WHOOP Podcast - The Science of Happiness: How To Live The Life You Want with Dr. Laurie Santos

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

On this week’s episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Dr. Kristen Holmes welcomes Happiness Expert and Yale Professor Dr. Laurie Santos to explore what makes humans happy. This science-backed conversation looks at the key mindset, habits and behaviors that drive a person’s happiness, beyond chasing achievements. Dr. Santos shares the information you need to create lasting joy and quiet negative emotions when they arise. Each practical tool shared in this episode will help to overcome stress, perfectionism and create the self-compassion needed to truly improve your everyday life. (00:35) Inside Dr. Laurie Santos’s Record-Breaking Yale Course(02:04) Differentiating Happiness and Joy (And How To Find Both)(03:33) The Importance of Finding Purpose(05:52) What Happens When You Aren’t Aligned With Your True Self(09:54) The Largest Misconception When It Comes To Happiness(11:40) Happiness in Athletes: Overcoming The Need For Achievement (15:05) Quieting A Negative Mindset (18:52) The Key Mental Shift for Fulfillment(21:36) Fighting Back Against Perfectionist Self Talk(24:50) How Social Comparison is Taking Away (29:39) Impactful Effects of Gratitude and Kindness Meditation(32:26) Creating Psychological Safety & How It Impacts Happiness(33:30) What Role of Sleep Play in Happiness?(39:19) Benefits of Scheduling Your Worry(40:30) The Overwhelming Impact of Social Connection on Health and Happiness(41:50) Social Connection For Extroverts vs Introverts(50:39) Happiness in Marriage: Finding Joy Within Yourself and Your Partner (52:25) How Ruminating In Negative Thoughts Can Hinder Growth(55:38) Attention and Intention in Mindfulness and Meditation(01:01:01) How to Dr. Santos Defines A Good Life(01:01:47) 3 Ways To Bring Happiness Into Your Life TodayFollow Dr. Laurie SantosInstagramYouTubeXWebsiteSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

What's up, folks? If you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get a high performance wearable in the mail for free. Get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. Dr. Lori Santos, welcome. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I am so thrilled to talk to you today. I've been following your work for a very, very long time and a huge admirer of all the contributions you've made. And I think what I love about how you go about your business is that you are just such a clear communicator of science. And I love this little data point, this fun fact that you have the most popular class at Yale. It's oversubscribed and not just the most popular course in the last couple

years, but literally across the 300 years that Yale has existed, it is the most popular course. It's a humbling, humbling thing. Mild logistical nightmare to get all the students in that one room, but it works out. And the course title has evolved. It's changed, right? It's now the science of happiness. Yeah. We originally called it psychology and the good life, which is the idea is you know, we're all searching for a good life and we want to use evidence-based approach to get there. Well, Dr. Santos, I can't wait to dig into happiness with you. There's literally no one better on the planet to have this discussion with. So we're just going to get right into it. We have, so, you know, our listeners are kind of hard charging, I suppose. And I think,

I know myself, I've struggled with trying to figure out, you know, what is the path of joy, what is the path of happiness? And, you know, I think there's achievement and there's ambition and, you know, can these coexist? You know, what's, what's, what's, actually happening here? Maybe give us some guardrails around what actually is happiness and maybe how does it differ from joy? Yeah. So nerdy social scientists like me tend to define happiness as having these two parts. So they think about being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So these are often called the affective and the cognitive parts of happiness. So being happy in your life is the affective part. It's like it feels good to be you, right? It's the,

you have a decent ratio between your positive to negative emotions. Now, I bet we'll talk. about this, you don't, a good life is not about no negative emotions. We don't want to get into toxic positivity, like you need a range. But hopefully the ratio is pretty good. That's feeling good in your life. But there's a second component, which is the cognitive part, which is sort of how you think your life is going. Like that's like thinking that your life is going well. And it's the answer to the question, all things considered how satisfied am I with my life right now. And so we can probably all think of times that those two parts of happiness dissociate, right? you know, you probably had folks on your show who are working really hard and killing themselves

and feeling like they're doing really purposeful work, but kind of in their life, they don't feel so hot. And we all know those other rich folks who have every hedonic pleasure in their life. You know, they're flying first class and eating great meals. Yeah, but like maybe they don't really know what their life is about. They kind of lack purpose. And so best case in our Iowa is that we boost both of these. And the good news is that the research really gives us strategies that achieve that. I love that.

