The Mel Robbins Podcast - The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

In this episode, you will learn how to live a more meaningful and happy life with zero weird tricks. Today, world renowned professor Dr. Laurie Santos is here to give you a crash course on living a happier, more fulfilling life. Dr. Santos is the professor behind Yale’s most popular course of all time, which she then taught as an online course called The Science of Well-Being.5 million students have taken her semester-long course, but you don’t need to.Why? Because today on the podcast, she is distilling and summarizing the key takeaways from her world-famous 26 lectures into one hour for you. She will share the surprising truths about what truly makes you happy and 5 science-backed ways to rewire your mind for more joy and meaning. And even if happiness feels out of reach, this episode will change your perspective and equip you with practical tools to experience more of it, starting today. For more resources, including links to the studies mentioned in the episode, click here for the podcast episode page.If you liked this episode, you’ll love hearing from Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar – the most popular professor in Harvard’s history – share about the science of creating a better life. Listen to this one next: How to Build the Life You Want: Timeless Wisdom for More Happiness & PurposeConnect with Mel: Get Mel’s new book, The Let Them TheoryWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Sign up for Mel’s personal letter Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes Disclaimer

Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Oh boy, you're ready? You better believe you are because today you are getting the ultimate crash course in happiness from the professor who created the single most popular course taught in college in over 300 years at Yale. It's called the psychology of a good life. It's 26 lectures long, and it's all about what truly makes you happy.

Well, today on the Mel Robbins podcast, class is in session, and Professor Lori Santos is here to distill her 26 lessons on the surprising science of happiness into an hour that is packed with so many tools that you can start using today to be happier. But I'm gonna warn you, Professor Santos begins class with a bombshell.

You've got happiness wrong. Everyone does. And today, you're gonna learn the surprising science of happiness and how to be happier in five steps. No gimmicks, zero weird tricks, and you need this now more than ever. In a world where so many of you and the people that you love are feeling disconnected,

lonely, and really overwhelmed, this conversation is essential. And Dr. Santos is here in our Boston studios to prove to you that you have more control over your happiness than you realize. And by the time we're done talking today, you'll not only know how to feel happier, you'll know exactly what to do to be happier every single day. Hey, it's your friend Mel. Welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so excited that you're here.

I'm so happy you hit play on the conversation today. First of all, it's always such an honor to be able to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're brand new, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family and you have picked one amazing episode to hit play on. And it tells me something about you. It tells me that you're the type of person who not only values your time, but you're also interested in learning about ways

that you can be happier. And I am really fired up for today's episode because I've brought in the best of the best, someone who's gonna guide you toward a happier life using the exact steps and research that will boost your happiness day to day. Dr. Lori Santos is in our Boston studios. She is a cognitive scientist and professor at Yale

who teaches the single most popular course that has been taught at Yale in 300 years. It's a course she created called The Psychology of a Good Life. It's so popular that 1,200 students signed up within three days of it being announced. Now, Dr. Santos has spent her entire career researching what truly makes you happy. And she has one of the most popular podcasts on the topic. It's called The Happiness Lab. And I personally, I love her research. I have used it, I've cited it, I've written about it. I've even taught it in online courses that

I teach and in the work that I do with some of the world's leading global brands. That's how powerful her work is. And you're going to feel that power today. And that's why you can hear your friend Mel just bubbling over. That's why I can't wait for you and for the people that you love and for me to learn absolutely everything that she has to share with us today. So please help me welcome Dr. Lori Santos

to the Mel Robbins podcast. Professor Santos, I am so fired up that you're here. I can't wait to jump in. And I wanna just say one thing. We're here in our Boston studios and I don't know if they've changed the flight pass for Logan airport, but there are airplanes outside. There's construction down the street. So if you are hanging with me and Dr. Santos today and you hear a little beeping or hear a plane, just know we're all on this walk together.

So with that, Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Oh, I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Oh, I'm thrilled that we've got you here in our studios. And I'm like just looking around the studio being like, this is Mel's studio, it's so cool. And you're in it.

I'm in it right now. Well, you're so busy. So thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And we're gonna cover a lot. And I just wanna tell you as you're listening and you've invited Dr. Santos and I in the car with you or on your walk with you,

that there is so much that she's gonna unpack for you about happiness, from the things that we get wrong about it, to the ways our brains are working against us, to most importantly, I don't know how you're gonna do this woman, but you're gonna condense the most popular course, literally ever taught on happiness, into this conversation with key takeaways.

And I understand you also have homework for us. Yeah, sorry. You can't invite the professor on the show and not have your listeners get homework. Sorry, listeners. I didn't mean it. That's okay. I would love for you to speak directly to the person that is with us right now and listening and share with them what they might experience

that could be different about their life if they take everything that you're about to share to heart and they apply it. Well, this is something we've seen in our students, which is that if you listen to what I'm about to say, if you follow the homework, you can actually become happier, somewhere between five to 15% happier, five to 15% more positive emotions, five to 15% more satisfied with your life.

It's actually what the science tells you. In our short, short, short version of the course today, that's what you're going to get. Wow. What does five to 15% feel like? Well, I think it feels like, you know, if you were a like six out of 10 on positive emotion, you know, if I said all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10.

You go up to like almost seven out of 10. And that matters wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, how much joy, how much laughter you have, you can kind of pop up a little bit. You're not going to go from zero to a hundred, but these are lasting effects where you really go up a small but significant amount in terms of how you feel. Can I share something? Please. So when you said five to 15%,

my brain was like, well, that's not enough. And I think that's probably relevant to our conversation about happiness. I mean, does that surprise you that I was like 5%? Not at all. I mean, I think when we that I was like 5%? Not at all. I mean, I think when we talk about these strategies, especially to my very type A Yale students, right? Everyone wants to go from zero to a hundred, right?

Everyone wants to do the extreme thing. And I think one of the lessons we get from the happiness research is that like, this works better in baby steps. And it's not the kind of thing that you're just gonna do one thing and happiness lasts forever. I think one of the disappointing things about happiness is that it takes constant work,

like all good things in life, right? If you want to learn to play the violin, if I want to learn French, you know, if I want to get really good at Guitar Hero, which is the last thing I've invested myself in, I'm trying to move from medium to hard on Guitar Hero. I know it's a little 2005, but that's what I do. But like you can't just practice once and then that's it. Like you gotta kind of keep up with it. And one of the lessons that we get from the science

about happiness is that happiness works the same way. It's kind of like a leaky tire. You do these different behaviors, you change your mindset, it fills things up for a little bit, but then you kind of gotta do it again and again. It sort of takes constant work, but the good news is that you can change things around a lot. So if you feel like your life is a leaky tire right now.

Yes, and I think probably listeners out there, my guess is a lot of you are feeling that way. Yeah, I think so. I would love to have you share a little bit about this course that you teach at Yale University. It is the single most popular course taught in over 300 years. It's called The Psychology of a Good Life. Can you tell us a little bit about this course, why you created it, and why the heck is this so popular? Yeah. So the course kind of

started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I've been teaching there for over two decades, but in just the last couple of years, I took on a role of what's called the head of college on campus. And so Yale is one of these weird schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's like Gryffindor, Slytherin. There's like these like weird colleges within a college. They're basically like dorm communities. And so I became a head of college of one of these, which meant as a faculty member, I was living on campus with students.

Really? And you're married. So you're married. Yes. Me and my husband, eating in the dining hall, hanging out in the coffee shop. It's kind of fun. I became this like benevolent aunt to like 500,

you know, 19 year olds, right? But, and I thought this was going to be fun, right? I thought college life right now was going to look like what college life looked like back when I went there in the nineties. And it just didn't. I mean, I was really looking at this college student mental health crisis up close and personal. And this is true at Yale, but And it just didn't. I mean, I was really looking at this college student mental health crisis up close and

personal. And this is true at Yale, but it's just true nationally. So right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function. Right now, nationally, more than 60% of college students report feeling very lonely and overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And this was what I was seeing in my community, right?

Where there were just students who were really struggling. And I just kind of went through this crisis of confidence. As a professor, I'm like, we're not teaching them computer science and Shakespeare and all this stuff. If like 60% of students are experiencing overwhelming anxiety most days. And I was like, we gotta do something about this.

And being a psychologist, I mean, I'm a trained psychologist, I said, well, my field has strategies, right? Like we know simple kinds of ways that you can change your behaviors in your mindset. But again, don't take you from zero to a hundred, but work pretty well, right? Can make you kind of patch up that leaky happiness tire and feel a little bit better.

And so I said, well, why don't I make a class? I'll just make a whole new class and I'll kind of teach students all these strategies. I wanted it to sound cool. That's why I called it Psychology and the Good Life. So it sort of pop out of the quiz, sounded like kind of fun. But, you know, it was a new class on campus. I thought, you know, 30 or so students would show up.

And so the first indication that I got that something was amiss was we get these little kind of tickers as students are registering for our class. It's like this little web page where you can kind of see this graph going up and down. And most of the graphs had an axis that was from zero to a hundred, but mine started going from zero to a thousand. Were you like, like where were you when that started happening? It was like, it was like back and forth in my office because it was like happening over time gradually as students were coming in. And I think it was something different because

students were sort of voting with their feet. I mean, if you're a 19 year old right now, you don't like this culture of feeling overwhelmed and anxious and just kind of so many of your friends are just experiencing panic attacks. Like that's not a fun way to be. And I think the course was really offering students a solution and even an evidence-based solution.

