The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - What We Still Get Wrong About Happiness (Live at Dartmouth)

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

In this special live episode, Dr. Laurie takes the stage at Dartmouth College for a conversation with happiness historian Darrin McMahon. Together, they break down some of the biggest misconceptions about happiness in modern life, discuss the most effective (and often counterintuitive) ways to improve our wellbeing, and explore how smartphones, AI, and other new technologies may shape happiness in the years ahead. Experts Mentioned:  Darrin McMahon, Professor of History at Dartmouth College Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania Lorraine Siggins, Director Emeritus of Mental Health and Counseling for Students at Yale Health Ashley Whillans, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside Carey Morewedge, Chair of the Marketing Department at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business Gabriele Oettingen, Professor of Psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg David Blanchflower, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership and Professor of Business & Society at New York University Stern School of Business Elizabeth Dunn, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia Manoush Zomorodi, journalist, podcast host, and author Robert Putnam, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Harvard University Kostadin Kushlev, Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University Catherine Price, journalist and author  Michael Inzlicht, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment in the Rotman School of Management Adam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher Erzo Luttmer, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science and Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford Resources Mentioned:  The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, by Charles Darwin (1871) “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010) “Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved,” by Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbra Mellers Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, by Ashley Whillans (2020) The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, by Sonja Lyubomirsky (2007) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt (2006) “Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption,” by Carey K Morewedge, Young Eun Huh, and Joachim Vosgerau (Science, 2010) Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, by Gabriele Oettingen (2014) “Declining Life Satisfaction and Happiness Among Young Adults in Six English-Speaking Countries,” by Jean Twenge and David Blanchflower (NBER Working Paper Series, 2025) “Smartphones Reduce Smiles Between Strangers,” by Kostadin Kushlev, John Hunter, Jason Proulx, Sarah Pressman, and Elizabeth Dunn (Computers in Human Behavior, 2019) Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being, by Manoush Zomorodi (2026) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam (2000) Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, by Juliet Schor (2025) “Do Happy People Care About Society’s Problems?,” by Kostadin Kushlev, Danielle M. Drummond, Samantha J. Heintzelman, and Ed Diener (The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2019) “When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists,” by Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith (1759) “Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being,” by Erzo Luttmer (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005) How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, by Catherine Price (2018) “How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa?”, by Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn (Psychological Science, 2026) “Effort Feels Meaningful,” by Michael Inzlicht and Aidan Campbell (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022) Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward (2025) “Alysa Liu: ‘If I Didn’t Hit Rock Bottom, I Could Not Have Gone Up’,” by Alex Morris (Rolling Stone, 2026) Related Episodes:  “Why the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Is a Bad Idea” “What Screen Time Is Really Doing to Your Body with Manoush Zomorodi” “What is Social Media Doing to Kids? with Dr. Jean Twenge” “Take a Three-Day Weekend Without Losing Any Pay (with Juliet Schor)” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. We're taking a break from our Happiness Hot Take series to bring you a special treat. If you listen to last week's episode, you know that I recently got to interview

happiness historian Darren McMahon, who told me all about the history of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Well, in this episode, I'll be continuing my conversation with Darren, but this time he'll be interviewing me. You'll get to hear a live conversation that we had at Darren's home institution of Dartmouth College

as part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth's public conversations on the pursuit of happiness. We talked about all things happiness science, like what practices we can do to really feel better and some thoughts I've had about new technologies and AI. It was a wide-ranging and super fun conversation, so I couldn't wait to share it with all my podcast fans. So enjoy this special episode of my conversation with Darren McMahon at Dartmouth College. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,

leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. This is the second in our series on the willing of the pursuit of happiness, both in the past and the present and maybe the future. Today we have Lori Santos, and I'm just delighted to have you here, Lori. Last week, Lori very kindly invited me to be on the podcast and to talk about happiness in the 18th century.

Today, I think we're going to talk about the pursuit of happiness in the 21st, but feel free to bring history into it if you feel so moved. Oh, yeah, we're going forefathers. So Lori is known as an authority on the science of happiness and pursuit of happiness, but you cut your teeth as a psychologist and researcher studying animal behavior, I think particularly dogs. And I'd love to hear, I mean, I get as a dog lover the link between dogs and the pursuit of happiness, but I'd love to hear. if there's a link between the study of animals and the pursuit of happiness or how you got from one to the other? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest link between animals and happiness is that animals, definitely dogs make us really happy. They keep us moving.

They make us mindful. Lots of evidence showing that dog owners are happier. So if you need one quick happiness tip, get a dog, so make you happy. Not a cat. Not a cat's, too. Less research on cats, interestingly, but definitely cats make you happier as well. But I think the psychological connection is one of the reasons I was studying animals is that I've long interested in the kinds of ways that our minds lead us astray. Most people study animals to try to

figure out whether or not animals are as smart as humans, but I spent a lot of my time studying whether or not animals were as dumb as people were in some of the ways that people are dumb. I did this with monkeys studying the economic errors that we have and trying to see whether monkeys show those two. With dogs, we were really focused on social errors. Do dogs imitate to the point that they're doing really irrational things in some of the same ways as humans do? And the connection between that and the happiness work is that my take on happiness has always been that one of the reasons we're not as happy as we can be isn't that we're not working towards it. We're working very hard towards becoming happier, but we're often doing it in the wrong way because our minds are

lying to us about the kinds of things that we need to do to be happier. And so in some ways, this work on animals, which is really about what it is that makes our minds go awry, it's very similar to the way I think about happiness. That's so interesting. Is there actually work on the well-being of animals? I always point out that Darwin, and writes about, you know, some horses that are sort of ill-tempered and some that are cheery, and he begins to speculate along those lines. And I don't know if there's actual work in the lab. Yeah, there's lots of work trying to look at what animals feel, right? This is really important even for animal researchers who are trying to make animals' lives better and thinking about animal

welfare and so on. The problem with animals and thinking about animal happiness is that the way I know, even if you, Darren, are happy, is that I ask you, often in some very formalized psychometric survey where I ask you about your life experiences and your life satisfaction and so on. But ultimately, I don't really have a way objectively to find out if you're happy. You have to tell me. And the problem with animals is as much as we ask them,

they tend not to tell us directly. Lacking verbal language, it's really hard for us to find out whether or not animals are happy. And so I think that's been the main limitation of why there's not a whole field of animal well-being research that's as robust as the research in humans is very hard for them to tell us.

