The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Q: "What Did the Pandemic Teach Us About Happiness?"

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Covid brought disruption and despair... but it also caused many of us to think about our lives and what is most important to us. Listener Dr Amy Comander, Director of Lifestyle Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, wants to know how we can apply lessons from the pandemic to improve our happiness as we return to normalcy.   Amy helps teach cancer survivors wellbeing tips - and also happens to be an old college lab partner of Dr Laurie Santos - so we invited her to host this episode and quiz Laurie on how to lead a happier post-pandemic life. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. special episodes, we've gotten so many amazing new questions about the science of happiness. But even more importantly, this season has been a great way for me to meet listeners from around the world. But while I expected to meet lots of new fans of the podcast, what I didn't expect was for one of the listener questions we got to reconnect me with a longtime friend who I hadn't had a chance to see in a while. I think I met you like freshman year. Oh yeah, we worked together in a psychology lab and I was already impressed by how amazing you were in terms of your dedication and passion for psychology. I'm a little bit in denial that we're celebrating our 25th reunion. This is Dr. Amy Commander. Amy and I were friends as nerdy first years in college. Back then, Amy assumed she was on the path to becoming a neuroscientist. But during medical school, she made the pivot to studying breast cancer.

Now, she's the medical director at Mass General Cancer Center and the director of the breast oncology program at Newton Wellesley Hospital. Well, you should know, Laurie, that I tell all of my patients about the Happiness Lab podcast. Well, you should know, Laurie, that I tell all of my patients about the Happiness Lab podcast, because I feel like the lessons you teach in this podcast are important for all of us, but in particular for cancer survivors. As you can understand, a diagnosis of cancer is life-changing and very scary. And the evidence-based strategies you share in this podcast have really helped so many people. So if any of my patients are listening, trust me, they've learned about it from me. That's awesome. Amy still maintains a deep interest in psychology and the commitment to helping her patients promote their mental health

in addition to their physical health. Last year, she and her colleagues completed a new book called The Paving the Path to Wellness Workbook. It's an easy to follow resource for cancer survivors or anyone who wants to improve their overall health and well-being. As you might imagine, the question she sent in via Twitter was really good. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind reading it for us and pulling it up right now. I think it would be really interesting to focus on the lessons we've learned from the pandemic and what these lessons have taught us about our happiness. As we try to return to normalcy,

I think it is important for each of us to reflect on these past two years. Given the challenges we have all faced, what lessons have we learned about what really matters? And as we move forward, can we hold onto these important lessons and improve our own happiness? I love this question so much.

What lessons have we really learned about what matters when it comes to our relationships, our jobs, and our overall health and happiness? In this episode, I want to take each of these post-pandemic topics in turn, starting with our relationships. But since Amy's a huge fan of the show, I thought it'd be fun for her to turn the tables and for me to be the one interviewed for a change. And so welcome to the Happiness Lab, our first ever special guest host, Dr. Amy Commander, who'll be asking me about post-pandemic challenges in the latest and final installment of our Happiness Lab Listener Questions, Special Edition. Are you ready to...

I'm so excited. Well, I will let you take it away. Maybe asking a first question about social connection. Well, I know that certainly we've really learned over these past two years, important lessons that we've kind of taken many of our social connections for granted. I hate to say that we've missed so many important rituals over the past two years, such as graduations, weddings, funerals, unfortunately. And I'm just curious, how do you reconcile that? And what do you think is the best way for us to move forward, given all these things

that we've missed? Yeah, well, I think the first thing is to take a real lesson from it. The pandemic has really taught us the importance of social connections, right? And just how critical this is. We have so much evidence that feeling like you're connected with other people, feeling like you belong, feeling not lonely and feeling really close to the people around you can be huge for people's well-being. I mean, one super famous study by Marty Seligman and his colleagues showed

that very happy people tend to also be very, very social. If you look at what separates very happy people from the not so happy people, those happy people tend to spend time with other humans like at all, like they're just around other people. But in addition, they also tend to be prioritizing time with their friends and family members, right? So this is something that positive psychology has known for a very long time. But I think the pandemic really put it in stark relief. Definitely. I mean, at so many levels, doctors and nurses and health care workers, our schedules changed and we weren't interacting as much. And I'm going to give you a fun example of a way we did find a way to maintain some connection during this time. You know New