I was saying, look, I'm gonna just comb through the science and tell you what does the science really say practically that you can do to kind of feel better right now. And as you started to observe this about college students, did you see any correlation when you look around at your friends who are your age, my age, all ages as well in terms of these statistics or just people generally being unhappy. Yeah. Well, this was the striking thing about the course, right? Is it, you know, we, the

course became viral on campus, but what I really didn't expect was for the course to get viral off campus. About a week into teaching the class, I got, there was a New York Times article about the class that the point of which was basically like, all these 19 year olds and Ivy League school have their whole life ahead of them are miserable. What about the rest of us? It was kind of like, Dr. Santos, share these strategies with the rest of us.

And I just get emails from all around the world of just people feeling like, it's not so much that I'm depressed, I just feel like I'm kind of languishing or just kind of meh, or like, there's so much going on in the world to feel stressed out about right now. Everybody's kind of going through it right now. I'm glad that you said that because I think that this conversation

is going to be incredibly helpful for understanding not only what the teenagers and 20-somethings and early 30-somethings are facing right now, but also what we're all facing. Yeah. And so whether you're already starting to think about the person in your life who's in their 20s or in college or high school that you're going to share this conversation

with or you're thinking about yourself, like all of the takeaways from the research and the science and the studies that you've been doing are relevant to all of us. That's right. And I think things are getting worse and will continue to get worse unless we come up with good strategies to deal with this. What do you mean things are getting worse? Well, you look at pretty much any statistic on mental health and I'm not talking in college students now, I'm talking about in adults, especially in the US, things are just getting worse over time. Like rates of loneliness have nearly doubled, right? Since we've been measuring

these things, like rates of depression and anxiety in the adult population are going up. I think even if you just look at rates of things like people reporting that they're overwhelmed, burned out, right? You get, you know, not just double digits, but very high double digits of folks saying like, yeah, that's me. I'm going through it. And honestly, if it's not you, you know, it's your sister-in-law, your colleague at work. It's like, we're just in a community where so many people just feel like they're not experiencing the kind of joy and positive emotion that they really like to be experiencing. I love what you just said about joy and positive emotion

because I was about to ask you, well, if you're dealing with anxiety or depression or a lack of purpose or you're feeling very lonely, is happiness the anecdote? Is that why this matters so much for all of us? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it helps to dig a little bit to what we mean by happiness because we can mean so many things. And in fact, there was a funny study that showed that what lay people think about happiness is not what the scholars mean when they use the term happiness.

So you're the scholar, I'm the lay person. Yes. Okay, I'm going to lay down now. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what the scholars mean. So what the scholars mean when they use the term happiness. So you're the scholar, I'm the layperson. Yes. Okay, I'm going to lay down now. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what the scholars mean. So what the scholars mean by happiness is happiness in two forms. Scholars think about happiness in your life and happiness with your life. So what do we mean here?

Oh, hold on. Hold on. So you just said you can be happy in your life. And you can also be happy with your life. Holy, I can think of a bazillion moments where I've been happy with what's going on, but not happy in it. Yeah. You know, the classic case, if you have kids, right, is that you have a newborn baby.

Yeah. And you're so happy with life Is that you have a newborn baby, right? And you're so happy with life, you've brought this new life, you have so much meaning and purpose. But in your life, there's dirty diapers, there's no sleep, there's, you know. Oh my God, I'm exhausted, my nipples are leaking, I'm not having sex anymore, I feel like I've just shot a cannonball through my legs,

like what is happening, miserable. And you've had enough important people on here to know the opposite, right? Which is you can have a life in your life where there's all these hedonic pleasures. You know, you're flying for a class and eating at the best restaurants and the best wines. But with your life, you feel a little bit empty.

Maybe you don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. And so what scholars are trying to do is they're trying to find strategies that boost both of these in your life. And specifically, we mean lots of positive emotions, lots of joy and laughter and contentment, right? These kinds of subtle positive emotions. Otherwise, I guess we'll probably talk about, we don't want to get rid of negative emotions completely, right? We want to have some negative emotions. I just don't want them to run me over. Yeah. I don't want

the negative emotions to feel like that's my whole life. No steamroller from the frustration or the overwhelm and so on, right? And that's happy in your life. With your life, it's the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied do I feel? Do I feel like I have meaning? Do I feel like I have purpose, right? As nerdy professors, we use scales to measure these kinds of things.

But you don't need a scale. You could probably answer right now, all things considered, how happy are you with your life? And I take it, if you were to just stop and ask yourself, which you really should, am I happy in my life, yes or no? And then ask yourself, am I happy with my life? That we're about to learn there are kind of

different strategies that you can use to bring those numbers up in terms of that 5 to 15 percent satisfaction that's available to all of us. Exactly. And one of the things that's striking is that a lot of the strategies move both at the same time. A lot of the strategies will give you a sense of positive emotion when you're practicing it, but also overall make you kind of just more satisfied in the long term too. So your course, Psychology of a Good Life, has 26 lectures on happiness. What do you think the big takeaway for your students has been?

Yeah. So one of the biggest ones is just how much we get happiness wrong. Oh. Yeah. I mean, I think if you're listening right now, you probably care about happiness, right? You probably want to feel happier. You're probably pursuing happiness, but you might not be feeling like it's going so great. Right. You're kind of off somehow.

And I think this is something that so many of us seem to go through. Right. It's not so much that we're not seeking happiness out. We are. We're probably putting some effort into the choices we're making, the actions we're taking to feel happier, but we're kind of doing it wrong. Right? And this is by and large what the science seems to be telling us. It's not that we're not going for improved wellbeing. We are, we're putting a lot of work in. Some of us are putting a lot of money in, but we tend to be picking the things that don't get us there. And this is a big insight into happiness is that we have theories about those sorts of

things that make us happy. But a lot of research suggests those theories are just wrong. So we have these intuitions that are leading us astray. I am so excited to learn from you. And I think probably the best place to start, you've talked about happiness with your life and happiness in your life. But what is the definition of happiness? Well, I think the definition of happiness

is really boosting both of those, right? It's kind of finding the way to become happier in your life and with your life. That's kind of what we're going for when we're talking about improving happiness. I love that definition. I do because I, again, I'm gonna reveal why I make myself miserable.

It's because I immediately went like, oh, okay. So this is something I can do. I can literally like figure out how to be happy with my life and I can figure out how to be happy in my life and I can get my little checklist out and then I can go, go, go, go, go. So it felt more like... It's doable. It's like a check listable thing.

Yes. Because I'm starting to really wonder, is it really more of a skill to learn how to be happy with and in your life? I think it really is. I mean, as we talked about before, this idea of happiness is something that you need to build over time, right? It just kind of takes energy. It's like learning the violin or learning to play guitar here, right? You kind of just build it over time. I think one of the problems is that we don't spend a lot of time learning ourselves, teaching our kids, setting up educational institutions to build these skills. I think understanding the strategies that we need to engage in to improve our lives, to regulate our emotions, right? To kind of not get run

over by that frustration and overwhelm and so on. These are such important skills. I think a different misconception is we just assume some people are good at it and some people are bad at it. That's not true? It is true to a certain extent, right? I think some people are naturally better at it than others. And is it because they're doing the things naturally that you're about to teach us? It's because they're doing the things naturally. And some of these things come to show. will say, I am not naturally a happy person. I've become happier, maybe even about 20 to 30% happier, since I'm like really digging into some of these homeworks

and doing these things. But those strategies absolutely don't come naturally to me. It's just the kind of thing you can learn over time. Well, one of the things that you teach in your course is that we're not wired for happiness. Yeah. What does that mean? One of the reasons we get it wrong is that

we're kind of like set up not to be so happy in fact. And I think this makes most sense if you think back to kind of evolution, right? You know, like we are just these survivors and reproducers that have to get out there off and on the savanna and not get eaten by a tiger or something, right? What makes you do that better? It doesn't really matter if you're experiencing

a lot of positive emotion, joy and so on, but you definitely wanna experience like fear. You definitely wanna experience anger so you can get access to maybe resources that you didn't get access to before. You're gonna be driven to pay attention to the negative stuff, right? Because that's kind of what matters

for surviving and reproducing. And that means we have brains that are built with what's called this negativity bias. We kind of constantly notice the bad stuff out there. And that's because our brains are wired for it. These were brains that had to like notice the tiger that was hiding in the bush. So when it's scrolling through an Instagram feed, it's going to see the terrible stuff. And that's what's going to get us. Or if you walk into a cafeteria at a college or at work, you're going to notice that everybody already has a friend

to sit with but you. Yep. We notice all the bad comparisons that make us feel terrible, right? And so that's just another feature of this. And it makes sense evolutionarily that that's what we're built for, right? Like we don't necessarily survive and reproduce better if

we notice all the things we're grateful for and the blessings and have contentment, right? It works better if we live this really volatile life. Well, it kind of makes sense because if we were to like time travel back several thousand years and we're sitting out there on the savanna or wherever, if you and I are sitting there playing cards all day long,

having fun, like cracking jokes, we're not gonna eat. Right, or worse, you know, imagine the like contented Buddha, you know, the perfect Zen happiness who's just meditating under a tree, like he's gonna starve and you know, get perfect. Right, or get eaten while he's meditating. So it sounds like because our brains are wired to keep us alive,

that mandate has kind of spiraled out of control in modern life. And especially when you think about things like social media, or you think about just how much information is out there about what other people are doing, you're probably now defaulting to paying attention to that instead of just paying attention to what's right in front of your face in terms of how to be happy with and in your life. Yeah, I think the modern world has found many more things for us to feel negative about

and many more things to kind of activate our negativity bias. So if you were to speak directly to the person that's with us right now listening, what is it that they probably have wrong about happiness or the misconceptions that they have that are leaving them feeling unhappy? It's almost like when you understand this thing, it's actually gonna help you when you realize that there's this thing you have wrong about happiness. That's right.