So thinking about our life versus feeling. Talk a little bit about the cognitive side for a second. Yeah. So the cognitive side is really about having a sense of meaning, having a sense of purpose. It's kind of just like feeling that your life is good. In terms of work, it means like doing work that meets with your values. I spent a lot of time talking to my students about this practice of job crafting, which is his work of a psychologist, Amy Resninski, at Wharton Business School.

And the idea is like you build into your workday. things that allow you to execute your strengths and your value. So if you have a strength of a love of learning, you find ways to build that into what you're doing. If one of your strengths is, say, bravery, you try to figure out where you can execute courage, like on the job. And so you're doing things that allow you to just get a sense of purpose. Live your values. Live your values. And studies show that when you're doing that, you wind up thinking that your job is a calling, right?

So that's, you know, part of what we can do. And I think we can do that in the workplace. We can also do that in our leisure time. I think a mistake that so many of us make, especially the kind of hard-pushing folks, is like when you get to leisure time, you're just like, bleh. Like you have no sense of flow, no sense of purpose. You're just scrolling. But that's another spot where we can think about how can we live our values and our leisure as well.

Yeah, I love that. I know for me, you know, peace is one of my values, you know. And it's like, okay, how do I back into peace? How do I live peace? And for me, you know, it's time in nature, yeah, quality time with my kids where we don't have any distractions where we just can get bored together, you know, like, so it's kind of figuring out, all right, what are the behaviors that allow me to kind of live that value to the fullest? Totally. And I think noticing when you're not aligned with that value, right, I think that

can happen to us a lot at work. We have this moment where you're like, wait, this is a value of mine and I really have not executed that at work in a long time. And sometimes it really just takes, you know, tiny changes. I imagine with a value of peace, it's like, I just need some micro breaks before I go into this meeting to like have an authentic moment, right? And so it often doesn't take much to make these changes, but we really do need to be intentional about it. I love that. You mentioned, you know, just the feeling, I suppose that internal dissonance that one gets when you're not in alignment with who you say you want to be or you're not allowed or able to live your values for whatever reason. Maybe just explain what's actually happening there.

You know, what can someone expect, you know, when they have that dissonance? Yeah, well, a lot of times that dissonance manifests in negative emotions. You know, we just mentioned that you don't want to get rid of negative emotions. And the reason you don't is that they are this wonderful, evolutionarily built alert signal. It's like the evolutionary dashboard on your car, which is like, you know, when your tire light is on, your engine light is on,

so often our negative emotions signal moments of misalignment, right? You know, it's like, oh, tire lights on, something's wrong. I think when you're experiencing sadness, it's like, oh, I'm missing something. Loneliness is a signal like, I need more social connection. A big signal that I think a lot of people who are, you know, live intense lives, get is a sense of overwhelm. Like this, oh, there's too much on my plate, right? Those signals feel very inconvenient.

We don't really want to deal with them. But there's such an honest signal that we need to make a change. And so I think this is just an overhaul that I would give to all your listeners right now, which is like when you have that moment of like, oh, a resistance or something's not an alignment, like almost like have gratitude for it. Like thank you. Like it's almost like, thank you, tire light, very inconvenient. But if I don't deal with you, like I'm going to break down on the highway.

Thank you a sense of overwhelmed for making me realize that, like, you know, while I was in the middle of this email, I wanted to, like, you know, rip my hair out. Like, that has a good signal to tell me I have to make a change. And what's the action that's best associated with kind of dealing with that negative emotion? Because I think, you know, it's interesting. And I feel this tension in modern life to the degree that you can pretty much bypass those signals. Oh, yeah. Because you have access to so much, you know, so you can get that glass of wine. You can have that, You know, that piece of cake, you can scroll on your Instagram. You know, how do you reconcile that?