But if I know a psychologist, that won't stop them. That's true. That's true. So you begin with animals, and then I think it's in 2018, you launched this great course, the psychology and the good life. I'm sure you've answered this a million times, but I'm curious how that came about. Had you taught on well-being prior to that point? What was the impetus? And then I'd be particularly interested to know how the course has changed as you've taught it, because I believe you're still teaching it now. Yeah, that's right. The pivot to thinking about well-being came with a pivot in my role at Yale. So for most of my time at Yale, I was a professor. at the front of a classroom, much like this. I interacted a lot with students, but I was a little bit distant from them. I was kind of teaching them, but didn't really see closely what was happening in student life.

That all changed when I became what's called the head of college on Yale's campus. These are faculty members who live functionally in the dorm communities with students. Yale is kind of like one of these weird colleges like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's like Gryffindor and Slytherin,

these like mini colleges within a college. I was head of Silliman College, no relation to Slytherin, even though it sounds very similar. But that meant that as a faculty member, I for the first time was seeing student life really closely. I was eating the students in the dining hall. I was hanging out with them in the coffee shop.

And I just didn't like what I was seeing. Like I was seeing this so-called college student mental health crisis up close and personal, where the stats, what I first started, were that in 2018, more than 40% of college students reported to being too depressed to function most days, not just Yale students, but nationally. more than 60% said that they were overwhelmingly anxious.

More than one in 10 had seriously considered suicide in the last six months. This was a staggering amount of suffering that was happening on campus, and it was happening in my community, right? I'm this benevolent aunt who's hanging out with students trying to make this community great, and I was just watching my students suffer from panic attacks or worse. And that made me really questioned what my institution was doing in terms of mental health. I was kind of like, you know, we as faculty members assume, that you students are learning, you know, computer science or Chaucer or whatever we're teaching you.

And how can that be true if more than two-thirds of you are too anxious to function most days? Or if you or your teammate or your roommate is seriously considering suicide, it just seemed like there was this disconnect between what we were expecting students to be learning and the real level of suffering that I was seeing in the community. And so I was just like, I have to take action. And being a nerdy psychologist, they were limited ways that I could take action, but I could teach a new class. And I had already had a little bit of experience in this field of happiness science

or what psychologists call positive psychology. I had done some work with Marty Seligman, who's often thought of as like the leader of the field. So I had a bit of background in it. And so I thought, you know, let me just teach a new intro class. I'll just make a new class about this stuff. But the difference with this class that I was teaching is that I wanted it to be practical. I wanted it to be a skills learning class where students were learning strategies they could

use if they were feeling burned out or stressed and so on. It was a new class on campus, though, so I thought I'd show up and 40 students would be in a classroom, which is typical for a Yale psych class. I did not expect the only place to teach it on campus would be our concert hall. There was also the football stadium, but to be fair, January football stadium was not an awesome spot to teach a twice a week class. Yeah. Yeah, so that's the history. It really came out of seeing this need on campus and recognizing that we as, I don't know, university president felt like we weren't doing our job. We were just like pretending it was fine and kind of holding it aside, and I really wanted to give student skills they could use. So interesting. It's funny. My late godfather

was close friends with Lorraine Siggins, who was director of mental health at Yale for years. And I remember Lorraine saying at one point, her office was seeing more than half the undergraduates, and that one had told her that he had mortgaged his childhood in order to get into Yale. And, you know, that realization of the stress that we put our young people through and the stress they take on, it's just overwhelming. You know, you make a point that I often try to highlight, and that is that all this talk about happiness in the news and, you know, elsewhere, it's not necessarily a good sign, right? It reflects a kind of underlying anxiety and unhappiness, which I think says a lot about our time. Has that course changed? I mean, so that's the initial impetus, but has it evolved?

Have things gotten better? Yeah, a bit. One of the things that's changed is the focus that I've had, Right. The nice thing about having a quarter of the entire Yale student body in your classroom is that you can see what works, what they resonate with and what's working less well. One of the things I consistently hear from my students about the stuff that they take away with them in the course, what I'm most interested in is like, what are the strategies you're going to use? You heard about all these different strategies, kind of menu of different tools you can use to feel better, which are you actually using? Which are you putting into effect in your own life? And the ones I consistently heard that students were using all the time were strategies that we had to regulate. and navigate self-talk, right? The stuff in your head. I'm not good enough.

I'm screwing up. I should be doing more. That like hustle culture voice that's out there in society that gets embedded in your head. That's the thing that I think my students needed some help with. And so we talk a lot about strategies

you can use to gain more self-compassion, strategies you can use to get some psychological distance from the problems that are coming up in your life. And those were the tools that I think my students were using more and more. And so the class has shifted to focus more on some of those things. I think when people classically hear about the work in positive psychology, they hear things like meditate or write in your gratitude journal. And those things are great.

