacking our leisure time. As you talk through the sort of time exercise with other folks, are there specific spots where you found not universal, but pretty general recommendations for what people should add more of into their leisure time? Yeah. Again, touching to the role of social connection. So socializing to the extent that it makes you feel a greater connection and a greater sense of belonging, that's where you really get the boost. And so friendship, research shows over and over again, the role of friendship. Family members can also be friends. It's the extent to which you feel understood and known and understand another individual. And the way that you can increase closeness among friends is increasing self-disclosure and having conversations where you share about your experience, listen to the

other's experience that can have a wonderful impact on how close and connected you feel. And I have this exercise that I do among my students in class where I pair them up and I give them this, it's the relationship closeness induction task, but basically it's a set of questions that as the questions progress, they become more disclosive. So the initial questions are the typical, like, what's your name? You know, why did you come to Anderson? What are your hobbies? And then the next set of questions is what made you go into this particular profession? So it's sort of picking up on goals. And then the last most disclosive set of questions are like, what was your happiest childhood memory? What is one

of your greatest fears? What are you most proud of? So there are things that people at first might feel like this is a little overshare, like this is awkward and weird. But what you find is that's not what people experience, is it? Within just 15 minutes, these pairs that have randomly paired up feel like they've made a new friend. So that's how we can get more social and get less on screens. But there's also stuff that happens outside of work that also feels not fun. I'm thinking of like the chores and things. Any tips for how we can make our chore doing a little bit more fun and enjoyable? Yes. So pulling from one of my favorite colleagues, Katie Milkman, she has wonderful work that shows that if you bundle unfun activity with a fun activity, it makes that activity all the

more fun. So she has shown it and you can certainly use this if you are one of the people that view exercise as a chore. If you listen to a podcast or if you're on the elliptical while watching The Bachelor, these are ways that you can make that exercise time or that chore time feel more fun. Turning on a podcast, the happiness lab, and you will have more fun folding the laundry. In fact, you will want to continue folding laundry and you're like all bummed when the last socks have been like paired up. So there are these ways of bundling that make it more fun. Another activity that I mentioned is associated with low levels of happiness, which feel like a chore because it's a waste is commuting.

And you can use this bundling strategy for that too. So if you drive for your commute, listening to books on tape, listening to podcasts, as opposed to the sandy way to commute, which is flipping through the radio station. Nikki, you're smiling there. I'm guessing that maybe you actually do some of these temptation bundling type activities. Oh, yeah, I'm a big bundler. And I think that the opposite to listening to a book on tape is maybe like scrolling through social media during your commute if you take public transit. But that in itself actually isn't fulfilling. And at least my students' time tracking results suggest that it's actually way less positive and way less happy and fun than people predict. We've heard about ways that we can fill our time with more fulfilling things in our leisure and in our chores. When we get back from the break, we're going to hear more about how we can do that at work, too, through the process of job crafting. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back.

So far, we've talked about how we can become happier in our leisure, kind of, you know, make sure our leisure is filled with golf balls and not sand. But this is something we also have to do at work too. And we actually had another listener who we met with earlier who shared a question about this issue, trying to make our work a little bit more meaningful and fun. Hi, Lori. My name is Megan Hyun. And Cassie, I'd love to hear more about this concept of job crafting. I'm in a position where I have a really demanding job that can really easily lend itself to burnout, but it's also really meaningful to me. I do patient care and also some teaching, and I love my patients and

my students. So I've tried to work on things that are more meaningful to me, and that helps prevent the burnout. But I also have friends and relatives in jobs that are maybe less meaningful to them. And so I'm wondering, how can someone in a position like that, where it's difficult to find the meaning in the work, enhance their happiness and their well-being in the workplace? I especially hate the phrase, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. First of all, I do what I love and it's definitely work. And there are people who just can't afford to do a job that is something that they love. They can't monetize the things that they care about, but I think they deserve to find wellness in the workplace too. do a job that is something that they love. They can't monetize the things that they care about, but I think they deserve to find wellness in the workplace too.

And so it seems like Megan has two questions about job crafting. First, how you can job craft if you have a really burnout prone, very busy job. And then second, how you can job craft in a job that might not be so challenging. Let's start with job crafting. It sounds like Megan has listened a lot to the Happiness Lab, which is not surprising. But Cassie, can you give us a quick rundown of what job crafting is? Yes. Job crafting is about how do you take the job that you have and craft it so that you're more satisfied with the work at the day's end. And that involves a couple of things. One is it is redirecting where you spend your time within the workday so that you're investing on tasks that are more worthwhile. It also involves reframing some of the tasks

that you're doing already. And it sounds like Megan has already redone that in terms of reframing her work by understanding what in her work is meaningful for her. And even though at the face of it, some of our jobs, it's not quite clear, like, what is the meaning of it? What's the sort of positive impact that it has on the world or on others or myself? But you can actually start to identify that in a happier hour. I have this exercise called the five whys. And what it is asking you to do is first state your job and then ask, why do you do that? Oftentimes that first answer is for money, but then asking,