Yeah, I think it starts with noticing that these signals are important. They're not just like some inconvenient thing that feels kind of gross and you want to avoid it. They're telling you something really critical. And I think once you make that mental switch, it can be powerful. You're like, oh, this is a really good alert signal. What is this teaching me? So I think that's thing number one. I think thing number two is to listen to what that signal's doing and spend some time with it.

Because often when people, especially kind of very like busy people, people who don't like, you know, this kind of inconvenience of their negative emotions, you're just like, oh, something icky. But we don't get granular to figure out what the emotion's telling us. And this is this practice of almost what's called affect labeling, which is like really try to get nerdy, you know, go back to your SAT words and figure out like, what am I going to call this? Like this is overwhelm. This is frustration. Like this is a little slice of feeling really disconnected or like I don't belong. like get granular about what the feeling is because that can often give you hints about how to take action. You know, if it's overwhelmed, you know, it's not going to get solved by scrolling.

Like, you got to take something off your plate. You know, if it's loneliness, you really need to make a social connection. So it helps to really diagnose like what the actual symptom is, not just like, oh, I feel yucky. But oh, now I get what this emotion is. And then you can take action on it. I feel just as you're talking, like I feel like it's like curious. You know, it's like getting curious about the emotional. almost.

And this fits a lot with what researchers like Kristen Neff talk about when she talks about a practice like self-compassion, where you kind of mindfully notice what you're going through. You mindfully notice the emotions. You're not judging it. You're kind of getting curious, almost like a coach would. Yeah, yeah. Like a good mentor of like, huh, how can we solve this problem? This is weird, right?

So you're not pushing it away. You're not judging yourself. You're being compassionate. Yeah. And also you're not being indulgent. I think another thing, like kind of like type A folks start to worry about when they listen to their negative emotions is like, oh, I'm just being so indulgent. I'm just going to, like, sit on the couch and never get anything done. But, you know, if you were really being indulgent, like, say,

you were talking to a friend who was going through a hard time, if that friend was going through something tough, I hope you wouldn't indulge them and be like, oh, it's fine, like, just pretend, just roll, it's okay. But you probably wouldn't, like, scream at them and beat them up either. Hopefully you'd get curious, right? Be like, let's problem solve. How can we figure this out? You know, how did this start? What can we do to make it better? That's the kind of non-judgmental curious approach you bring to yourself. I love that. When you think about this happiness field, which you have been a part of for a while now, and leading the charge, frankly, what's your pet peeve? Or like, what's the biggest myth? Oh, I have so many pet peeves. Yeah. So so many. So let's bust away.

I think for the crowd listening to this, honestly, the biggest one is that our happiness is tied to our achievements or our money or our circumstances. Yes. Further from the truth. Yes. And I think if we like really paid attention, we would notice that. You know, so many of us have the experience of working really hard to get to something. Like, I want to get through this quarterly report or I want to get to the next promotion. I need to get my next degree, whatever it is. Then you get there and you're instantly like, okay, what's the next carrot? Let me move on quickly.

Like these good things in these successes in life don't give us the happiness bump up that we expect. And the bump up that we get doesn't last as long as we expect. And that means we're kind of constantly chasing the next thing. And so I think it's important to remember that happiness is not about what you achieve. It's really about the behaviors and the mindsets that you bring to the journey of whatever it is that you're doing. So it truly is process. It truly is process, right? Which sucks because I think, you know, like folks listening is probably like, I'm good at achieving.

I'm good at getting to the next milestone. But being present and enjoying the ups and downs of that process, that can take a different skill set that we don't often build in as much. I think it goes back to what you said right from the outset. is that it's really about your values first, you know, and the more you can think about your values in the context of how you're living every single day, then all of a sudden, that brings you purpose and all of a sudden you're enjoying the process. All of a sudden, those outcomes, yeah, they're there, but they're not what's driving you. I think that's exactly right. You know, you and I are having this conversation at the end of the Olympics that we're going through in Italy right now

and had this really fun podcast conversation with Michelle Kwan, the Olympic, I mean, And what's interesting is she never won gold, which is kind of people forget because she's such a famous skater. And she says, like, yeah, the medals weren't what I was about. Like, it was really about the little moments. Like she talked about when she would first get on the ice and she was skating and they have the Olympic rings under the ice. And she's like, just noticing that part was what mattered or noticing like the way I could sort of hear the crowd begin shearing when I was there. And that, and that, like, struck me that, you know, even an elite athlete like that, even someone who's in this arena, know, where it's all about metal, metal, metal, found a way to notice the parts that were better.