But I think what my students really needed help with was like, when I'm beating myself up, how can I talk to myself in a healthier way? And those really resonated. So some basic cognitive behavioral therapy, basically. I mean, what we do in the class really is the kind of skills building that you learn with a good therapist, right? Cognitive behavior therapy is really changing your thought patterns, changing your relationship to your thought patterns, finding ways to regulate your emotions better. That's functionally the tools that we're teaching in a classroom. And I think that's important.

It is the case that sometimes for certain issues in life, you need a one-on-one therapy session to gain these skills. But these skills are also, I don't want to say they're not hard because they're hard to put into effect in the moment, but they're pretty straightforward. And this is one of the insights that I've had teaching this stuff is like, we should be teaching this stuff earlier and earlier because none of this stuff is rocket science. Like these basic emotion regulation strategies are ones that I think we should be teaching definitely in middle school, but maybe even earlier. I mean, Yale's done wonderful work introducing these kind of emotional skill building into

elementary schools, right? And I think it can come earlier and earlier. There's been so many cool opportunities that came from teaching this course that I didn't expect. But one of the most cool ones was that I got to work with Sesame Workshop, which is the group that runs Sesame Street, and think about how we can get these strategies out to little, little kids. And what I realize is like, oh my gosh, I mean, one of the strategies I teach students is this idea of affect labeling, which is like, just give a label to what you're feeling. I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling lonely, whatever it is.

A word can help you get some insight into exactly what you're feeling. and it can also help you get some insight into how to fix it. The fix for when you're feeling lonely is totally different than the fix for when you're feeling overwhelmed. But if you're just like, I don't feel good, then you don't know what to do. But that's a strategy that you can teach a three to five year old. Maybe not with big words like overwhelmed and frustrated, but you can try. In fact, Elmo was teaching kids about frustrated.

That was one of the words that Elmo was learning. So it's like if we could just get that stuff in earlier, we'd be giving people tools they could use. Well, you know, my five-year-old daughter then taught me, and I got that education. A little late, perhaps, but still got it nonetheless, so thank you. We human beings are really bad at knowing what will make us happy, and we make bad choices accordingly. And you, lawyer, not shy at all at pointing out what people do wrong in terms of pursuing happiness. And, you know, while we have you, can you give us a few quick tips on what not to do?

Yeah, because I'm staring out at a bunch of undergrads, it looks like I'll give the one that my college students get wrong the most, which is the connection. between money and happiness. Most of you are here at a place like Dartmouth College because you want to like earn a lot of money later on. And turns out there is a connection between money and happiness, but that connection only exists if you really don't have any money. If you are currently living below the poverty line and I give you more money, yes, that's going to make your life a lot easier. You will be happier. But this connection between money and happiness seems to level off. Researchers fight about exactly where it levels off back in a very

famous paper in 2010, folks thought it leveled off around $75,000 U.S. dollars in modern day money, that probably is an equivalent of like $110,000. People fight about whether the slope after that point is totally flat or whether it goes up a minuscule amount over time. But the point is like, it just isn't helping your happiness that much to get more money after a certain point. And that's one that I just feel like is so hard to take into account. I'm looking at a room of students that I imagine some of you are seniors and thinking about different job offers, maybe you're lucky enough to have multiple ones. And my guess is the first thing you look at is what's the salary. And you're twiddling about like, ooh, which one should I pick and maybe I'll get

$5,000 extra dollars or whatever? And it's just not going to matter at all. What will matter, what is your social connection going to look like at work? One of the biggest predictors of happiness overall and happiness at work is that yes or no answer to the question, do you have a best friend at work? Another big predictor of your happiness at work is whether or not you have a lot of free time. This is some lovely work by Ashley Willens at Harvard Business School on the power of what's called time affluence, the sense that you feel wealthy in time. So much more important to have time wealth than monetary wealth. Even interestingly at lower incomes, actually, because we're talking with so many folks at public policy here, Ashley's pushed the policy

that one way to solve the kind of happiness crisis and so many other crises that come up in low income populations is actually to give low income individuals more time back, right? Because if you're thinking about what happens if you're low income, you're driving Uber, or maybe you don't even have a car, so you're commuting two hours to work and so on. If we could solve the time crisis, we might actually help them psychologically and maybe even monetarily down the line too. But this isn't how we think. We're not like, if I want to be happier, let me find a life that gives me lots more time. We're just like money, money, money, achievement, achievement, and it's not going to move the needle in the way we think. So money, not unimportant, but not as important as people think.

It's so insidious for the way our mind works, right? Because it is important for a while. Like if you're undergrad and you're not making any money, or like me when I was like a poor grad student, it was the case that, you know, in grad school I was earning enough that I was not below the poverty line, but more money was definitely making me happier. I wasn't at that threshold yet.

So you learn that reward relationship. You're like, oh my gosh, more money, more happy. But then when it levels off, you stop realizing that that's the case. And so what happens when you're getting more money and it's not moving the needle? You don't think, oh, I must have been wrong about that relationship between money and happiness. You just think, oh, I was wrong about the amount of money I need. I need way more money to be happy. In fact, one of my favorite surveys, this is Sonia Lubomerski cites this in her book is you ask people who are earning $30,000, you know, is that enough to be happy?

You know, is that enough to be happy? Those folks say no. They say, okay, what amount of money would you earn that? Like, if you were getting that amount, you'd just be happy. And this was years ago, but folks that earning $30,000 say, well, if I could just get $50,000, then I'd just be happy. I wouldn't ever need another penny more. But you do the same survey with people who are earning $100,000.

You ask them, is that enough? They say, no. You say, how much do you need? Those folks say, I need $250,000 to be happy. Now, I'm looking at smart Dartmouth students who can do the math in their head, and you realize, wait, it's not like you get there. It's like the ratio, the difference between what you think you need and what you have is going up as you get more money.