England winters very well, and especially January, which is a really tough time in New England. So one way we found a way to connect and recharge in the month of January, I'm in a group of women oncologists, and we did something called the Winter Warrior Challenge. Every day for the month of January, no matter how cold it was, no matter how much snow was coming down, whatever conditions, we had to get outside and do one mile. You didn't have to run. You could walk it. You could snowshoe it. You could cross-country ski. And then we had a WhatsApp group and we all shared pictures and assured that we are all accountable to each other. And even though we were not together in person, it really was a

fun way to bond. And it actually lifted everyone's spirits during that very challenging time of that winter of January 2021. I love this, of course, because this is building up all the other happiness habits that you've heard on the Happiness Lab, right? Like getting some exercise and getting some behavioral commitments from the other people around you. Like you feel like a dork if you're the one person that doesn't show up for the warrior challenge. But just enforcing that kind of social connection, right? your challenge. But just enforcing that kind of social connection, right? Because I think, again, probably those are people that you saw at work all the time that just because of the strange thing that was COVID, we wind up not being at the same place as we wind up not kind of connecting

with because you're not physically in the same location. And I think we haven't really fully understood the problems that come with remote working and the kinds of things that we're losing. So I love the idea of building in this new ritual that includes exercise and so on. And also just like, cause since I know my listeners don't know you, like Amy is super bad-ass. She runs the Boston marathon like every single year. And so like to be in a warrior group with her is I bet particularly motivating because she's so like hardcore about her fitness and things. Well, it was a lot of fun and it really brought our group together. And especially in January in New England, which is a tough time, no matter what pandemic or no pandemic.

Totally. So that was, I think, you know, the social connection that we get from people at work that we're like missing out on. But I think it's also worth taking a moment post-pandemic to recognize the connections that we got additionally during the pandemic or the things that we saw socially extra. So I'm thinking of like, you know, in the middle of March of 2020, the connections that we got additionally during the pandemic or the things that we saw socially extra. So I'm thinking of like, you know, in the middle of March of 2020, even though my students had taken off and it felt a little bit more lonely than usual on campus, I was like around my husband a lot more like we were kind of trapped together. And I know at the start of the pandemic, Amy, I think your kids were home with you, right? Like you have two kids. And so I think that,

as parents and as families, I think we had a lot more close time or at least many of us who have close family members and spouses had a lot more close time than usual. And I think for a lot of people like that was good. Like that was like better than people expected to just have a little bit more unstructured time with the people you care about. And I think, you know, that was like, you know, March of 2020 or the thick of the pandemic before vaccines and so on. But we might be starting already to take for granted

how good that was, right? Like I know I'm my travel schedules like picking up again and I'm starting to take off more. It's like, wait, how can I build back that structured time with Mark, my husband, where we just like hung out? Or how can you build back that family time so you don't kind of lose that? Is that something you've thought about with your kids a little bit? at family time so you don't kind of lose that. Is that something you've thought about with your kids a little bit? Absolutely. You're so right. It was definitely weird to be home a few days. I'm a doctor. I've never worked from home, but there were some opportunities to see patients using telemedicine, which actually was a really great innovation that really took off during the pandemic. But yeah, it was nice to kind of see my kids upstairs doing virtual school

or not doing virtual school, but in being with my husband a little bit more during the day. So there were some, if we want to use the term sober linings, that was nice to have some quality time at home with the family. Although my husband and I do share an office in our house, and we learned early on, probably that second week of March, that you cannot have two simultaneous Zoom meetings going on in the same room. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing I really want people to take away from the pandemic in terms of social connection is just to remember what we lost and find kind of creative ways to bring it back in. I think especially for people who are still working

remotely, right? We know that there's a lot being lost, the subtle like office cooler conversation, these kinds of things. And so what can you do to build up other kinds of social connection at work? Maybe they need the WhatsApp warrior challenge like you did. You're all welcome to join. You guys are too hardcore. I'm going to have to like, like, well, it's only one mile a day. I feel like that's also nice to like set it so that it's really low. But but yeah, I mean, then think finding other creative ways to bring these kinds of things in or finding ways to like reconnect

with friends and family members, whether it's over Zoom, whether it's on the phone. I think as we kind of go back to normal life, we can forget the lessons we learned. And it's super important to make sure we're building some of these kinds of things in. I definitely agree with you. We received another interesting question