And I think that's one of the reasons she remained, you know, such an amazing athlete for so long, is that I think there's a real lesson in that for all of us, right? Can you find, you know, what's your little Olympic rings under the ice? What are the things that get you going? And for most of us, that's our values. It's crazy. I, you know, I work, I was an Olympic level athlete and, you know, put a couple of sports in college. And no, but I just, I just feel like we, you know,

I think what gets the athlete to that point of being able to compete at that level is almost not sustainable. You have to refine yourself. I was just, I was working with a swimmer a few years ago, same sort of thing. Like, you know, went to a university of Tennessee was Dutch and just Olympic level and just absolutely amazing. But she was so outcome-oriented, you know, and just really. struggled with frankly joy and you know like she just you know and and manifested in all sorts of you know dilatory ways physiologically and and it she really had to create a new identity yeah and i think you know that's true for elite athletes but it's true for anyone who wants to be at the top of their

game right we just have a bias to become outcome oriented in that way researchers in my field talk about this bias called the arrival fallacy i'll be happy when i'll be happy when I'll be happy when I get that gold medal. I'll be happy when I get that, you know, small promotion. I'll be happy when I make X number of dollars. We just kind of put our happiness on a point that we're at some accomplishment that we're going towards some outcome. And it just doesn't work that way. Why do we as humans mispredict what makes us happy and happy?

Yeah. It's all evolution's fault. Yeah. It's evolution's fault. I mean, I think, you know, if you think of the evolutionary process, you know, natural selection didn't want brains that were like happy and sitting there and savoring, you know, what we got. We never go out and get those blueberries. Yeah, it's like crave, crave, crave, go get more. And so, and that mirror is what we see in the brain.

You know, what's so interesting if you look in the brain is that there's just like not many regions of the brain that experience reward. There's a lot of parts of the brain that go after reward, right? You know, people, all my students talk about like, oh, you know, dopamine, I'm so into dopamine. Dopamine's having a heyday. And people think dopamine is about the feeling of reward, but really what dopamine is about is the going after the reward. The like feeling bad because you don't have the reward yet. That's what it's about. And so much of their brain is built on that.

So we have a brain that's built to crave, to not think that we have enough. And that made good evolutionary sense for, you know, popping out babies and surviving. It doesn't feel so awesome to exist in that space. As a psychologist and a neuroscientist and, you know, we're always fighting evolution, right? Like in the sense that what worked for us back in the Savannah absolutely does not work for us today. How do you personally think about that? and, you know, and if you zoom out and look at the research that exists around that, how do we reframe modern life in a way that helps people recognize the reason why we struggle,

I suppose, you know, because they have these evolutionary roots, but it's like we almost don't talk about that enough. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. We don't get so up in arms about this when our evolutionary limits are physical limits. You know, we're having this conversation in Boston. I live a while away. I just hopped on, you know, public transportation.

I wasn't like beating myself up like, oh, I'm so like weak that I can't run to, you know, the studio. No, I just, but like I'm having this conversation. I'm wearing contact lenses. I'm not beating myself up that my eyes aren't perfect in middle age. I'm like, oh, if there's some solution, let me find it. I think when it comes to our own mental health, when it comes to our own happiness, we don't like that as much. We don't like kind of hacking our biology to do a little bit better.

But I think that we need to do just that when we're dealing with our happiness. What would you say about, that's a good question, you know, what cognitive biases cause people who systematically overestimate the happiness impact of success. Yeah, there are a couple. Yeah. A big one is what's called hedonic adaptation, which is just a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff. You know, the best thing that you could possibly imagine could happen to you.