And I think it's worth being a little bit self-compassionate, right? If you're listening to this feeling like, oh, I'm maybe not flourishing, I'm maybe not experiencing as much positive emotion as I could, first of all, you are in the majority, right? You're not alone when you're dealing with this. Second, you're just allowing your brain to play out and the way your brain was built to play out, it makes sense that you're going through majority, right? You're not alone when you're dealing with this. Second, you're just allowing your brain to play out

and the way your brain was built to play out, it makes sense that you're going through this, right? You're not doing anything wrong in some sense, but with a little tweaking of the way you engage in different actions and different mindsets, you can feel a lot better. Understanding where we go wrong, I think is really the path to making things better.

Amazing. I mean, I'd rather stop doing things because it feels easier than have to start doing a whole lot of things. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, that is the bad news about happiness. You know, now I'm unhappy. I don't want to hear this. OK, Dr. Santos. Come on. The bad look.

All good things in life take a little bit of work. Yes. And happiness is like that, too. But the good news is that if you put that work in, you can change. And I think that's another thing that we get wrong about happiness. We assume, not just that some people are good at it, some people are bad, but that it's built in, right? If you're a kind of Debbie Downer sort of person

or like a real optimist, you're just always gonna be that way. We assume that there's nothing you can change about it. And study after study shows that you can change. Again, you don't necessarily go from zero to a hundred, but with time you can build habits that allow you to make important, significant progress. That's great. Because I was just sitting there when you were talking about Debbie Downer and I was

thinking about my husband, Chris. His name is Christopher. Christy Downer? Well, his name is Christopher Robbins, from Winnie the Pooh. And so in a not so nice way, he's always kind of been the Eeyore of our family, you know, just kind of, ooh. But it's because he's quiet. And I'm the tigger bouncing all over the place.

But I think he has probably had a higher level of happiness with and in his life. He's just not outwardly expressing it. Whereas I'm all over the place. One of the big things we get wrong when it comes to happiness is that we assume happiness is about our circumstances, right? We look out at people's lives and think, oh, well, if I could just be rich, I would be happy. Or if I could just get that promotion at work, you know, from my college students, if I could

just get the perfect grade or into the perfect internship or the be in the different friend group, be in a different relationship, be in a relationship if you're not in a different relationship, you know, but by that new house, even I think just like buy that new thing, right? That's the new dress or the new shoes at a local level. I think we're buying things often to make ourselves happier. We think it's gonna work, but really it doesn't work as well as we think. It seems like circumstances aren't the key to happiness

that we expect. Now that has a caveat. If you are listening to this right now and you're like in a refugee camp or you don't have enough money to put food on your table, yes, changing your circumstances is gonna matter really a lot for your material happiness going up. But my guess is you're listening to this

and you're not necessarily in a refugee camp, that maybe you're not having the perfect finances, but you got food on the table and a roof over your head. If you're in that situation, then drastically changing your circumstances probably isn't gonna affect your happiness in the way that you think. That's what study after study shows.

Well, and I think more empowering is to know that you don't have to change your circumstances. That's right. To boost your ability to feel happier. And that's huge, right? Cause changing your circumstances is a pain in the butt. Right? Like going from, you know, like your current salary to like $300 million a year, that's a big change. It's going to take a lot of work, right?

You know, kind of finding a new relationship, getting a big promotion at work. These are hard things and they're often things that most of us don't really have that much control over. Yeah. But all the strategies we're going to start talking about soon are ones that you have complete control over. They're just things that you can engage in yourself. Let's talk about money though, because you have some foundational and very interesting research about money, at least in the United States. And I would love for you to share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the most famous study on money and happiness was one that the late Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman ran back in, I think, 2009. And he asked this kind of interesting question, does increases in your amount of money wind up corresponding with increases in happiness? Which he measured in a couple ways. First, kind of positive emotion. Do you get more positive emotion? Do you get less negative emotion?

And do you feel kind of less stressed? And so he had this huge data set where he could plot this out across different incomes. And what he finds is that if you're in the low, low end of the income spectrum, if you're earning $10,000 a year or $30,000 a year, yeah, increasing your salary over time is going to boost your positive emotion. You're going to feel less stress, less negative emotions. But that kind of increasing curve where more money is more happiness, more money is more happiness, it levels off. And in 2009-ish dollars in the United States, it leveled off at around $75,000.

What does that mean? That means that if in 2009 dollars you hit a salary of $75,000, even if you doubled your salary, tripled, quintupled your salary, you wouldn't get any corresponding increase in positive emotions. you wouldn't decrease your negative emotions and you wouldn't feel less stressed. Now that is not what you probably believe if you're listening right now. Like if you're like Mel's got her mouth kind of hanging open. No one thinks this, right? And you might be like, well, that's $2009. The equivalent right now would maybe be like a hundred, 110,000 dollars, something like that, right? We just don't think that. We think if suddenly I could triple my salary, I would be way happier. But these research like this just shows that we're kind of wrong.

And so that raises a different question, which is like, well, why doesn't more money buy happiness? And I think it's for a few reasons. One is that as you get richer, you often tend to get busier. In fact, this is a change that we've seen in the US population. It used to be that rich people lived their lives of leisure. They look like Cary Grant in the Philadelphia story, just sitting around drinking cognac out of beautiful vases and things like that.

But higher salary now usually means you're working harder, or you're putting in more hours at work. And we know that time really matters for happiness, and free time sort of matters for happiness. The more you're working, the less you're interacting socially. So wealth doesn't seem to kind of give us the sort of social benefit we used to get before. And I think the bigger thing is that as you get more money, you kind of just get used to that over time, right?

So if you get a little bit more money, maybe you start going to see the trainer and you start flying first class, you start eating in the nice restaurants. But if you do that over and over every day, it just becomes your day to day experience. You don't get this kind of additional happiness boost from it. And so $75,000, I think it's not like a kind of magic bullet number, but I think it's like kind of around the amount where like a lot of your needs are taken care of. You got food, shelter, you know, maybe like the teeny vacation a year or something. Like the stuff that you can additionally buy with more money is not going to bring you more

happiness. I'm so glad that we're talking about this because I do think this is one of the major mistakes I've made in my life. Totally. That I think that if I can buy something or if I make more money or if I just have this much in savings, that somehow it's gonna just automatically boost happiness and it's true it hasn't and I will also say though that when I think about the times in my life where I have been struggling

profoundly financially like really struggling to get groceries on the table having my bank card bounce at the gas station, trying to fill up the cart, right? We've all been there. That there is a certain kind of cruel and relentless stress that you feel when you can't take care of your basic needs that does interfere with your ability to be happy with where you are in your life.

And because I was constantly worried about it, which meant I had no time. Which meant I didn't enjoy where I was at. Which meant I was focused on survival. And so is that the reason why the monetary figure really, if you can take care of things so that you can get through your day-to-day life and take care of yourself, it lowers stress and that's why it makes happiness available to you.

Yeah. I mean, I think when we asked this question, does money buy happiness, part of our intuition is right. It was like, well, money can get me stuff that would lead me to be happy, right? Money can put me on a vacation that I can spend time with my family, can allow me to decrease these negative emotions, like fear of like, you know, as the rent collector going to come and get kicked out of my house or overwhelmed, right? I have to take on more hours at work just to make ends meet, right?

I think when you get to a certain wealth level, you shut off those basic need problems that come up that very much do affect their happiness. And so from that perspective, does money matter for happiness? Yes, for sure. But it only matters up to a certain level and that's the spot that we get wrong. And I think it's not just like, you know, you and I and the listener getting this wrong. I think this is the kind of thing that like even people of extreme wealth get wrong. One of my favorite guests that I've ever had on my podcast, The Happiness Lab was this

guy Clay Cockrell. And he is a mental health professional that works only with the 0.0001%. So I think most of his clients are earning over $50 million. And the first thing that should be striking is that this dude has clients, right? These are people who have $50 million who apparently aren't happy enough that they need to see like some mental health professional to kind of help them get through. And a lot of their problems, amazingly, are financial.

And so one of the stories Clay told was that there was a guy who he worked with who just bought this new yacht. A wife really wanted the yacht and they couldn't figure out where to park it. And it was causing all this marital strife, da da da. And you can look at that and you probably think you poor, explet, poor, you know, expletive baby legs, like kind of like, you know, like can't park his yacht well.