from Christina I from Twitter. Her question is, how can you feel a little bit more normal these days? For me, I still find an overwhelming sense of anxiety by doing any small activities that involve being with people or making eye contact. I never used to be like that pre-pandemic. It feels very strange. Like I'm starting over every day, just trying to get back to regular life things. What do you think about that, Laurie? Well, I think like Christina's in my brain because I feel like I feel this a lot of the time too. I mean, we just, you and I are having this conversation and we just finished doing a big graduation at Yale where I got to

see all my students who'd left in 2020 again. And that was really fun. But I just remember just being so exhausted afterwards. Right. And, you know, graduations are kind of exhausting anyway. But I think what was particularly exhausting is like I just hadn't seen that many people. I hadn't had to have that many conversations. I hadn't didn't have that chance to interact in that way before. And so, yeah, I kind of get it. Like, especially social activities can feel like really exhausting lately and can be kind of trickier. I don't know. Are you getting this back at work?

Because you're back at work a lot more in person. Yeah, I am. But I would say I've noticed it as well, though, certainly in social interactions. Like now, you know, galas are happening again, parties are happening again, you're around a large group of people. And while certainly it's wonderful to be around friends and see people and whether we have a mask on or don't have a mask on, it's just wonderful to be together. But you're right, I do find that it does feel exhausting. It is an adjustment. It's an interesting thing. Maybe a psychologist should study that. I think psychologists are. I mean, I think one thing to remember is

like, you know, it's easy for us to like get out of practice. We're social primates and our brains are built to be social. We're naturally creatures that can process social information, but it's also a lot of information, right? It's processing what people are saying and what their emotional expressions are doing and like tracking multiple conversations at once. And I think it's processing what people are saying and what their emotional expressions are doing and like tracking multiple conversations at once and i think it's worth remembering that that's a big computational task that we get used to over time but you can kind of get out of practice at it and i think the general advice that i would give christina and other people who are going through this is just to have a little bit of like self-compassion you know we talk a lot about self-compassion on the podcast it's just this idea of being kind to yourself to recognize your common humanity. Look, everybody

is going through this. Everybody just went through a global pandemic. Nobody is feeling like socially completely on top of their game right now. You're not alone. And so, you know, this is the kind of thing that I try to do when I'm going through this. I remember even at graduation when I was starting to feel a little overloaded, it was like, okay, what can I take off my plate? Can I take a little bit of a break from this? Can I kind of step away for a second and get my bearings and come back? But most importantly, not to beat yourself up over it. I mean, I think that's the sad but amazing thing is we just kind of expect ourselves to bounce back with no cost from having taken off like two and a half years to take a break

from this stuff. And that's just like not how brains work. That's just not how minds work. I think we just need to allow ourselves to go a little slowly to give ourselves some grace. I mean, I think whenever I'm at one of these big events with lots of people now, you know, I'm like low grade looking for the door of like how to get away or like how to like be socially distanced, right? Like we've been primed to be vigilant and pay attention to social interaction in a different way because, you know, for a while again before masks and so on, it was threatening, right? Like, of course, our brain's just not going to shut off immediately. So far, we've covered what the science says about improving our relationships in a post-pandemic world. But when we get back from the break,

Amy will take me on a deep dive into the second challenge she brought up in her Twitter question, how we can deal with all the challenges that come with returning back to work. We'll tackle some post-pandemic suggestions for improving our well-being on the job when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I can honestly tell you that the past, I guess it's now two years, three months has been like a roller coaster for those working in the healthcare field. And certainly we've really come together to work and care for patients during this extremely difficult time of the pandemic. But recent surveys really looking at levels of burnout among health care workers, those individuals really have worked so hard over

these past two and a half years and faced so many challenges. So it has been a very difficult time. And this is the kind of thing that I think people are trying to address at the highest levels. I know your esteemed classmate who's now the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has talked a lot about this, right? Like he just released another, a big report about kind of burnout in healthcare, right? Yeah. So it was really great to see his report, but he really illustrates all the various layers that are contributing to this significant problem and some of the strategies for how we can address this. And sort of how to think about these recommendations in the context of what so many people are going through.