And if that best thing happened over and over and over again, you would just get bored with it. You know, I sometimes use the example of, you know, if you're partnered up the first time your partner said, I love you. That was a moment. But, you know, when they said it Thursday morning when you were leaving for work, like, who cares, you know? Or the first time your kid said, mommy or daddy, that was awesome. But again, when they said it last night, it was like, who cares, right?

So these good things stop being good over time, which sucks, right? It means that the things that we build a life around are not going to keep positively impacting our happiness in the way that we expect. And that's a big one for why the things that we think are going to make us happy, don't make us happy, right? Take money. You know, when you first get that promotion, that week, feel like that we feel. awesome. Two weeks in, that's just what your salary is. You're used to it. You know, when you get some level of accomplishment, you know, feels great at first, but now that's just your new baseline that you need to hit. I see this so much in my Yale students who've had the luxury of having

success all their lives, but now they're at a place like Yale where the only where to go is down, you know, like if you've got perfect grades to get into Yale, all you can do is get a, you know, the A is don't feel good anymore, but the A minuses hit really hard and really badly. And so, so that's kind of bias number one, hedonic adaptation. Bias number two is the fact that we just don't evaluate things objectively. We see things in relative ways. And so it's hard to say, you know, how much money do you really need to be happy? Well, you're paying attention to what your coworkers are making and the level of affluence

that you see on Instagram, right? We're constantly comparing what we have with what other people have or even what we had before, right? And that means that even if we're objectively doing amazingly, if there's like, like one person who's doing better than us, now all of a sudden we don't feel so hot, which is interesting. And so I think those two biases together often mean that we're not getting the happiness boost that we expect from all these circumstance changes.

What are the, how do we combat that? You know, what is it, what's the anecdote to those biases? Yeah. The sad thing is like you can't really shut them off because they're, you know, I'm the happiness expert. I'm walking around with them just as much as everybody else. I think the way you combat them is try to build in new behavior. of years that really do move the needle on happiness and mindset changes that also move the needle on

happiness. Yeah. Mindset changes in the sense of being more growth oriented or, you know, kind of. I think that's really weird. Carol Deweck's kind of work in that. And so, I mean, Carol talks a lot about this idea that we want to be focused not on where we are, but potentially where we're going, right? I'm not good at this.

If you just add the word yet, right, it gives you the opportunity to keep going. I think other mindset changes that really matter are a sense of presence, right? You know, we've been talking about enjoying the journey. You can't do that unless you're, you know, paying attention to the Olympic rings, noticing where you are, savoring the moment, those things really matter. And then I think for, you know, the kind of type A folks that are push, push, push, I think there's a lot of evidence that developing this mindset of self-compassion, not being avoiding the self-criticism can be really powerful. And that's a mindset where you kind of non-judgmentally notice what's going on. I'm having a tough time right now. This is tough right now.

I'm feeling overwhelmed and that's okay, calm and human experience. Those kinds of mindset shifts really do seem to help the research shows for making us feel better. How much can that positive self-talk actually shift our mindset to make us happier? I know when I started doing loving kindness meditation, it is transformative for me. Because I am a very hard self-talker. And I think that manifests in ways that are not great. And I kind of recognize it. And I was like, oh, I need a strategy here.

And I started experimenting with loving kindness meditation. And it was a really good tool for me. So I suppose there are there other tools like that that you feel can be really helpful for folks who struggle with that growth-oriented kind of the future's positive mindset and get caught in these kind of negative self loops. Yeah. I think loving kindness is a huge one, right? And anything that you can do to build up compassion for yourself or others is a great practice.

Because even if you're building up compassion for other people, you kind of apply it to yourself, which is one of the hardest people to give compassion to. I think another mindset that really helps with our self-talk is gratitude. You know, we were talking before about the biases that mess us up. And a big one is our negativity bias. Our, you know, evolved brains are constantly on the lookout for. threats and that means we find the terrible thing. You know, a million things could go right in the day. You go home and partners like, how was your day? You're like, oh, this one thing or that one co-worker

annoying me. You can shift your mindset to the more positive stuff through a practice of gratitude, which is literally writing down and noticing these were the blessings. Here was the stuff that went right today. And, you know, just like a loving kindness meditation, it's a practice. It's hard at first. You get used to it over time, but, you know, like all good things, you've got to keep doing it daily to get the benefit from it. A final one, I think, is like, and it's related to sort of self-compassionist sort of fighting back against perfectionist talk. There's lots of studies showing just how much perfectionism has gone up in the last few days.