It's not going less, right? And so I think this is the insidious thing. about money is we don't realize like, oh, I was wrong. It must be something else that I need. We think, like, it's still money. I just need way more than I think. It's time to take a quick break. But Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. So pursuing happiness through money maybe doesn't quite work. That's one of the wrong pursuits, right? What should we be doing? How should we pursue happiness? Well, here's one that I think

with your focus on the 18th century, you will love, which is another thing we get wrong about happiness is we think happiness is about us. It's about me, me, me. And I think this is especially true in the modern individualist culture where we find ourselves. And at a school like this, to be honest, many of you students are here because you focused on your studies and what you needed and getting your stuff up. It wasn't, what are you doing to help the country? What are you doing to help the world? What are you doing to help your brothers and sisters? It was like you, you, you, And the research just consistently shows us that this is not the path to happiness. And I think this is something that modern culture gets so wrong.

If you go on TikTok, you will see somewhere something about self-care or treat yourself or me, me, me, right? But if you look at the happiness research, that's just not what predicts people's happiness. Happiness is about being other-oriented. So controlled for income people who donate more money to charity are happier than those who self-report not donating anything. Same with volunteering for your time, controlling, for the amount of free time you have.

It just seems like doing stuff for others makes you happier. Those are correlations. You could be like, well, maybe it's that you're doing nice stuff for other people makes you happy, but it could also be that just if you're happy, you do nice stuff for other people. And we know that's an effect. It's what's called the feel good, do good effect. If you're like in a good mood, you want doing nicer stuff for other people.

But there are also studies that, you know, they're very cute. They force people to do nice stuff for others. And then they test what happens to your happiness. And what you find is that even when you're forced to do something nice for other people, you wind up feeling better after doing that. And so I think this is one that we consistently get wrong in the modern day. And as I said, Darren, this is one that I think you'll appreciate because of the forefathers, you know, they were good about individual pleasure,

but they also got that even just the whole concept of happiness was about everybody's happiness. And this is something we really miss today. Yeah, one thing that comes very clear is when people in the 18th century talk about the pursuit of happiness, they don't mean the pursuit of quanta of pleasure. They mean the pursuit of a life well lived. In order to sort of access that, they draw really deeply on wisdom traditions. So in their case, Greek and Roman philosophy,

as well as religious traditions, right? And while you were speaking, I was thinking of that wonderful Chinese proverb, and I won't get it quite right, but it's something to the fact that if you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap, if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing, and if you want to be happy for a lifetime,

then help others. And that gets at the way in which so many of the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions have, you know, deep lessons about how to pursue happiness embedded in them. And I've heard you say a little bit like John Haidt, who talks about the kind of modern truth and ancient wisdom, that, you know, much of what positive psychologists do is to reaffirm or validate insights that we've already known, but they've just put a modern kind of scientific imprimatur on them, which is important, but nonetheless the knowledge itself may not be new. Yeah. And I think that that's a really important

thing to do, right? I think my scientist hat sometimes is embarrassed, right? Because it's like we positive psychologists and psychologists and behavioral scientists in general have got out and tested all these things that scholars have been talking about, you know, since the time of Aristotle. We're like, oh my gosh, it turns out that habits really good to form. We're doing nice things for other people. It makes you happy. Mindfulness and being present. That's awesome. Folks have been saying that for like thousands of years. And so on the one hand, it's like, really? This is the modern science. is like you're just showing us what these folks were saying forever that's now true. But I think it's important to do because it didn't necessarily have to be that way.

And sometimes the ancient traditions were just wrong. Right. Think of your favorite ancient tradition. You'll realize some of it we just don't really subscribe to in the same way today. And so I think that that stuff is really important is asking the question, are we doing it right? And sometimes when we look, we realize we're doing it wrong. This one isn't so much an ancient tradition, but it's another thing that's really popular. in the culture right now. It just drives me so crazy is the TikTok trend about manifesting.

The undergrads are nodding. Like, oh, I'm just going to like, I want to get good grades this semester, so I'm just going to manifest it. I'm just going to envision it, right? Turns out it's not just that manifesting is neutral or that it doesn't work. It actively causes the thing that you want to get further away. How does it do that? What does that through a funny trick of the mind. It does that through the way your mind images different rewards and the way your rewards system work. So let's say I want to get fit, right? This is something I've been thinking about. I've been trying to go with my trainer, go once a week. I want to get a little bit fiter, right? So I manifest, I think, like, oh, how awesome it would be if I was fit. Oh, my gosh, my clothes would

fit better and, like, I have stronger muscles. What I'm doing there is I'm vividly imagining that I've already gotten the reward, that I've already put in all the work I need to put in, and I have that good thing already. And a funny thing about our minds is like, when we image stuff really closely, there's part of our brain that thinks we already got that. It's a wonderful study by Carrie Morweg and colleagues that test this directly with food. He either has you imagine carefully putting quarters into a slot like you're going to do your laundry or imagine slowly eating one M&M at a time. And you do this for a while. And then the experiment is that you come out and there's a bowl of M&Ms. And the question is, how many M&Ms do you eat? And what you find is

when you've already imagined really carefully eating all these M&Ms, the last thing you want to do is eat more M&Ms. You kind of have envisioned what that reward would feel like, so you don't need it anymore. You don't need to take the action to get it. And research by Gabriel Oettingen and colleague finds that the same thing happens with manifesting. If you manifest, oh my gosh, I want to get great grades, part of your brain thinks you got those great grades. So you don't take as much time to study. You don't work as hard. She finds that students who manifest getting fitter actually go to the gym less often. So it's not just that manifesting is like, oh, it doesn't work. It's like this woo-woo thing. It's actively bad. But the good thing is that there's a way you can do it better.