I was gonna say, Dr. Santos, it's very petty of me to say this, but I'm like, good. I'm glad you're unhappy. Like, I literally, I don't like, I hate that I had that reaction, but I'm like, I'm glad you're freaking unhappy if you have a yacht. Like screw you. Like, and now that I'm like, I'm a terrible person. Oh my God. But the flip side is I think we've, many of us, way less wealth levels than $50 million

have seen some of the problems that our material possessions come up with. Of course I'm mad that my husband is making me get up and move my 1987 Toyota Corolla to the other side of the street so that the street sweeper is coming through and we don't get towed. And to somebody who's trying to have an existence with that. No, I was going to say the opposite way, somebody who has an existence where they would kill for that 1987 Toyota because they can't get to work and they're taking the bus two hours a day.

That feels like, how could you ever come put up with that? Right. And so this is the problem is that we don't, we don't, these material goods come with some costs that we don't expect. And they just kind of don't continue to give us the happiness. Like if you were that person who was taking the bus today, every day, they would worship your 1987, your car. I love my car. I know. I have like a really crappy Nissan too. So I get it. It's like very beat up. But it's like there's somebody out there who would worship that. And this is the problem is that like you've had it so long.

It was 1997, you kind of stop worshiping it. You stop getting the kind of utility out of it. I mean, tomorrow if you walked home and the car was gone and you're like, wait, where did I park it? Did somebody steal my car? What's going on? And like it took you a while. You're like, oh no, husband moved or something.

For that five minutes where you didn't know where it was, where it had gone. Now you'd see the value in it. Like, Oh my gosh, I don't know. I left my CDs in there. Like, you know, like, Oh my gosh, like I didn't have to get a new car. When you get it back, you're like, Oh, thank goodness. That little break is breaking up what you are used to. It's kind of a break in what psychologists call your hedonic adaptation. You kind of just got- That's a big word. I don't know what that means. The fast definition is you just got used to something.

Hedonic adaptation is you get adapted to your hedonic value. I feel like we do that in our marriages and our relationships too. Oh my God. Actually, there are curves of hedonic adaptation in marriages. Yes, it's caught my waistline. No, they're like, you know, the moment you get married, like basically like five months in you're already getting used to your partner. Wow.

It kind of goes down. You know, you said something earlier though, that gave me this epiphany. Because you were talking about how when you're really struggling and you think, okay, money's going to make me happier because money is going to help me pay my bills. So yes, that's true because we're lowering money is gonna help me pay my bills. So yes, that's true because we're lowering stress. But then you said something interesting. You said, and maybe I'll be able to take a little vacation with my family.

And what occurred to me is that the thing that a vacation does with your family is it gives you time with them. Correct, yep. And so I think maybe one of the mistakes that we're making is that we think money gives us the thing that actually makes us happy, which is more time with people we care about or more time to feel less stressed.

And is that kind of where this is going? Yeah. There's really lovely work by the psychologist Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School that talks about a concept that social scientists are getting really excited about lately called time affluence, which is not wealth affluence. It's not the amount of money you have, but it's the amount of free time you have. And if you're listening right now and you hear that term time affluence and you're like, that is not me at all.

Um, again, don't feel too bad because you are part of the general majority of like humans on the planet right now, especially Americans right now. Most of us are experiencing the opposite of time affluence, which is time famine, where we literally almost feel like you're starving for time. And Ashley Willens research shows that if you experience time famine, that's a huge hit on your well-being. In fact, one of her studies show that if you experience time famine, that's a huge hit on your wellbeing. In fact, one of her studies show that if you self-report being time famished a lot, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.

So those of you listening right now who are lucky enough to have jobs, something else we can get hedonically adapted to. If you're lucky enough to have a job, imagine you lost that job in the next 10 minutes, how you'd feel. Just not having a lot of free time can make you feel that bad. And so, Mel, you're really onto something, which is that one of the best ways we can spend our money to increase our happiness is to actually use money to buy back time. And Ashley Williams, there's some really cool work on this. She finds no matter what your discretionary income is, because you can say, okay, yeah, that guy with the $50 million and the yacht, he can spend money to, I don't know,

hire somebody to clean his house or, you know, take these unwanted tasks off his desk, right? He can go to the restaurant instead of cooking meals for himself. But many of us have like a little bit of discretionary income and Ashley finds that no matter, like what level of discretionary income you have, if you spend that to get time back

and you commit to spending it to get time back, you can kind of be happier, whether that's hiring the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn, or- Watch your kid. Watch your kid. Walk the dog. Exactly, or just like-

Dropping off some laundry at a local laundromat to wash and fold it for you. And I think if you can shop on Amazon and you're hitting the shop now button on Instagram or social media, that's discretionary income. Exactly. Exactly. And the stuff arrives.

And one of the extra hacks you can do to make this an even more effective strategy is whenever you do that, reframe the amount of time you saved, right? We're here in Boston. Like, you know, before I came to the studio, I stopped at this local coffee shop that was right near there and I just got breakfast. I got this nice little egg sandwich, it's a little egg souffle, it was delicious. Oh, it is my favorite egg sandwich on the planet

with that mustardy aioli and the arugula. Yes, a little dijon. And that bacon, girl, I'm with you on that, let's go. But if I had to make that myself, I would have to souffle the egg, which would take, I don't know, what's that, 20 minutes to get the nice pop of the egg. I would have to like souffle the egg, which I don't know, what's that 20 minutes to get the nice pop of the egg. I'd have to have gone to the grocery store to get this stuff.

I'd have to like chop up the tomato because it's a nice sliced tomato. I probably saved at least 45 minutes buying that egg sandwich at the shop. What did I do with that 45 minutes? Now I have that, you know, some of that 45 minutes to talk to you. Maybe I take a nice walk. That framing technique matters. Every time you get takeout, go to a restaurant, every time you dropped your clothes off at the laundromat, if you're, again, have enough discretionary income to maybe hire somebody

to mow the lawn or clean or something like that, reframe it and say, oh my gosh, by spending that money, I saved X amount of time and literally give it, it's an hour and a know, hour 20, whatever. And then ask yourself, what did I do at that time? You're making the face that a lot of my students make when they experience this smell, which is kind of like, you have this breath of, I have an hour, an extra hour. You know what else I also love about this? Is that you just did something really important, which is you put value on your time. And what we've been doing wrong is we've been putting all the value on the thing. Or the money that we can use the time for. Right. We're used to kind of kind of switching our time into money of like, well, if I work

an extra hour, if I take overtime or we don't realize that what that money is supposed to be for is to make our lives better. And often what makes our lives better is free time. Individuals who self-report being more time affluent, so they feel wealthy in time, they're more social. There's these funny studies where you just kind of convince people they're a little wealthier in time. You do have people do like a little.

How do you convince me that I'm wealthier in time? Well, psychologists have these very funny hacks. So one funny hack is I give you a little word scramble to do. So there's scrambled up words and you have to unscramble them. But then I make those words be affluent in time. Things like vacation or time off, like holidays. Like I kind of have you have words where you're like, oh yeah, I'm sort of wealthy in time, you know? And then all of a sudden I give you the opportunity, they have subjects in a coffee shop and you can have the opportunity to just chat with somebody.

And I just like sit back and watch, do you chat with people more when you have that moment of feeling a little bit more wealthy in time? And you do. And then you also feel happier because you've just connected with somebody. Exactly. There's also studies showing that people who are wealthy in time do nice stuff for other people. The most terrible one was a study that was done kind of back in the day.

And this is like back in the day when the like ethics of studies maybe weren't so great. It was like in the seventies. But there was a group of researchers who were studying Princeton seminary students. So these are people who are studying to be a priest. Okay. And the study is that you have to go and give a surprise lecture about the story of the good Samaritan, which for, if you don't know is, you know, Jesus was walking around and like saw somebody doing nice stuff. It's like about doing nice things for people in need. Right. But these different seminary students were put under different time pressures.

So some were told, you got a couple hours, you know, you get across town and go give this, but you got some time or really high time pressure. Like actually you gotta go right now. You just don't have time, you gotta get over there. And what the researchers did was they staged someone on route to this lecture that was in need. So it was kind of set up to look like the unhoused person

who'd maybe been hurt. It's kind of like the seminary student has to literally walk over this person to get to the lecture. And the question was just, do you stop to help? Okay, and this is somebody who is studying to be a priest. Correct. So we would think you would be. And he's about to give a story about why Jesus values

doing nice things for people in need. Okay, so you are primed. He's in his head thinking like, how do I think about how to tell people to do nice things? Let's just be honest. If you fail this, you should get kicked out of seminary school. That's basically what I'm going to say there. And basically, the people who are in a rush

pretty much never stop to help someone, which is really sad. Which explains the state of society today. Which actually explains the state of society today. Which actually explains the state of society today. We're rushing around. We all feel so busy. I think time famine has felt like it's going up around. We just don't have the bandwidth to help other people. We don't have the bandwidth to help the planet.