why is that important? I can use myself as an example. Okay, my job. I'm a business school professor. What is that job? I conduct research, I teach, and I do some service. Why is that important? I want to create knowledge and disseminate knowledge. Why do I care about that? I want people to be smart. Why do I want people to be smart? Actually, I personally want people to be smart about their happiness. I want them to know how they should be spending their time to feel greater happiness. And having identified that, it actually makes some of my tasks more fun. So even emailing, going back to emailing, one of my least happy Sandy tasks, if I'm like, oh, actually creating knowledge about what makes people happy is now when I get emails from my collaborators, it's not like responding to email. It's, oh, this is part of the endeavor to create knowledge about what makes people happy. So even email takes on new meaning. It seems like it works in two ways, right? It's not just the email takes on new meaning. It seems like it works in two ways, right? It's

not just the email takes on new meaning, but if you had some other tasks that you couldn't reframe, they're like, wait, this is not part of making people happy at all. Then that might really cause you to think maybe this has to go, or maybe I need to really minimize this in my work as much as possible. Absolutely. So that's where the sort of where you dedicate your time. This helps inform what are those projects, what are those tasks that you say yes versus no to. And there is a lot of sand that is there and that shouldn't be there and is potentially not necessary for your job and certainly not for what drives you and motivates you in your work. for your job and certainly not for what drives you and motivates you in your work. I'm curious hearing this, Nikki, what you're thinking now, especially having, you know, switched around your job so much now. I'm actually transitioning into this really neat part-time caregiving slash help with housekeeping and errands kind of situation that allows me to live up in the mountains

and also help an older individual keep her independence as she gets closer to the end of her life. And it's really beneficial for me as well. I just hear you guys talk about doing that exercise. I've been doing it in my mind, listening to you guys talk. And I work in public media, so I'm also really passionate about educating people and then creating content that they want to watch and share and are inspired by. educating people and then creating content that they want to watch and share and are inspired by. But at the same time, I'm like, I'm not really sure. So what would you recommend for somebody who like me has determined that maybe this thing that I've been doing for a long time and that I went to school for and all these things isn't really serving me anymore or

isn't the right fit for me maybe? How do you determine what comes next? Or is it the right fit for me, maybe? Like, how do you determine what comes next? I think that this job crafting or even the time tracking and asking these questions of why. So once you identify within your workday or within your former job, what were the pieces of it that were more fun for you? As well as why were those pieces more fun? Was it contributing to something that really gets you going? And so this job crafting doesn't only help make the job that

you have better, but by identifying those things that can help you select what type of work actually would be where more hours of that job would be fun. Because of course, there's going to be pieces of any job that just aren't fun. But knowing why you're doing the work makes those unfun pieces more reasonable. Totally. I like honestly wish that I could get every one of my Yale students to do this because I think when they're picking their job, it's not based on what's that thing that's their why. It's like, oh, what gives me the most money or the most prestige? They're falling into the same cultural trap that I think we all fall into. But then I also want to get back to Megan's other question, which is, this is for the people who have a lot of choice about their job and had a lot of meaning, right? My Yale students are often

picking between jobs that are all really challenging and interesting. What about the jobs where you might assume it might be hard to job craft or the kind of job description you have is really specific and really tight and maybe not that challenging? What about people who are listening who are in that situation? How can they also engage in job crafting? Yeah, there's another component of job crafting that we haven't talked about, and that relates to any job, no matter how meaningful the job scope itself is. And that is finding a friend at work. I've already talked about the role of social connection. And it's interesting because it's like in the time tracking research,

they identify our happiest times of the day are when we are connecting with others. And the least happy times are when we're at work. But there are potentially a lot of work hours that you could imbue with that authentic social connection. In the Gallup poll, they have this funny question, which initially I was like, oh my gosh, is this for real? It sounds like something a third grader would ask is, do you have a best friend at work? And interestingly, the answer to that question is highly predictive of how engaged people feel at work, their performance at work, how satisfied that they are with their work. And satisfaction with our work is a very big determinant of how satisfied we feel with our life overall because we spend so much time on it or at it. I love this conversation because it's really telling us that even if you're feeling

very not engaged at work, even if you're feeling like you're hating it, even if you're feeling like you're at the end of your busyness treadmill, there are paths forward to figure this out. Perhaps the path is to completely empty the jar and just start over from scratch like Nikki did. But perhaps the task is to do a little bit of a time evaluation exercise to see what's in the jar in the first place. And can I switch some things around? Cassie and Nikki, thank you both so much for being on the show. This was fantastic and such a wonderful little exercise having our listener on for the first time. So super appreciate it.

Thank you both so much. Thank you guys. That was so much fun. And thank you for all you're doing to disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy. For many of us, so much of our identity is deeply intertwined with what we do for a living. And more often than not, our work dictates our schedules and sometimes leaves us without time for fun, for family, for volunteering, or for just looking up at the clouds. body the idea that we're really born to live, we need to practice these strategies to push back on all the social pressure and time pressure that causes us to prioritize work over living. After chatting with Cassie, I'll be watching out to make sure my calendar isn't too sandy

and reminding myself that no matter how busy I feel, there's always time to get a tasty beverage with a friend. Thanks so much to Happiness Lab listener Nikki Walker and to my guest expert Cassie Holmes. Be sure to look out for Cassie's new book, Happier Hour, how to beat distraction, expand your time, and focus on what matters most. You can pre-order it wherever you shop for your books. We'll be back with another show answering all the questions from you, our listeners. And if you have a question you'd like answered, or you have a great idea for a show in general,

you can email us at thlvoice at pushkin.fm. That's thlvoice at pushkin.fm. You can also contact me on Twitter or Instagram. Thanks so much for listening to the Happiness Lab Listener Questions Special Edition with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. I hope it's been a good use of your time. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan,

Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Thank you.