Gabriel Oettingham shows how this works, which is just in addition to kind of thinking very vividly about the reward, you also think, hmm, what are the obstacles that are getting me to that reward? And you imagine that. And you're like, oh, I don't have gym shorts, or I like don't have my books to study, or like there's four parties this weekend. I'm not going to have time to read the book I need to read, that causes you to think about how you can overcome those obstacles. You can use manifesting well. It's just that like the TikTok version drives us so straight. And so the whole point of that is that it is the case that sometimes science goes out and they study things that are out there in the public ether that scholars have been thinking about for a while and they're like, yep,

everybody was right. But sometimes we look and we realize that the popular wisdom is just wrong. And that's where I think science can help us get on a better path. That's wonderful. And that's a perfect segue to where we're willing to go next. This last autumn in October, Professor Danny Blanchflower, who is here in the audience, and colleagues put together this wonderful conference with the United Nations around the crisis in youth well-being. And as Danny has shown and others like Gene Twangy and John Hight, who are also at the conference, that crisis is real. And moreover, it shows up in the data right at the same time that the cell phone becomes kind of broadly accessible.

And so I'm wondering if you might want to comment, and I'm hoping you're not sponsored by META. I'm hoping we're not sponsored by META. I don't think we have met a sponsorship, but yes. So I think it's important when talking about technology and social media and cell phones and how they're affecting our well-being to remember that cell phones are just a tool. It's just a technology. We could use it in all kinds of different ways. We could use our phones to call a friend, to donate money to a good cause, to do a meditation app.

It could be used for good stuff. It's just the problem is we don't tend to use it for good stuff. Basically, all the different strategies I talk about about how to feel happier, if you look at how we tend to use technology, it leads us astray. Let's take the one that I find most ironic, which is social connection. Every available study of happy people suggest that happy people are more social. Quickest intervention, other than getting a dog you could do to be happier is to get a friend or talk to a human or be socially connected in any way. Our phones were built to literally do that. It's a phone.

The whole purpose of a phone is to call someone. How do we normally spend it, staring at it while ignoring the people in real life around us? Deep irony that these tools that were meant to help us connect often help us not connect. And there's some lovely work by folks like Liz Dunn and others showing just how much phones steal our attention when we're around other people. Liz does this lovely study where she puts people in a waiting room. Imagine Darren and I who are sitting up on the stage. We're in a waiting room together. We could just chat with each other.

But if we have our phones out, what are we going to do? we're not going to chat with one another. We're going to look at our phones. And Liz just does this clever study where she measures how much smiling happens between people in a room together. You know, maybe the basic, tiniest unit of social connection. And she finds like a 30% reduction in smiling when people have their phones available to them in this waiting room, right? Imagine that 30% multiplied by our whole society walking around on campus and this kind of stuff. So we socially connect less.

Another big one, especially for young people, you sleep less because you have your technology out. I think the most evil thing cell phone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in cell phones because it gives us an excuse to have it right near us in bed. And then when we wake up in the middle of the night, we look at it and we are tempted by it and so on. I think it also makes us way less present over time. But mindfulness, kind of noticing where you are, just being in your space, so much evidence that this boosts our happiness. We never have moments to be mindful. You know, probably even some of you walking over here, Darren, you and I are talking on this beautiful spring day where Dartmouth's campus is just gorgeous right now. guessing some of you didn't even notice that. Why? Because you were staring at whatever was going on in your phone, right? Not to mention all the anxiety provoking information about the news and everything else. So it's just a technology. It's just one that we tend to use in ways that make us miserable. And the coolest finding that I've heard most recently, this actually I learned on a podcast with Mamush Zamorudi, who's a journalist who has been thinking a lot about the effects of technology in the ways people typically thought about attention and all this stuff. But recently, she's

She's become interested in the way technology shapes our physical body, not like what we're thinking in our mental health, but our physical health. And she talks about research showing this connection between our core muscles and our adrenal glands, like our stress system. And if you think of the way we often sit when we are on our phone, I will demonstrate for those of you who are not on your phone right now, it is like this. It is in what I'm hunching over in what's called the cashew posture. it turns out that this is a posture that is literally stimulating our stress system. Zomarudi actually claims that maybe a lot of the mental health crisis that we are getting with our phones is actually just the way we're sitting in our physical bodies and our physical presence.

So everyone in the room right now is now straightening up and getting into the right position. But yeah, she argues that we might be able to solve some of this if we think about the way technology is changing our very posture. Neither of us are policy people. I'm a historian. You're a psychologist, and yet we're here under the auspices of the Rockefeller Center of Public Policy. Our director is right here. I feel obligated to ask a question about public policy. You were advisor to a king for the day. What would you tell them about things we could do at the macro level to improve well-being in the United States? I'm so glad you asked me that because sometimes a lot of this work comes off as saying the following thing. Here are these strategies you can use as individuals to feel. happier right in your gratitude journal, you know, use these self-talk strategies. And that's it. Good.

We can ignore the fact that there's many structures around us in governments and companies and institutions that are actively making it harder to be happier. And I think that that's just a misnomer. It is the case that we can use individual strategies to get happier, but it would be so much easier to employ those individual strategies if we had the institutions and governments around us helping us. And we as psychologists don't often get to pontificate about that. So I'm excited to pontificate about that.