There's lots of evidence that if you're feeling under more time pressure, you don't recycle. Honestly, I feel like I'm guilty of this myself where it's like, I gotta wash the thing and do it. I'm literally like, I look, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm like, wait, landfill, recycle, which if there's an egg on it, do I put it? You just opt out. But imagine like it was like,

that Sunday morning feeling where you got nothing to do and you're like, I could wash the glass a little extra to put it in the, you know, like we're hurting ourselves, each other, the planet, just because we don't have any time. OK, now I'm depressed. So there is good news. But the good news is like. The tire is flat. Now I'm leaky. Dr. Santos, how do I be happy?

But the beauty is that you can, first of all, you can prioritize your free time. You can spend money to get back more. But these little hacks of just remembering what free time you do have, right? You know, I bought my egg sandwich and that saved me 45 minutes. That alone can kind of put me in the head space to have a bit more free time. Another one of my favorite hacks is to find ways to use the free time you do have. The journalist Bridget Schulte coined this term that I absolutely adore, which is called time confetti, by which she means the little five minutes you have here and there, we don't think it's that much. So we usually just blow it. You know, if you're

pick up our phone, yeah, you pick up your phone, you scroll Instagram, check your email, but those five minutes add up. In fact, Ashley Williams and her colleagues estimate that we actually have more free time now than we did 10, 20 years ago. What? I know. There's no way that's true. But the difference is it's broken up in stupid ways.

It's these little five, we don't have these big chunks anymore. We got five minutes of time confetti, 10 minutes of time confetti here and there. So it doesn't feel like a lot. So we just blow it. But those are perfect moments to engage in all these strategies to fill up our leaky tire. I think we'll start talking about some of that. Let's do that.

Okay, so let's fill up the leaky tire. We're going to take our time, confetti, five minutes at a time. And we are going to start rewiring our brain for happiness. Dr. Santos, I really want to dig into this more with you, but I need to take a short break. So let's take a moment and hear a word from our sponsors. And when we come back, we're going to be diving right back in.

So don't go anywhere. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And today you and I are getting to spend time learning about the simple things that we can do to make ourselves a little bit happier every day. And so Dr. Santos, in the course, you teach five ways to rewire yourself for happiness and fill up this tire. So what's the first way that you can rewire your mind for happiness?

The first step is to engage in more social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests happy people are more social. People who self-report being happier physically spend more time around other people, less time alone, and they also spend more time with their friends and family members. So they prioritize time, not just with any old human bodies floating around there. They pick time with people they care about. And this seems to be true both for introverts and extroverts. Really? Yeah. So the key that other people matter for introverts and extroverts is some work by Nick

Epley and his colleagues. He does these studies where he just like basically forces people to be a little bit more social than they normally would. So he walks up to people, he's at the University of Chicago, so he does this on the L train. Oh, I know this study where he forces people to talk to strangers on the train and to work. Yeah. And just for a $5 Starbucks gift card, everybody's willing to do this. People sign up for that to talk to a stranger? People will do anything for a $5 Starbucks gift card.

It's really the engine of all social science research. Wow. People are like, I don't want to do that. It's like $5 Starbucks gift card. You're like, engine of all social science research. Wow. People are like, I don't want to do that. It's like $5 Starbucks gift card. You're like, okay, fine. I'll talk to someone. Because that, and now notice my reaction. And as you're with Dr. Santos and I, you probably had the same reaction as you're listening to us. Like I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't do that for a $5 Starbucks gift card.

There's no way you would talk to, I mean, like you just got to talk to some random person on your computer. But I think the important thing here is that our reaction is that this is not going to be fun. Correct. And our reaction is, so much so, I don't want a gift card to do that. Yeah. And so we all would go into that situation and say, but what did the research find?

Well, Nick actually did that comparison. He asked people, hey, if you were in these two conditions, like, first of all, would you do it? And, you know, how would it feel? And people said exactly what you're saying, Mel. And what I'm sure if you're listening, you the person listening right now, I think you're right. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. It would feel terrible.

Not just it would feel neutral, but it would feel actively awkward or yucky or whatever. And what he finds is that it's just the opposite. People who spend their train ride talking to a stranger experience positive emotion. They feel more energized. They feel less lonely. And in fact, enjoying your solitude on the train kind of makes you feel a little anxious, yucky. I mean, we can kind of simulate you're like, oh yeah, if I tell you, yeah, just don't talk to anyone, enjoy your solitude. What happens? We start ruminating, we get in our head, right? And so just the simple act of talking to a stranger makes us feel good. But the reason I love Nick's research is he tested this extrovert-introvert question.

And what he finds is that there's no difference in the happiness boost that extroverts and introverts get. Where there's a difference is on that prediction question. If I ask you, hey, how bad is it gonna be to talk to someone on the train? Extroverts think pretty bad, but introverts think like, bad, bad. It's death. Yeah, like the most horrible thing.

But what's striking is they're wrong. You know, I do think it's a skill to just learn how to talk to people and the fastest way that I've taught myself how to do it. And again, I've been doing this now for decades because I get very anxious when I feel lonely. You're good at that. You do this for a living, right?

Well, yeah. And I also do this to make my life better. So saying hello, like, hey, good morning, you know, to the person who I am, like, let's say we're ordering an egg sandwich. As a person is ringing me up, like, hey, how you doing? And most people kind of look at you like, oh, hi. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I love your nails. And oh, well, thank you. And a compliment. Yes, huge. And a smile. Like what I find is it's almost like popcorn. If I walk in and I'm a pop kernel and I'm warm, there's something about complimenting somebody's socks

or complimenting their nails or being like, even if they serve you the cup of coffee, you're like, oh my gosh, that's so beautiful. Thank you. Oh, I really needed this. There's something about your warmth that always gets returned. And then I feel lifted by that interaction.

And it helps me. Yeah. And this was something that Nick Epley said on my podcast. He said, look, Lori, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. Like if somebody waves at you, you're going to wave back. Right? And then that just kind of gets the social connection off the ground. And for both individuals, it winds up feeling better. And I bet same thing, you know, true of you at the coffee

shop and you say, Oh my gosh, this latte looks so pretty or nice meals. That person might not have predicted that they wanted to talk to you, but afterwards their happiness leaky tires a little bit more. Absolutely. So the first takeaway I absolutely love and the tool for me, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. So always be the person who waves. Yeah. I love that. What is the second way we can rewire our brains for happiness? It's related to the first. It's another way to exploit social connection, but it's becoming

a little bit more other oriented. What does that mean? It means like, instead of doing stuff for yourself, like self-oriented, you becoming a little bit more other oriented. What does that mean? It means like, instead of doing stuff for yourself, like self-oriented, you get a little other oriented. Like you spend your money and your time on other people. And this is a spot where I think our intuitions are, like an overdrive in the wrong direction and our culture takes us in the wrong direction.

Well, I had a little bit of a moment when you said, spend your money and time on other people. I'm like, but Dr. Santos, I don't have any time for myself. So why the hell am I gonna give my money and my time to somebody else? My kids are draining me dry. I'm giving my time to my work.

So now you're telling me I gotta be other oriented. Give me a break. My gas is leaking here out of this tire. What do I do? So one of the surprising things, again, spot where our intuitions are wrong, I'm going to say this and you're listening right now and you'd be like, that's not true. But what the research shows is that the act of doing something nice for somebody else makes you feel like you have more time.

It's one of these hacks that gives us more time affluence. Think about it. You're at work and somebody's going through something tough. You say, well, what can I take off your plate? Can I help you with something? Just like out of the goodness of your heart. What does that tell you? You're kind of like, well, I must have more openness on my plate if I'm going to help this other person do something. That's true. And if you're the one that holds open the door, it means you have more time

because you're not rushing through it. Exactly. Oh, that's interesting. That's sneaky. It's sneaky, but it's a funny hack to make yourself feel like you have more time is to opt to do something voluntarily for others. And I think that's the key word though, voluntarily. Too often we feel overwhelmed when we feel the have-to's in life, the shoulds of life,

right? I'm supposed to do this for other people. If you're doing lots of stuff for other people and you don't have a choice, you know, maybe you're caretaking for, you know, like an adult in your life or helping someone out or kind of stuck in child care. If you feel like you have no choice, then that doesn't count. But if you willingly are like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got time to do that. I'm going to choose to do that with my time or my money. Now that's when the benefits start to kick in.

Wow. Dr. Santos, this is so interesting. I've never really heard somebody break it down like this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. This feels like a really great moment to just take a beat, let everything that you're teaching us settle in. While you're listening to a few words from our amazing sponsors, take a minute and share this with somebody.

I mean, we're talking a lot about happiness and there's no doubt that the people that you care about in your life, they deserve to be happier and they need this information too. And don't go anywhere because when we return, we're going to dig in even deeper. You do not want to miss this and we're going to be waiting for you when we come back. Stay with me. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins and today you and I are spending time together with the amazing Dr. Lori Santos. She teaches the single most popular course ever taught in college on the surprising science

of happiness. And we are in for a master class. So Dr. Santos, the second thing that rewires your brain is this sort of real focus on other people. And, you know, when I think about some of the research that you mentioned earlier, especially around loneliness and it doubling and just how it's true, everybody seems to feel very lonely right now. Totally.