I think this has been really acute in the context of health care, obviously, burnout and stress and things. But this is the kind of thing that people are facing all over the place. In fact, if I looked at the number of questions we got about jobs and burnout and stress and how to deal with that post-pandemic, that was the biggest set that we got. But in part because you're here as a healthcare person, I wanted to read one question in particular, or actually I wanted you to read one question in particular because you're me today, by one listener that we had over Twitter, Maria Alejandro. Maria Alejandro. Okay. I feel like burnout was a very common experience over these past two years. We experienced the fear of getting sick, losing loved ones, losing our jobs, seeing others lose work, managing our realities, et cetera. How do we nurture ourselves from this burnout with strategies that are self-honoring? It's an awesome question and a hard question, I think. In fact, if I think to the questions that I've gotten from listeners and the things that I found most hard during the pandemic, actually answering this question of how to deal with burnout has been the hardest one, in part just because like

scientifically in terms of how burnout works, you know, burnout has these like three important components. So one of the components is I think the thing we think most often when we're dealing with burnout, which is exhaustion, but not not necessarily just a physical exhaustion, but an emotional exhaustion. Like you just like simply feel like you cannot handle one more thing going on your plate. Like everything just feels overwhelming. That's kind of emotional exhaustion. The second part is what's known as depersonalization, but it's mostly defined as cynicism. You're just kind of annoyed at the people around you. And I think this came up a lot in the health care field where you talk about people in health care nurses and doctors just being like annoyed

with their patients or just like angry that they have to answer even simple questions with their patients and this this is the kind of thing we saw in the educational field with college professors being just pissed when their students had completely reasonable questions about what's going on or you know this grade that they got on their exam or something like that. That's cynicism when you're just like kind of want to like flip off everybody that you work with, basically. So like not a great thing, but it's something we forget about burnout, but it's that burnout is really this interpersonal sort of problem, too. And then the third part of burnout is what's known as a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Like you just feel like you're not able to do what you want to do in your job anymore. I know I had this a lot

working with college students, you know, when they all got sent home and then we brought them back to do Zoom classes. And there was this deep sense of like, is this really even college? Am I really even giving students what they want? Even if you did your job perfectly, you wouldn't be meeting the mission that you have in your brain about what you're supposed to be doing. And those three things together suck. There are all these scales that you can take to measure how bad burnout is. But ultimately, the way you solve them is sort of twofold. One is that all those things come with a whole host of negative emotions. And those negative emotions are things that we have lots of strategies to tackle, you know, to regulate them and kind of allow those emotions or even do things

like exercise or healthy habits that allow you to get through those things. But a lot of those symptoms of burnout actually come from organizational structure. You know, there might be features of the health care system and how it works and the structure of it that make people feel exhausted or that make people feel like it's hard to be really effective in what you're doing. I think there were definitely features of the way educational systems worked during COVID and what we were able to allow students to do that made it frustrating to work with students that made it difficult to feel like you were making a difference and doing the job that you wanted. And so I think when we're talking about burnout, you know, on this podcast that we can get in this habit of just being like, oh, here are the five strategies you use to get

over it. And I think we can walk through a bunch of strategies we can use to deal with the negative emotions that come from burnout and how you can feel less stressed. But ultimately, I think it's important to recognize that burnout is a little bit different. It really needs to get solved structurally. You know, and it's one of the reasons, you know, it's so exciting to think the Surgeon General is really thinking about this in the healthcare field, right? Because I think he'll be in a unique position to think about, well, what are some structural changes the government and others can be making to healthcare and how it works to kind of make it work better?

I agree 100%. And that's what's so great about his report. I mean, he really lays out specific recommendations, starting at societal and cultural factors, the healthcare system in general, organizational factors, as you note, and sort of the workplace environment. And you're absolutely right. There's so many layers to this, and it's not just one quick fix. You know, I think at the individual level, we're grieving the fact that we feel ineffective. We're feeling frustrated, you know, at the situation that we're facing. We're feeling frustrated at the situation that we're facing,

we're feeling frustrated with the people we work with. And there, I think we have lots of actual strategies to deal with those negative emotions, right? One is just this simple act of remembering that those negative emotions are useful. They're good signposts. They're good signals for how you should be making changes in your life to feel better. I think if you're feeling some of those negative emotions, it means you do need to start thinking about how you relate to your work and how you form your identity. You know, you might need to take a break. You know, this is what I've decided to do next year where I'm taking a year off from my work at Yale just to kind of get a little bit of a distance from what I was doing in terms of that stuff. But I also think that we also have lots of strategies to kind of navigate those negative emotions. And one of the ones we talk about a lot on the podcast is just use your physical body to regulate those negative emotions.