What do we know about the policy implications of what we've learned in happiness? We talked about this connection between money and happiness, where money after a certain level doesn't make you happy, but money under a certain level really, really, really doesn't make you happy. I think the happiness science is super clear about the powerful impact that a universal basic income could have on both levels. If you give low-income people more money, it will necessarily make them happy. if you have to tax higher income people to get that money, it's going to have absolutely no effect on their happiness. It's just super, super clear.

Another big policy implication is that social connection really matters for happiness. I think there's many ways that public policy can influence social connection. Here I'm channeling great folks like Robert Putnam and others who've long talked about the power of things like third spaces, literal spaces that aren't work or school or something or home, places where you can get together with other people. These are things that governments can do is just make it easier for people to have these spaces. And in empirical cases where people have done that, we've seen huge impacts in terms of more connection, more happiness.

But I think even like more conversations across the political line, which can help a lot. Finally, we talked a lot about the power of time and the importance of time affluence. I think this is a lever that public policy can use that it often doesn't think about because we forget the importance of time. but even things like a four-day work week, which even economists are now telling us, wow, four-day work week makes workers more productive. They get more of the bottom-line stuff done and they also have time to rest and do other things can be super powerful. Finally, I'll say that I think one of the things we forget is that being happy leads to doing

nice things for others and kind of doing what the forefathers wanted, which is like being good in terms of your civic life, living a good life not for yourself but for everyone else. There's lots of new work just showing that a really great way to get people to fight for what's good in the world to fix the structures around them is just to make sure they're in a positive mood and feeling happier. This is some lovely work by Kushcheleff at Georgetown that asks the question of, well, who's going out and like doing the stuff? Who's going to like climate protests or he was doing this work around the time of the Black Lives

Matter? And he's like, who's going to those protests and like fighting for social justice? And what he finds is it's not what you think. You might assume, like, who's going to a climate protest? It must be somebody who's really anxious about climate. Turns out, no, the people who are least anxious, the people who have the most positive mood. They're the ones getting out to do this stuff.

And in some ways, you didn't need to know that study to know that fact. Like, if you think of when you're just feeling overwhelmed and in a really bad space, you're not out there trying to fix the world. You're just, like, trying to deal. But it does mean that this connection between individual happiness and civic happiness is an important one. But if we give people the tools and the skills to promote their individual happiness, it's going to give them the bandwidth to fix the bigger stuff.

And so I think policymakers need to realize that it's not just that welfare at the individual level is a policy goal. It might be a policy tool to help people to do better more broadly. It's time for a break. But Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Well, I have more questions and I have time. And I'm mindful. I want to open it up to full. The Dartmouth tradition is that a student asked the first question.

And so if there's a bold student. Hi, thank you for being here. My name is Mia. I'm a first year student. I was wondering, what do you think the relationship is between like comparison and happiness? And to what extent can you really separate your happiness from evaluating it in comparison to someone else's? Like how can a college student derive their own happiness without thinking?

oh, I'll be happier if my life looked like so-and-so's. Totally. So here's another dumb feature about how the mind works when it comes to happiness. And how the mind works just in general. Is it not just true of happiness? It's just like human mind writ large. We don't think about anything in objective terms. We only think about stuff relative.

We're here in this room with kind of brightish artificial lights. When you walk outside into the slightly darker hallway, you'll feel like, oh my gosh, it's so dark. It's not that the hallway is dark. It's just it's brighter in here. You don't think of the light in terms of its objective properties. You think of it relative to another space, right? This is just how we think about everything, including our own level of whatever, our grades, our beauty, our salary.

We can't even understand them in objective terms. We only can think about them in relative terms. And our brains have this other insidious property, which is that we tend never to do that relative comparison towards things that we're better at. So we tend to look at the person that makes us feel worst about ourselves. My favorite nerdy example of this is a sports example. Researchers looked at Olympic medalists on the stand and their emotional expression. So the gold medalists, super happy, really excited, right? What about the silver medalist?

They're not just like ever so slightly less happy than the gold medalist. If you do analyses of their facial muscles, what you find is that silver medalists are showing emotions like contempt, deep sadness. They're not like a little less happy. They're miserable. Why? They just feel like a total loser. They're just looking to the gold medalist and feeling awful, right? You can be in objectively the best circumstances in life. And if your mind finds the one person that's better than you, it's going to look to that person and do it. I consulted very briefly for a NBA team with basketball players, which is funny because like I don't know anything about basketball or anything about sports in general. And so I have to figure out ways to talk to basketball players.

But we were talking about the insidiousness of social comparison, even at the highest level in the NBA. And I was asking them who their comparison points were. I was like, who's your comparison point for like salary right now? And at the time, they were like, oh, it's Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison point for like three point shots? And they're like, who's your comparison for height? And they're like, oh, it's like Taco Fail or something. I was like, why is it not Steph Curry for hike? Because if you know basketball, Steph Curry is pretty short. And they're like, well, I didn't think about him for that. But like, you thought about And for every other comparison, why is that not?

So like, even at the highest level, we pick the awful stuff, right? So I think one way to deal with comparison is just to have some grace about it. It's just the way your mind works for everything. Of course you're going to compare. But you need to realize that you can shift that process a little. And this is why I love to nerd out and tell this Olympian story, because there's a third data point that I haven't mentioned. I talked about the gold medalist and the silver medalist.