I mean, the rates of loneliness are like at 60% and every demographic group levels of loneliness are going up. So does your focus on sort of these small social interactions and these small ways to be more outwardly focused and kinder to other people, which is going to boost your happiness. It's also going to deceive you into thinking you have more time because you're really taking the time to do this. Does it also have an

impact on your feelings of loneliness? For sure. I mean, that might be one of the hugest impacts it has. In part, because like when you reach out to other people, you know, chat with the priest at the coffee shop, talk to someone else, reach out to an old friend, another good one, those just kind of are actions that make you feel less lonely. One of the fastest hacks to reduce loneliness, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, I'm feeling a little lonely, is to try to help the loneliness of somebody else. Literally take out your phone, scroll through the contacts, pick the name that you think might be feeling the most lonely, having the toughest time, and just, you know, send them a text that says, hey, just thinking about you. Well, listen,

this is cool. Mel Robbins podcast. We were talking about friendships and just made me think about you. It'd be great to connect. Yeah. And better yet, share them this episode and let's talk about it. Like it's something that you can talk about. I think a lot about this because, you know, I think about the rise in loneliness and I look what's happening in the world and there's absolutely zero doubt that every single human being that has a smartphone is addicted to it. And everybody has way more time than they think, but they're pouring it into social media and they're pouring it into just being online and doom scrolling.

I get really scared because what I see happening down on the street in our day-to-day lives and in my life and in my family is we are now living life connected to our phone. And then I see society trying to address what is clearly the problem. Like I just saw some country name some minister of loneliness.

And I see, you know, courses filling up about happiness. And, but we're all in it and addicted to it that you don't even see that you're in it and how much it's killing your joy and your ability to connect. And I think you can reclaim your life and your happiness. One of these micro interactions at a time that have you look up and smile at somebody

or hold the door or compliment someone, or if you're on the phone, send the text instead of staring at an influencer that's trying to sell you something. I mean, it's just scary to me. And it's deeply ironic, right? Like in theory, social media was supposed to be social, right? In theory, we could use our phones to socially connect, right?

I just told you- They weren't wired to keep you on it so that people could make more money advertising if the algorithms didn't optimize to literally take advantage of your brain wiring to keep you on it and to manipulate you, then yeah. And that's the irony, right? That they should be helping us be more social, but they just aren't. And like, you know, the study, when you look at the actual data of how much our phones are

stealing our attention, it's just so terrible. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the university. They're not even stealing. They're actually designed to. Yes, exactly. Designed to steal, like designed. And to do it kind of undercurrent, so we don't notice. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has this study of people just in a waiting room. You go to the doctor's office or something, you're sitting in the waiting room. She either lets people have their phones there or not. And what she finds is that there's 30% less smiling in the room of people when people have their phones out, even if they're

not on their phone, just having it like it's in your purse, right? I mean, it's incredible, but you get it, right? Because like the sad thing is what folks have done with phones is they've engineered content that's like, you know, built to be more exciting than what we assume is true for social connection, right? Liz Dunn, when she was on my podcast, had this lovely analogy. She said, you know, you go, you go to dinner with your husband and I have my phone flipped over on the desk. Right. But imagine instead of my phone, I had like a big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow were like printouts of every photo I've taken since 2015, like, you know, big binders of my emails,

you know, since I moved to Yale the first time, um, newspapers from every country in the world, right. Like videotapes of cat videos and porn, just like a huge wheelbarrow of all this stuff on the internet. And she's like, if that wheelbarrow was sitting there at dinner, you would not be able to pay attention to your husband because you'd be like, Oh, I want to look, I want to just watch that real cat video, throw it in the VCR or something. She's like, your brain isn't stupid. Your brain knows that on the other side of that phone that's sitting flipped over on the table, all that stuff is there.

So even when you're not looking at it, even when you're not ignoring your husband and sort of fubbing him because you're staring at your Instagram feed, something in your brain has to hold back, right? It's as leashes me like, no, don't look at the cat videos. Don't look at the old photos, right? We've kind of set up this distraction that's there with us all the time. And every study that's looked at it has found we do worse on memory tests when our phones are with us. Well, it has a direct connection to happiness.

Yeah. Because what's happening is when we're not on our phone, we're kind of missing out on something. And the question is, what are we usually missing out on? And it's usually other people, right? All the social connection that we're not experiencing, which we just heard is so important for happiness, which then kind of psychologically makes us feel lonely. It also ends up decreasing our presence, which is something we haven't talked about yet, but is really kind of matters for happiness. Right? What you use the word, fubbing, what is that? Fubbing is a term that my students use. It's a P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. So it's phone snubbing. So it's like, you're trying to talk to me and you notice like, I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh. But I'm really like looking at my phone.

Well, when somebody does that, and I'm hovering here not because I want to spend too much time talking about the phones, but I think it's extraordinarily important. Totally. To highlight and to also embrace the truth. Yeah. That if your life feels like you are a tire that is flat and you would like to be happier, then there is a direct connection

between your unhappiness and your phone use. Because the phone and the way that you've allowed it to take over your life is interfering with your ability to do these five things in your day-to-day life that actually, based on the research, will fill up the tire and make you happier in your life and with your life. And that's why I wanna be very clear

that this is a massive problem and you have an opportunity, if you're serious about being happy. Like you can spend the rest of your life mainlining social media and staring at other people's lives and then get to your grave and go, Oh God, I actually didn't use my time while I was here to do what I needed to do to be happy and to live my life. And that's what's happening to the majority of people.

Yeah. And for sure that's what's happening to our students. But you don't have to let it happen. Totally, yeah. No, you have power over this, right? You can flip it over, you can leave it somewhere else. Or if you can't get out of your hand. Go to a doctor, because that's a problem. No, I'm saying, like, you're not gonna,

like, would you walk around life with an eight ball in your hand? And like, it would destroy it. And I do think if you look at the research and this is again why I wanna hammer this point is that I think every one of us is at this really scary tipping point where there's a before and an after.

And you could hear this episode and decide that you wanna be the kind of person that actually happiness is important and taking care of your mental health is important and staying connected to people in a meaningful way and being present for your life is important. And if it is important, you have to be honest with yourself that it will take a decision on your part to go, I'm not giving my life to this phone and to social media. I'm just not doing it. Yeah. And I'm not giving my life to this phone and to social media. I'm just not doing it.

Yeah. And I'm going to follow this advice. Go ahead. I was going to say one of my favorite strategies for dealing with this comes from the journalist Catherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she doesn't exactly argue that you need to break up with your phone, but it's more you need to take it to like couples counseling, sort of the idea. And she has this lovely acronym she uses.

In fact, you could go on her website and get these little plastic bracelets that you can slide around your phone. The acronym is WWW, which kind of fits like World Wide Web. But hers is what for, why now, and what else? And her argument is every time you find your phone in your hand, ask WWW, what for? Was there some purpose? Maybe you needed to like look up directions, you know, on my way here to the studio, I had to pull my phone out because I didn't know what the studio was looking. But also when I was walking, I was just like, also scrolling through.

Yeah, it's boredom usually for me. So is there a reason? Reason, you know, reasons are good. Why now? Why now? This is a really important one because it's about what was the emotional trigger that caused you to go there? Because my sense is if you're listening right now and you heard Mel's advice, you're like,

I'm going to put it away. There are going to be some moments where that's easier or harder. And the why now question forces you to ask the question like, well, why now? Why is it harder now? Oh, I was bored or I was a little bit anxious or, you know, or whatever it is, right? Kind of notice mindfully, non-judgmentally, like what drives you to go there. But the most important one, Mel, the thing I think the thing you're getting as the last one, what else? What is the opportunity cost? Whether that's talking to your husband

at dinner, just having that moment of time confetti that you could use for something more positive, maybe the most important, just being present, right? You know, I was saying when I was walking over here, I pulled the phone out for a good what for reason, I was looking for the directions. But then once it's in my hand, like it's in my hand, I had this moment where I kind of looked up for a second. I was like, oh my gosh, we're in this beautiful neighborhood in Seaport where there's like the water and the red bricks.

If I was deep in my email, I would have missed that, right? And that little moment of noticing and being present with the sights and the sounds, that's a really important thing to boost your leaky happiness time. So many of those moments are just lost. Well, that kind of brings us to the third way that you're going to build the skill of being happier and boosting happiness in your day to day life.

And it has to do with what you were just talking about kind of being present and grateful. Yeah, this is one that is in the cultural zeitgeist, right? We talk a lot about mindfulness, but we don't spend a lot of time doing it. I feel like this is sort of grandmotherly wisdom, but it is not common practice, right? Most of us spend a lot of our time mind wandering where your brain is flitting to like, oh, what should I have for dinner tonight?

Or that weird conversation you had with your spouse. You're just like, brain is anywhere, but in the present moment. There's a very funny study by the Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, that tried to estimate, well, how often do we spend mind wandering? And what he finds is that people self-report, I am absolutely not paying attention to what I'm doing

just under 50% of the time. I think it was like 48.9% of the time, you're like, yeah, wasn't paying attention. And he finds that there's a kind of equal not paying attention-ness in like all the different activities, whether you're at work, at leisure, watching TV. He found a slight dip for one activity, which is when people self-reported that they were having sex.