You know, when doctors would ask me, what's one tip I can use to stop feeling so stressed in the middle of the pandemic at work? I would always go back to your breath. You know, we don't we don't have many ways to hack into our fight or flight system. But one good way we do have to hack into that system is through our breath. The simple act of taking a couple of really deep belly breaths, especially through the bellies, you're kind of activating your vagus nerve. You have so much evidence that you're really turning on your rest and digest system. You're giving your body a little bit of a stress break. And as simple as it sounds, it can be really effective. On one of the top floors in the

hospital at Mass General, there's actually a sign that I always stop by it when I see it and just think about it for a second. It says, breathe, you are alive. That's all it says. And I'll usually be in the middle of a very busy day caring for very sick patients. And I try to pause and ponder that and actually breathe. So I love that you pointed that out. And it's so powerful. I mean, just in case the listeners don't know the mechanism, we have this sympathetic nervous system that normally pretty automatic, right? Like it's there if a tiger jumps out at you and you have to like switch, you know, from processing, digesting your food or doing the stuff your body normally does to like dealing with this there urgently and getting out of there. And we don't have many

ways to hack into shutting that fight or flight system off. But our breath really is one of those. Just the simple act of taking a deep breath convinces your body like, oh, no horrible tiger jumping out at you. There can't be that terrible of a threat if you're like really breathing deeply, right? So it's a way to give your body like a hack so that you can turn that chilling out system back on. It can be so, so powerful. And I think in part because so many of these kinds of struggles come up in the healthcare industry, we actually had another question that came up from someone in the healthcare field. Amy, if you want to share it. Yeah. So there's an anonymous question. Can you talk about the

potential impacts of permanent remote work on mental health of workers? Many companies are doing this to save money and that is valid, but curious, how is this going to affect relationships, collaboration, et cetera? What will this do to the long-term wellbeing of people who live alone if they work remotely indefinitely? Yeah, I think this is honestly a super big question that we're only now starting to get good empirical research on, like really specifically testing the mental health and well-being outcomes of remote work, because we haven't done it on the type of scale that we're doing it now after the pandemic. But I think there's real reasons to recognize that this is a huge challenge for people.

Social connection is such an important piece of our happiness. And one thing we know about social connection is we're often blind to how important it is. You know, if you're having a bad day, it can be easy to think, oh, I just want to like hang out solo and like watch TV're not interacting with other people, the more you don't get that quick conversation with a stranger or that short chat with a coworker at your desk. Those things sort of add up over time. In one of my favorite interviews on the podcast, I chatted with my colleague, Nick Epley, who's a professor at the University of Chicago. And he had this really apt metaphor that when you think about happiness, you should think about it as the air in your tire, right? If you have a leaky tire over time and the air is going out, you need to add in, you know, these little behaviors that can pump up your leaky happiness tire.

And one of the behaviors he talks about the most is a quick chat, a quick little bit of social connection and so on. And when I think about my work day, when you're not doing remote work back in the day pre-COVID when everyone was in the office, I think we didn't realize how many tiny infusions of air into our happiness tire we got from social connection. You know, like I'll chat with my office assistant and then I'll see a student in the hallway and then I'll run into a custodial staff worker and I'll chat with a professor colleague. Each one of those tiny things I'm not thinking of as like a moment that's building up my happiness, but in practice they are. And so

I think we haven't fully processed what is it going to mean when we don't have all of those little infusions into our happiness tire. And with remote work, unless you're finding strategic ways to build that stuff back in, you're like not going to get them naturally. And so as we think about remote work, I think that's the most important part is where are you going to get your little subtle infusions of social connection to build these things up? And I think there's ways to get them. Maybe that's when you need your weekend warrior workout, like, you know, Zooming with people. For sure. I really love your comments. And it's also just interesting to reflect on how many Zoom meetings we've had over these past two years. Yeah, I think there's like good and bad about the, you know, Zoom world in which we find

ourselves. I think the good is that there's so much evidence that connecting in real time is the thing that we need for our social connection, right? Obviously, in person is better because we can get touch and we get all the subtle cues. But like, you know, you and I are having this conversation and it feels like we're really connecting, maybe not as connecting as we'll get over wine and drinks at our 20th reunion coming up in a few days. But like, this is pretty good. And it's pretty good because, again, the brain responds in real time to the kinds of social interactions that we have. So that's been really huge is recognizing the kinds of ways we can use these platforms to really socially connect. And that includes at work, too. I think we often use Zoom meetings at work just to like

work and just do a work thing. But we can also find ways to use technology to connect more socially and more informally with the people at work too. Yes, we did a trivia night on Zoom actually. There was a lot of pop culture. So Laurie, I know you would have done amazing. We doctors are not as good at that, but like it was a fun way to connect over Zoom.