I didn't mention the bronze medalist. researchers analyze their facial expressions, and it turns out they're ecstatic. They often, in some of the analyses, are showing more positive expressions than the gold medalist. Why? Their comparison point isn't gold. They were like multiple seconds or multiple points away. Their comparison is like, oh my gosh, if I just messed up a little bit more, I would be going home empty-handed. And so the joke is you have to find not the silver lining, but the bronze lining. You literally have to look at could it be worse? Is there not comparison I could find. And that intentional energy takes work, but it's possible. So a little grace,

everybody does it just the way your mind works. But if you look carefully, you can detect that objectively you're not doing so bad. Strive in life for third place. Yeah, exactly. Professor Blanchflower. Thank you. I'm Danny Blanchflower. That's exactly the theme I was going to try and think about. Darren and I were in Scotland for the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth. And if you read the first page of the theory of moral sentiments, he says what you just said. He actually says, actually, we compare ourselves to others and we care about the well-being of others for the guy who wrote about markets.

So the relative thing is really important. Even I think in macro sense it's really important. I'd just tell you a Nobel Prize winner who remained nameless. Call me one day and I've written about relative things and he said, I can buy anything that I like, but I still care about the salaries of my colleagues. So this is a big deal, right? So if you think in macro terms, we've seen GDP rising income, the nation rises. And if you look at happiness as flat as a pancake, well, what happens is people compare themselves to others. If I get a BMW, this is work of colleagues of ours. If I get a

BMW, it makes me happy, but if you get one, I'm not happy anymore. I mean, this is literally true. And there's evidence, oh, so a lot of famous paper finds that if I get about 10% rise income, that's fine. But if I get no rise in income and everybody in the neighbourhood gets a 10% rise, I'm worse off. So these comparators are really important. And I know you talked about it on an individual level, but I obviously, I think it's really important for us to think perhaps to your connection on smartphones. When I was a kid and I was 12, I'm old now, I was 12, I compared myself to my sister and my school colleagues. Maybe what we've got here is the smartphone has change the comparator group. The comparator groups are not real, right? If I'm comparing myself

to my sister or to Darren or something, that's fine. But in a sense, the connection of the real things and the smartphones is the smartphones change the comparator group. And until we can do that, the individual things you've talked about full flat. So I'm just trying to think about how do we actually get people to compare themselves to real things? Because if I've learned anything about the happiness work I've done, it's what you said. Relative things matter. Yeah. No, I think this is such an important point, right?

It's comparing yourself, you know, if you're a student here to everyone at Dartmouth, but it's also comparing yourself to literally everyone on the internet. And of course, what's happening on the internet is completely curated, especially when it comes to beauty, your physical looks and so on, it's like all made up. And I think in the age of AI slop, which we're moving towards, we're going to have even more comparisons that don't even exist, right? And so it raises this interesting question of what we can do. Again, being a psychologist, I think of the individual strategies that we can use.

And the idea is like, you have some agency over whether you pick up that phone and look at TikTok. You can mindfully notice. How is it making me feel when I do that? If I leave TikTok hating my body and demanding I go to the gym and feeling bad about my grades, like try to notice when are these comparisons coming up and are they really real? This is a strategy that journalists like Catherine Price was this really lovely book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues, you don't necessarily have to break up. with your phone, but you need to take it to like couples counseling to figure out like a healthier relationship with it, you know. And she has a strategy that she uses. It's an acronym, WWW, which stands for what for, why now and what else, right? Why did I pick up my phone?

What am I using it for? What else could I be doing? But the reason I like this WWW strategy is it's a moment to be mindful. Why did I pick up the phone? How am I feeling when I'm using it? If it's making you feel totally crappy, if you have all these social comparisons, it's a hint to like maybe pop off that stuff. Or take a moment to read and realize, like, a crappy thing about our mind is that we don't have a lot of control over what other reference points, these social comparison points we use. We just soak up any that we get, and especially ones that make us look bad. And that means that we're constantly affected by other folks. And when those other folks are real and around us and our peer group, that's one thing. When those other folks are fake people

on the internet with photo filters and whatever, it's just so much worse. Question right here. I was wondering, because I'm a cognitive science major, given that people started using AI, sometimes as a substitute for mental health counselors, like AI can lead, as long as you prompt in the way, it can lead you to do self-harm. Do you have, like, any suggestions?

Because even when you, like, Google something, it's usually AI-based answers to, like, I don't know. Yeah. No, I love this question because I think more and more we're going to be needing to think about how these emerging technologies like AI and LLMs are affecting our happiness. On the chatbots and advice or chatbots in therapy or even chatbots in friendship, chatbots and relationships, I just did an episode with Gene Twengee and she was talking about how it's likely that most like middle schoolers will have their first romantic relationship with a chatbot.

Because it's just easy. It's frictionless. You can talk to them about sexy stuff without having to talk to a real person. And we just haven't thought carefully about this stuff at all. But on chatbots in therapy and chat bots and friendship, I think you've identified a lot of the problems, which is that these tools aren't necessarily so hot at distinguishing between good advice and bad advice. And sometimes, especially since a lot of the tools are built to kind of agree with you a little bit, you know, if you say, oh, I want to do. this terrible self-harmie thing. Sometimes they're prone to kind of, oh, that sounds great. I think these tools are getting better, especially as awful as these incidents are coming out. But yeah, it's dangerous. I worry too about the idea that social connection can seem a little frictiony. It can be hard. Many of us are feeling lonely and that people are really turning to these tools just for friendship, advice, companionship. And there's some new work coming out of Liz Dunn's group that finds that at first, that's helpful. Like in the moment, it makes you feel less lonely, but long term it makes it harder. It makes you more lonely. So I think it's a kind of like

a nutrisweet of connection where it feels good, it feels sweet in the moment, but it's not giving you the nutrition you need. Another thing I'll say just because I'm in a room of lots of students that I worry about a lot with AI that I think we're not thinking about is the impact that cognitive offloading is happening, that you let your chatbot just do your response paper because it's a little faster, or you let your chatbot, like, kind of write your essay, or do that hard thing because you kind of feel the friction of doing the hard thing, you're having some resistance, and you just offload it to that. There's lots of work by folks like Mickey, Inselect, and others showing the power of effort, the effort feels good. We don't like to do it, but once we get