But I actually don't believe the state of point. I was like, I don't know. But in any case, basically all the good things in life were not paying attention to. But the most important part of Dan's study for happiness research is that last question, how are you feeling right now? And what he finds is that whenever you self-report mind wandering, like whatever to its two, even if it's like a good thing, like, oh, I was thinking about my upcoming vacation, you're less happy than if you just like weren't mind wandering. Like, like when you report like, oh, I was deep in that, you know,

dumb Excel spreadsheet that I was like working on at work. When you're in flow and doing that, you feel better than if your kind of mind is off thinking about something else. And so the implication is that the way we become happier is we get in the present moment. We kind of notice what's going on. For me, walking over to the studio, I put my phone away and just notice the nice kind of chill in the air and the sights and all these things. How does that boost happiness to practice and grab these moments and come into the present moment? Yeah, I think partly it's just being in the present moment. I mean, that's what's striking about some of this research, right? Is that when you're just there, even if they're there,

isn't it awesome? Even if it comes with, you know, this morning was a little chilly, right? You know, be honest. And like, it was one of those days in Boston where like, you know, it was beautiful water, but a little smelly side, you know? Just even though it didn't seem good, just the fact that I was there with it made me a little bit more grounded, a little bit more pleasant in my life. That's one of the striking things is that presence works not just when everything is unicorns and rainbows. Being present also seems to work well when things don't feel so good. And you asked before what are the biggest misconceptions that students have from the class or the biggest aha moments.

I think this is a real big one, which is that sometimes we need to commit to being present, even when we don't feel so hot. You know, it's interesting is that we always walk to the studio in the morning. And I'm almost always with Tracy, who's the executive producer, and Christine, who's our COO of She's in Town. And we're never on our phones because our phones are in our bags. And it takes us about 15 minutes to walk over here. And I always feel better. I always feel happier.

I feel energized. And so it is something that I think we all know works. We wish it were something we could buy because that would feel instant and easier versus what you've been telling us all along, that happiness is something that you need to practice. It's a skill. It's something that can start leaking from the tire if you're not paying attention to it. But the really good news I'm realizing

is that at any moment, you can use any of the five things that you're teaching us to rewire our brains and help us boost our happiness. That's right. Now, can you share the third way that we rewire our minds for happiness? Well, it's something that you just mentioned getting on your drive in. It's the practice of experiencing gratitude.

And gratitude, I think, is a special form of presence that we really need to dig into, right? It's this idea of not just the noticing, which is regular presence, but noticing the things that are really good, right? On my walk to your studio, it could be, I'm walking right now, right? A few months ago, I had a knee injury, like, I would have had to take that Uber, but like, oh, I'm out walking, right?

I recently had COVID and lost my sense of smell, completely lost my sense of smell, which was awful, right? But even as you're making fun of the Lake Boston harvest, smelling a little stinky, I could have a moment of gratitude for that, of like, I can tell it's stinky, right? But even, you know, as you're making fun of the like Boston Harvest, Spillin' a Little Stinky, like I could have a moment of gratitude for that. Of like, I can, I can tell it's stinky, right? Which, oh my gosh, what a miracle that was and how easily it could have gone away.

And so that's what gratitude does in presence. Like you're being present, but you're noticing that, like, things don't have to be this way, right? I could miss out on these kind of gifts. Then, and if you kind of have your attitude like that, if you can kind of bust out of that negativity bias to notice some of these things, there's so much stuff out there that's a gift from like our basic senses to the fact that we're above ground today, right? You know, one of my favorite hacks for noticing the blessings that

you might not have noticed is actually an ancient hack. It comes from the ancient Stoics who had this idea of what they called negative visualization. And so their idea was something that you love in life, your husband, your kid, your car, whatever, just imagine it's not there anymore, it's gone. The last time you saw it was the last time you will ever see it. You can come up-

I don't wanna think about that. Yuck, right? Then you do that with your husband, with Chris, right? The last time you saw him was the last time you're ever going to see him. My guess is when you get home tonight and you give him a hug, just that two seconds that we spent on that, you'll hug him a little bit more. So if you're listening right now and you've got a kid, the kid one is powerful. Last time you saw your kid was the last time you're ever going to see them.

Or your parents. Or your parents, right? That's one hack that I like for gratitude. But another one is just kind of committing to scribbling it down. Is the writing important? So it's more spending time thinking about it that's important, but the writing kind of forces you to do that. So if you can commit to like another practice I've heard one of my students use is like,

just when they're brushing their teeth, just go through, I'm really grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my job. I'm grateful that you know, my legs work today. All of those things are things that might not be true. And so just like find a time when you do something anyway, like brushing your teeth and think about it. But if writing it down helps, that can kind of force you to pay attention to it. And the nice thing is sometimes you can go back to it. I don't have like a fancy, some people talk about gratitude journal. I don't have a fancy gratitude journal, but even sometimes in my notes app,

I'm being consistent with it. I'll scribble down things. And that's a thing that you can go back to, right? We talked about our phones being bad, but sometimes we can use our phones for positive things. And for me on a bad morning, looking back at that notes app and just seeing like all the things, you know

And they're often stupid things like a lot of days. They really that's actually not that stupid because it's almost like a super size Of gratitude. Well, let's start there because that's the fourth way that we can unlock happiness and it's through the practice of savoring And really just like diving into it, right? You know, you can drink your coffee or you can really be present thinking, how does this taste? How does this smell? How so lucky am I that I have this miracle of a sensation

that can allow me to taste and smell this coffee, which again, just cause I lost it, like it's more fragile than we think and we forget. And just that act of kind of being in it. And it's useful to know that we can do that kind of for anything, right? And so I've tried to remind myself to do that whenever I'm doing the dishes. I have a dishwasher, so it's not like I do dishes religiously, but you know, sometimes there's like one or two you gotta do, right? But just like the water on my hands and the suds and a little bit of the smell of the dawn, which I like,

I like that kind of fun, you know, like feeling the porcelain and like, it's so silly, but it turns that task that was this onerous, stupid thing that I had to get done into a moment to be present and to notice like some of these things feel really nice. My favorite way to do this is the weather. I always step outside and either remark to myself what a beautiful day it is, or even if it's disgusting and gross and it's raining, I'll remark how wild the clouds look. Yeah. And so I didn't realize that that's what that was,

but it hyper focuses me on this thing that's happening, that I just take a minute and take in. And I do feel this little like, Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons that folks often talk about how being in nature can bring us happiness. Because I think it winds up being a little bit easier to savor in nature, right?

Because the clouds are moving and they're so beautiful or you're around the trees and you hear the crunching. In places like Japan, they talk about this concept of forest bathing, where you're just kind trees and you hear the crunching. In places like Japan, they talk about this concept of forest bathing, where you're just kind of out bathing in the forest. And I love that term because it sort of shows you the savoring where you're like, I'm just bathing in all these sensory experiences. Dr. Santos, what's a fifth way that we can rewire our minds for happiness? I mean, there's so many. And you know,

my 26 weeks, which into only five tips. We talked about time already. So maybe for my fifth one, I'll talk about a strategy that I have a lot of trouble with, which is that we should bring a mindset of self-compassion. I think one of the ways we make ourselves really miserable is that we beat ourselves up a lot. We have incredibly high standards. And rather than achieving those high standards by talking to ourselves like a lot. We have incredibly high standards and rather than achieving those high

standards by talking to ourselves like a kind coach who's always motivating and knows we can fail, we talk to ourselves like this evil drill instructor that has like, why could you be so stupid? And this like for some people, maybe even if you're listening, you might recognize this can just become a constant refrain in our head of beating ourselves up. And I think we do this not because we're masochists. I think we do this because we think it works. We think that's the way to get off our couches and get into the world and do stuff. But researchers like Chris De Neff have studied,

like, hey, does berating yourself on a constant mental loop basis really work? Turns out, like, surprise, surprise, no. It makes us procrastinate. It makes us feel drained. And it has a hugely negative effect on our happiness. And so Neff and others have come up with a much better, healthier mindset for self-talk,

which is what they call self-compassion. I think, you know, self-compassion is not huge. So I think it's helpful to break it up into steps. Step one is something we've just been talking about a lot, which is sort of mindfulness. And not even mindfulness of the exterior, but mindfulness of the interior. It's, I'm having some trouble with this. This is hard. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm off my game. Right? It's being mindful that you're not in a perfect space. But then the second step is what

people like Kristin F. call common humanity. It's following that I'm in a bad space up with, and that's normal. It is a common human experience to feel overwhelmed. Like, it is completely fine that I'm going through this. It makes sense. It is a common human experience. But then the third step, which is a hard step, is what Neff calls self-kindness. You say, how can I treat myself with some kindness? How can I treat myself like a friend? What can I take off my plate? What do I need right now? You kind of coach yourself like you would coach someone you really care about.