And I mean, I would do it again. It was really fun. And that gets us to the final set of challenges that Amy and other listeners wanted us to tackle in this episode about improving happiness in a post-pandemic world. Namely, what lessons has COVID taught us about improving our overall health and happiness? We'll get to those final insights when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. You know, it's weird thinking that we're going back to our 25th reunion, which is kind of this like milestone landmark, but it also feels weird because it feels like there's so many like milestone landmarks that we're going through. You you know Yale just brought back all our students for two commencements we're kind of caught up on

all the graduations we missed out on I feel like we're getting back to like parties and celebrations again like I feel like we have kind of finished the COVID chapter I mean obviously it's not finished and we're all still kind of dealing with it but I feel like we're getting to this sort of end point which comes with the possibility of a fresh start and a new beginning too, that we also don't want to take for granted. Definitely agree. It's really an interesting time and I'm glad we're talking about this. We also got a question that was really specific to this idea of fresh starts and how we can use this better. Would you like to read the second question we got from our listener, Maria Alejandro? I'm all for making our way

through the stages of the pandemic, but how do we recover from the grief we've experienced in a healthy and more authentic way? How do we acknowledge what we've been through and continue to show compassion for each other instead of this rush to just get back to normal? I love Maria's question about this idea of the rush because on the one hand, while I know so much about how we need to grieve what we've gone through and so on. I also get the rush part, too, where it's like, pretend everything's fine. Like, get back to normal. I've missed all this stuff for so long. I just want to, like, pretend it's fine. But at the same time, like, we're all struggling. Like, I imagine this is so palatable in the healthcare field, right? Where it's like, hang on, time out. This has sucked. We need a break. Yes, I definitely agree. I think a lot of us are now really pondering what we've just been through and how are we going to continue to move forward? And it is really a challenging time to think about that too. This was something that I saw firsthand. So

at Yale, we just finally brought back the class of 2020, which is the college student class that got unceremoniously kicked out in March of 2020. Like they just got kicked off campus for two years. They didn't get to come back or see their friends. And they all came back and it was amazing and it was super fun. But, you know, it made me realize how little we'd process the trauma. I had all these side conversations with students about how much it sucked or how much they missed home. And I think they were seeing it firsthand when they got back to campus. You know, they get to they get to stay on campus in their old rooms and they'd be showering and burst into tears because they're like, oh, my gosh, I just left the shower out of

nowhere. You know, it sounds so silly, but I think there's all these tiny things we've lost in addition to the things we've lost lost and i think the way to deal with that is really take some explicit time out to process this stuff there's so much evidence that we need to actually grieve we can't just like shove our emotions away and pretend that they're going to be fine there's some lovely work by the stanford neuroscientist james gross and his colleagues showing that when you have negative emotions our assumption is like oh we can just stuff can just stuff them down. But in practice, that just like simply doesn't work. James Gross does these lovely tasks where he has his subjects watch a little short video that's like sad, you know, so subject comes into the lab, they watch some sad YouTube video, and he tells his

subjects, whatever you do, don't feel sad, just like pretend it's fine. Then he has his subjects do some like, you know, thinking task or some memory task. And what he finds is like people perform terribly, right? Like they do worse on a memory task. They do worse on a risk taking task. And then also if you measure people's heart processing, they actually show signs of like cardiac stress, even in just in this really short laboratory task where you're suppressing this emotion. And so like if that happens when you're suppressing like your emotions about some dumb YouTube video, imagine what is happening, not just after the pandemic. We're in the midst of like fighting racial violence and climate change and war in Europe, right?