through it, it feels nice. We like to have our own ideas. We like to push through things. That's why for those of you who do the New York Times Wordle in the morning, you don't just look on one of the many sites that just has the world answer and type the wordal answer in. You try to push through it that feels good, right? But we are not thinking of the consequences of this kind of offloading for an entire generation's academic work, for an entire generation's stuff where there are cognitive benefits of pushing through something on your own. And I think we're not tracking the happiness cost of that. I see it a little bit in my students. Professors can tell when you use the LLM. They're like, okay, this was LLM written. And I'll be like, oh, what did you think of paper? How is that idea? They're just like, they're just not as into it. They just don't engage with it, right? In the same way.

There's something interesting being lost about that connection. There's obviously a learning cost and other kinds of costs. I'm really interested in the like, that little happiness boost, the little flow boost that you get from working hard on something. I think more and more over time we're going to lose that. And I worry that that's dangerous. What's true of Wordle, by the way, is also true of learning the conjugations of irregular Latin verbs, just so folks know. Let's see. We are almost out of time, but I think we could probably take one more question if somebody wants to fight it out. Yes.

It seems like comparison is this thief of joy, but we're taught that ambition is really important. And economically, ambition and productivity are kind of these things that are society. prioritizes. So how do you reconcile that mindset of it's okay to be a bronze medalist with the idea that we want people striving towards being gold medalists? One way to reframe your question is to ask, well, what are the things that get us to be gold medalist in whatever field? What are the things that cause us to be A plus students, the best worker? Like whatever achievement you want to pick, how do I get there? And I think our minds have this assumption, which is like, like, you just work to the point of absolute burnout and kill yourself and push yourself

and hustle and you'll get there. And I think that what we're learning is like, that's just not how it works. Even if your goal is just achievement at all costs and you don't care about your mental health, it might be that by prioritizing your mental health, you get to that achievement more. And we see this in the context of our physical health, I think, a little bit better, right? You're here at Dartmouth, so I know a lot of you are athletes and you probably, if you're on a team or you work out, heard about concepts like active rest where like if you just kill yourself and keep practicing and push yourself 110% for working out all the time, you're going to get an injury. Like your body's not going to be able to handle it. If you want to be optimal, you have to

have moments of rest and scale back and this kind of thing. My read of what's happening in the performance literature is that we're learning the same thing about mental health and burnout and so on. That if we just push, push, push all the time, even if your goal was just the like full performance goal, you're not going to get there as effectively by doing that. Four-day work weeks, people perform better than the five-day work week. Like, taking time off, sleeping and resting, makes you perform better. There's lots of evidence for the power of sleep and grades that if you take an hour off of studying to sleep, you'll probably do better and perform better over time. There's also evidence to, like, a different achievement bottom line, which is just a capitalism

achievement bottom line of like making as much money as possible, where researchers are learning that, in fact, the act of taking rest, focusing on happiness, doing the stuff that I'm talking about, seems to matter. My favorite study of 2025, people have like the Spotify rap from 2025, but I would say nerdy researchers want their favorite, like, it would be great if an app gave us our list of our favorite studies. But my favorite study of 2025 was by the Oxford researcher, Jan Emanuel DeNev. And he partnered with the job website Indeed, which I'm sure some of you know, to ask the following question. And he's like, you know, on Indeed, they have 15 million rankings of all this stuff about people's workplaces, like their salary and all this stuff. But one of the rankings they have is people's happiness at work.

And he's like, oh, these are rankings across 5,000 different publicly traded companies, right? And so we could do is the following. We could take per company, the average happiness at work, and look at whether or not that predicts the stock performance of a company. And we could imagine this goes different ways. We could have the theory that like, well, the way you get good. stock performance is like you exploit the heck out of your workers, you make them really miserable, you push and push, but that's how you get to a good performance. What Yonem Manuel Denev finds

is just the opposite. Super strong correlation between the happiest companies and the best stock performance. Just a perfect, beautiful correlation. In fact, the correlation was so high that Denev has now made a stock index of the happiest companies. You know, like the S&P 500 where it's like, you can invest in this and it'll get you money, you can invest in, you can look on his website and see this, the top 100 Indeed companies and invest in that. And he's found that every time in the market from 2021 till I think the last data set was like in 2025, this will-being 100 out for forums like the Dow Jones and the SMP 500. It's a little investment tidbit from the Hapleys City.

You didn't think you get that, but a little tidbit to take with you. Which is why you came tonight. But my point is we have an incorrect theory about performance, whether it's for companies as individuals, we think push, push, push, that's the way to achieve more. but it might be the way to achieve more is to rest, but focus on your positive mood to take some time off. I think even if all you care is your output, you need a different theory about how to do that well.

And so that would be the idea is like, ask the question, what gets the gold medalist to be the gold medalist, right? It might be rest, it might be time off. Look at Alyssa Liu. We've just had this wonderful Olympics. Everybody watched her video. I think that's beautiful. But if you know her story, you know what happened was

she was feeling burned out. So she took time off. She had people tell her that's stupid. You're never going to be a good skater. Like you're never going to be a good athlete, right? What happened? She took the time off. I mean, her own kind of account of it is that's why she was able to win, right? So I think that's the message. Even if what you want is to hustle, hustle, hustle and achieve as much and be the gold medalist and the perfect Dartmouth college student, you might do that by focusing on your well-being more than you expect. Wow. That's wonderful, Lori. Please join me in thanking her for This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed human.