I mean, it makes perfect sense. How could you possibly think you're going to be happy while you're hating on yourself? Exactly. And so I think it's important for all of us to also be reminded that you should just assume that everybody that you meet is busy- Everybody's trashing themselves. Yeah, trashing themselves. One of my favorite quotes that my students really love in the course is, you shouldn't

be comparing your insights to other people's outsides. I see my inside of like, oh, I'm ruminative and kind of messing up. And I was thinking that thing that I didn't say, but I'm just comparing them to say, you're outsides like, oh, you just put together podcasts, you're doing a great job. But we don't see what's going on internally. So it's a compare, we shouldn't be comparing ourselves anyway, but that's a really unfair comparison because people are actively good at hiding

when their insides are self-critical or filled with doubt and so on. How does comparison play into happiness and unhappiness? Oh, it's huge. I mean, one, another stupid feature of our mind is that our minds don't ever think about something objectively, right? So it takes something like salary, right? Like, you know, what's your salary, right? Think about your salary right now. Is that

a good salary? Probably not thinking about it objectively in terms of how much purchasing power you've had. You probably said, well, it's not a good salary because, you know, so and so makes more or I could be making more, right? You're just comparing it to something else. You know, you know, are you pretty, right? You instantly think of people that you think of as pretty and you kind of compare yourself often in a downward way. And this is just true of how our minds work. And the problem is that usually when we pick a kind of reference point, as it's called, that's like the comparison point, we pick a comparison point that's particularly awesome. That's like really, really good.

And even if you're at the top of your game, you do that too. Oh, of course. Like I feel like that never changes. Yeah. It just, who you're looking at changes. Yeah. But we tend to be obsessed with,

what is it called, upward comparison? Which is somebody that we perceive to be like either of higher social status or that has something that we've been trashing ourselves over and then we obsess over that. Well, how the hell? That's clearly draining the tire. So how do you stop doing that? I know all five things kind of honestly snap you out of it.

I think one thing with comparison though, and this might be true for some of these hacks already is like, it's going to be hard to fully shut it off because we just don't, our brains just work that way. They can't think objectively, but we have a little bit of control at what counts as a comparison point, right? And I was just walking over the studios, become this sort of metaphor we're using for this, but walking over the studio, like I could myself to, like, you know, all the runners that were passing by really quickly. But my thought pattern went to, like, well, remember when your knee was, you know, totally messed up and you couldn't even walk and you'd be crouching over here, right? It's like you find, finding a comparison that makes you feel

good can actually make you feel, but our brains naturally go to the ones that make us feel crappy. But we can find, sometimes finds one that makes us feel good. Yeah. I'm starting to realize like you have the ability to inflate your tire. Yeah. And you're constantly at the auto body shop with the little thingy pin in and it's ready to go. We just miss opportunities to fill it up.

And you could even ask yourself at any moment, is this going to let the air out or is this actually going to fill me up a little bit, even if it's just a little boost? And those boosts last, right? We talked before about kind of this idea of being happy in your life, which is a sort of positive emotion and being happy with your life. The more you just commit to those little boosts, it's not just an in your life boost. That just makes you feel like your life has purpose. It makes you feel like your life is meaning. It makes you feel satisfied with your life too.

So for the person that's listening, that may just feel a little bit of conflict about why this matters. And we do have listeners that are in refugee camps. Yeah. And we do have listeners that are facing extraordinarily difficult situations in the countries that they're living in right now. Or they're going through just devastating grief or some kind of health scare, or they're just overwhelmed by the state like the world around you has such bigger problems?

I love that you asked this because honestly, if I had to say the question I get from students the most, it's this one. And I think the form for college students is a little bit similar. It's kind of like, how dare I? How dare I, with all the problems of the world, focus on my own happiness, right? And I get it, right? There are real problems out there in the world.

But I think this comes to, that question sort of shows a different incorrect theory we have about happiness, which is like, if we're feeling happy, we're just gonna let the rest of the world burn. Like, I don't know if you're listening right now and you know the meme with the dog, with the flames going up and the dog's like, this is fine.

I think we think if we're just focusing on our own happiness, we'll be like that, right? But that's an empirical question, right? Are happy people doing stuff to fix the world? Are they letting it burn? And the answer is really clear. It comes from folks like Konstantin Kuchlev at Georgetown and others who study

who are the people that are out there making a difference. And what he finds is if you survey people's level of positive emotion, if you survey how satisfied they are with their lives, the people who are taking the action are the ones who are happiest. There's this lovely effect in the field called the feel good, do good effect,

which is that if you put people in a positive mood, they wind up doing better stuff. You know, studies, for example, like pipe really happy music at the gym versus kind of sadder music at the gym. And you have people when they're leaving the gym volunteer to do a survey or volunteer to help someone or donate blood. And what you find is that people when they listen to the good music or are in a better mood just wind up doing the nice thing that takes them some time and energy, but it's for a good cause.

I think this is the answer to why we should all be focused on our happiness. I think one of the reasons the world is burning so badly is that we're all not feeling so good. And if we could intervene on the feeling good, we'd probably get a long way towards the doing good part too. Now, does that mean we just focus on our own individual happiness and ignore all the structural problems? For sure not.

I think we could work on those together. I think we're all gonna have a lot more emotional bandwidth to fix stuff if we are focused on filling up our happy tires. Well, I have another reason that I would add to it. And it comes back to your metaphor of the tire, which is so helpful. If you're going through a period in your life

where the tire is flat or deflated, it's very hard to move forward. It's very hard to meet the challenges of your life right now. And if that's you, the reason why happiness matters is because absolutely every single thing that Dr. Santos just shared with us is a small way to fill the tire up, which means you can be better equipped to roll forward in your own life. And I also understand, like a great professor,

that you give your students happiness homework. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's not like happiness essays or multiple choice questions. Well, why is it so important to give them happiness homework? And what have you found over the years as students have tried to complete this happiness homework? Yeah. So the analogy I use with my students is imagine if instead of being worried about my students happiness, I was really worried about my students level of fitness, right?

Like I wanted them to like get fit and make better bundles and get healthy. I could teach a whole class about, you know, leg day and how to do squats appropriately. And this is a deadlift and here's how muscles work. But if students closed their books at the end of that lecture and went home and didn't hit the gym, nothing would change, right? They know, but they wouldn't necessarily put it into practice. And this is kind of the problem with a lot of the happiness research. The biggest bug in the whole class equation is like, you got to have to do this stuff. And if you're listening right now, it's not just my students, you just heard all this great stuff. But if you don't put it into practice and get your social connection and think about

what you're grateful for and find ways to savor and put your phone away, if you don't do that stuff, nothing's going to change. What is one assignment that you can give to the person listening to take something that we talked about today and go do? Well, I'm going to pick one that you're good at. I'm going to say that all of your listeners sometime this week, the next seven days, you have to give at least three compliments to people in your life. They can be strangers, they can be someone else, but really kind of try to present the compliment

in a way that really matters to the person you're talking to. And that's nice because it's boom, it's other oriented, you're doing something nice for somebody else, boom, it's social connection, you gotta talk to somebody. And three, it's kind of savoring because, you know, when you noticed my necklace this morning, it meant that you noticed it, you were present with it. You kind of liked

it and noticed the color and things like that. So you're going to get like a threefer with this compliment practice. And extra bonus points, if you tell us you did it, you know, find me on social media, find Mel and tell us what you did and tell us how it went. Yeah. Because I bet you're going to notice exactly what the research said. The tire inflates a little. And again, the tire inflating, it's not going to pop, right? It's not going to be so happy that you burst. A single compliment is not going to do that. But over time, a few of these in the week, and you can be an overachiever like my Yale

students. You don't have to stop at three. You can just do one every day, right? The more you pump it up, the more you're happy your tire will be. Dr. Santos, what are your parting words? We can all be a little bit happier if we put in a little bit of time and energy. Well, I just wanna thank you for being with us today

and sharing everything that you just poured into us. I'm so excited to try it. I'm excited for the person who's listening to us to try it in their life and share it with their friends. I just really appreciate your generosity. And you just have this unbelievable way. I feel smarter as I listen to you because you're weaving in so much science,

but you do it in a way that makes me see the study and to understand the research and to feel very convinced that this is gonna work. And I just truly appreciate that gift in you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And it's such a pleasure to always be able to spend this time with you.

And I wanna thank you for listening all the way to the end and for taking time. We talked a lot about time when we were learning from Professor Santos, for taking time and spending it on yourself. You deserve to be happier. And so do the people that you love in your life. And there is zero doubt in my mind

that if you follow the homework and if you really absorb everything that Dr. Santos taught us today, and you do it, you will be happier and you deserve it. And one more thing, in case no one else tells you today, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you. And I believe in your power to create a better life and learning how to just fill up the tires a little bit to keep you rolling forward no matter what's going on. That will absolutely make your life a lot better. Alrighty, I'll

see you in the very next episode and I'll be waiting for you the moment you hit play. I'm seeing the background. I'm like, oh my gosh, really here? I like plopped into the YouTube. I mean, I've been digging into your research. I have used it. I have taught it. So to sit with you and be able to learn from you, it's really so exciting. Oh, that means so much.

God damn, I love you. Do you like that? Okay, great. Yeah, of course. No problem. No problem. Patrick on the move on the job. Do you need me to redo anything? Was it too long? Do you like it? I liked it. Yeah, okay. I'll just do that and I'll be like, you know. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being with us today. Such a pleasure. I feel like my tire's full. Definitely.

I'm not talking about the one around my waist. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.

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