What does that look like? Perfectionist talk. Like, how would you... I should have done better. There's a lot of shoulds. I joke with my students that it's like shoulding on yourself because you're like, oh, I should have done better. I should have looked at that thing.

I should have, you know, made my students, you know, like, you know, should, should, should, should, should, should. Also very black and white, right? It's like it's not kind of talk. Always never like that kind of language. Exactly. It has features of what psychologists often call fortune telling where it's like, oh, I'm never going to get into grad school or, you know, like that the quarterly

report is going to go terrible. Like you're predicting the future. Right. You're often doing a lot of mind reading like how my husband's going to kill me. Like, you know, my coworker like it hates me. Like your mind reading in ways that don't look good. And so it has all these features, but the key to break it is just to notice that. that you're doing it is to kind of catch yourself in the act.

And one of my favorite strategies for fighting back to it is to give it a name. My students, because they're all into memes, they like calling it Karen. Like, okay, Karen, like I hear you yelling at me again. Just shut up. Apologies, steady. Cairns. I don't know why poor Karen. But, you know, pick your old, you know, like a mean coach or somebody you don't like.

Like, the power of that is that you recognize that it's a thought. And you realize, like, oh, this isn't reality. This is just that broken voice in my brain that's saying, I had a podcast guest who studies perfectionism, Jordana Confino, and she said she likes to picture the little guy from the mucinex commercials. Like the little green goblin, like a snot, like yelling at you. And so picture whatever it is that, you know, you like and you can use. But really what you're trying to do is to label that voice as a voice.

That's not truth. It's not reality. It's just, you know, your broken brain telling you stuff. It kind of loses its power, I suppose, when you do that. Totally. another technique that I love is picture it like listen to the things that you're saying and put it to like some dumb musical soundtrack

like pretend it's the Star Wars theme and it's saying I should have done this thing but it's like or you can even picture it kind of if you're a visual person picture it kind of going up like the what you're trying to do is to like take the weight out of it it just being true. Add some levity humor yeah yeah I love that and another colleague talks about picturing it in Comic Sans font

like pick your least favorite font and like image it in that and you're like okay it's done It's just silly things I'm saying to myself. That's so good. Those are some really good strategies. Thank you. Yeah. I know a lot of folks struggle with that.

Oh, yeah. And I think it's also helpful to normalize it, right? Like if you're listening to this podcast right now, you're the kind of person who likes to push yourself. And you, like most people on the planet, are going to get it wrong because we tend to just have this theory that the way you push yourself is to scream at yourself in your head like a drill instructor. But, you know, studies look at, does that work? And they find, no, super doesn't. work makes you feel bad and we know our performance is tied to our emotions when you're experiencing more positive emotions you perform better so just making yourself feel like crap is hurting your

performance but more it tends to increase things like procrastination right because procrastination is really about kind of a fear of doing things wrong and you're kind of afraid of that own voice that bad voice in your head too you mentioned uh social comparison earlier i just i want to just go back to that for a second because i feel like is increasingly challenging uh for for a lot of folks, just given online, you know, just all the access they have to other people's lives online. It's just pretty much impossible not to compare. So I'd love for you to talk about just maybe double click on just the relationship between social comparison and happiness, what, if any, relationships exist. And then if it is generally has a negative impact on our

happiness, how do we correct that? Yeah. I'm glad you brought up this idea of like that social comparison is going up because the studies really bear that out. Yeah. The same is to just. The data is Yeah, I mean, the same statistics I was mentioning about perfectionism ask what's the former perfectionism that's going up? Because you could have different ones. Like, I'm just setting really harsh standards for myself. But the one that seems to go up is a sort of reflective perfectionism of like, I'm not doing well in other people's eyes, right? It's kind of like the eyes of the world are looking at me and thinking I don't measure up, which is interesting. And so, yeah, I think you really need to curb that and to figure it out.