There's just like a lot of tragedy and bad stuff that's happening around us. And the move of just like pretend it's not happening, just like move on with your life. It's ultimately not going to work in the way we think. I think the advice is really to give yourself some space to process this stuff. This was something that I did personally, especially after the 2020 students got back. I think I didn't realize how much I miss them and how much it sucked to lose them and to lose my community. Like I just spent some time like going for walks and just like letting myself cry when like no one was around. And it felt indulgent, but honestly afterwards it felt like, you know, afterwards it felt like,

you know, I let out some of those emotions that were in the pressure cooker that I really needed to let out. I'm so glad you did that. I don't know if the same advice is happening in the healthcare field, if this is the kind of thing doctors and nurses are doing to process some of their negative emotions too. Honestly, I think we could be doing a lot more of what you're recommending because I think we're still on this roller coaster. At work, we're still extremely careful, wearing masks all the time. We're still facing COVID infections amongst our colleagues or our patients, of course. And so we're still on the roller coaster. But I think what you're stating right now is so important. I think we can really learn from that and have some time to really process, honestly,

what we've been through because it's been crazy. And I think one thing really learn from that and have some time to really process, honestly, what we've been through because it's been crazy. And I think one thing we forget is that, you know, I mean, obviously grief takes a long time. You know, we've talked about that on the podcast, but I think there can be these tiny spaces where we allow ourselves to process negative emotions. We did a podcast episode a while back with the meditation teacher Tara Brock, who's amazing. And she had this lovely process of

meditation where you sort of recognize and deal with your negative emotions, which goes under the acronym of RAIN. RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And it's just a process that you can do over 10 minutes where you just sit with and recognize your emotions, allow them, you know, let them take their course and investigate what they're doing in your body as they do that. And then you take time to nurture yourself. And the reason I bring it up is, again, it's a process. You have to take the time, you have to put the work in to do it. But, you know, it takes like 10 and 15 minutes, you know, in the 10 and 15 minutes that we're, you know, scrolling through some scary news, you can take time to sit with a little bit of the sadness that you have or the frustration that you have. You know, like all the things we talk about in the podcast, you have to actually sit down and do

them and you have to commit to them, which doesn't seem like super fun. It's easier to distract yourself and get some little dopamine hit from your social media. But if you give yourself the space to process that stuff, you can process it and you can actually get through it and do better. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I think that's great advice. And certainly I share those types of recommendations with my patients as well, because it's really excellent advice. Final thing I want to end with is that, you know, I think as we think about this, this nasty and awful time, which it was awful and nasty, and it's worth recognizing, like just how much it sucked. I think another thing we forget, though, is that like these awful times can really build us up in ways we don't expect. It was really at the start of the pandemic that I started to like learn more about the work on what's called post-traumatic growth.

cause all these negative consequences. But there's also lots of evidence for what's called post-traumatic growth, which is like after some nasty event, you feel better, you feel more resilient, you feel stronger. In many cases, you feel more socially connected. Post-traumatic growth is often talked about in the context of really scary medical diagnoses, right? Like a cancer diagnosis, obviously no one would want that. But I'm sure as an oncologist, you've also seen that people sometimes respond with feeling like,. If I can get through this, I can get through anything like they write these deeper social connections and so on. And so I think we have to not forget the power of our psychological immune system, that even in the midst of really bad stuff, we can start to feel better with the right strategies. I love that. I'm so glad that

you brought up that concept because I've recently been learning more about post-traumatic growth as well. And I fully agree. It certainly applies to all of us who have lived through this very challenging time of the pandemic, but also it's a strategy that I do talk about with my patients as well. I mean, again, I agree with you. Nobody wants a diagnosis of cancer, but after a diagnosis of cancer, sometimes it is an opportunity for an individual to really question like, what is important to me? How do I want to move forward? What are changes I might want to make in my life with my job to continue to move forward? And I

think it's a really powerful concept. I think this is a really nice spot for us to end because if all of us took this yucky, terrible time in the pandemic to think about exactly those changes we want to make. What are the changes we want to make for our health in terms of our job, in terms of the way we live our life, in terms of the strategies that we use to navigate our day-to-day lives? You know, if all of us asked that question really seriously and put in some new strategies intentionally, I think we could all be healthier and happier and use this moment as like a really good fresh start rather than just like a nasty time that we're all getting through. And so it's a nice way that we can all harness the

pandemic to help our health and our happiness. Amy, you're the best podcast host. You should just like take over the happiness lab. You're amazing. I just could listen to Dr. Laurie Santos all day. Huge thanks to my longtime friend and former lab buddy, Dr. Amy Commander, for submitting such a great question and for doing such a fabulous job as our inaugural guest host. That's a wrap for the Happiness Lab Listener's Questions Special Edition, but we'd still love to hear from you. So keep sending in your questions and all your ideas for new episodes. We'll be back in September with a full season of new shows. We'll be tackling topics like how to handle regret, how to become happier parents,

and how to use our environment to boost our mood. Until then, stay safe and stay happy. 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, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Grant 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, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.