Like all these other biases, you don't shut it off. our brains just kind of automatically pick these comparison points or what psychologists call reference points. And there's some very funny studies with this. There's studies, for example, showing that the higher number of hours you watch TV, the more you think the wealth of the average person around you goes up. And the average beauty of the people around you go up. Why?

Because it's like they're rich and beautiful people on TV. So the more you watch TV, your brain is just like soaking up these statistics of the world and what you need to do. And those were early studies. They haven't done that on like Instagram or TikTok, but I imagine it's just getting worse, you know, or LinkedIn or whatever your social comparison, you know, vices. So how do you fight it? I think one way to fight it is to notice and limit those kinds of comparisons when you're getting them. You know, if you're spending like hours and hours on LinkedIn, scrolling through other people's profiles and thinking how terrible you are, you know, think about whether that's mindfully the way to spend your time. Notice how you feel and what are the things in the world that cause your comparison to go up and then maybe just.

try to limit how much that is, you know, going on in your life. If Instagram Rails make you feel terrible about your body or your weight or whatever, your job, just like think about limiting that. Another move is to really try to use social comparison positively, right? And that's like, pick a comparison that's really helpful. So you in the past, right? And that kind of gets back to this growth mindset idea, right? I'm thinking of my own progress relative to me two months ago. Like, that's a comparison that can feel a little healthier. The other thing we can do is to remember in whatever domain we're looking, probably how well we're doing. You know, if you're listening to this podcast, probably you're, you know, effluent enough to have

the technology that lets you listen to this podcast. You're, you know, probably in good health. You have your hearing, right? We can find these reference points that remind us that we're actually much luckier than we think. And this is actually a strategy that the, you know, the ancients talked about, the ancient Stoics talked about this process of negative visualization where you just like, think of a counterfactual to some good thing in your life. In fact, the ancient Stoics thought you should wake up in the morning and think, I've lost my health, I've been exiled from my community, like my partner has died, like I've lost my job, not to sit there and ruminate about it, but just to have a moment of like, oh, like, I'm so happy that didn't, you know, that didn't happen.

I, you know, we're having this conversation was very cold and icy in Boston, and a couple years ago I had fallen and broke my knee cap on the ice. And so sometimes I like to just hold that as a comparison point. Like, no matter how bad my day is going, like, at least my knees, that was worse, right? And it's so silly, it doesn't take a lot of work to queue up that negative comparison. But all, you know, immediately everything I'm going through feels a little bit better because like, oh my gosh, I can walk. This reminds me.

I had a pretty young age, I came to learn about negative visualization. And it was actually, it was from this Argentine gal. We were playing, I'd play field hockey and we were competing against them. and we were just like socializing after the game. And I don't know what made us talk about this, but she was just saying like, you know, when things are going bad, like she always like a saying that they have in their family is fire is worse. Like your house burning down.

Like that is worse. Like being burned alive, that's worse. Like, you know, fire is worse. Yeah. And I think, you know, the sad thing is that at any point we can look out in the world and see their realities that other people are going through that we should. And we have to be careful of that. because, again, we don't want to now feel heavy or guilty for our privilege or whatever.

But like, you want to take that in to recognize that you're in a good place so that you can savor and enjoy that good place, but also so that you have the bandwidth emotionally to, you know, maybe recognize that you're in a privileged place and you can do things to fix it. And it can potentially motivate you, you know, like, for example, like, you know, whenever I'm like, whatever, maybe not as motivated to go work out or whatever, I just think, wow, you know, and I'm really lucky to the house of the body that I do, you know, and that I can. And in fact, there's a study. from Dave DeSeno actually just over here at Northeastern, like, who have been doing work showing

the power of pro-social emotions like gratitude. So an emotion like gratitude where you recognize, like, wow, I'm really lucky. It makes you want to give back because you feel like, not like you've an unfair advantage, but you're like, I'm doing all right. Let me give back. And that can be to your community. But interestingly, he finds it can also be to your future self, right? So it's like, I'm doing great right now. Like, I'm going to hook up like future lari. So like I'm going to hit the gym. It's like, I got extra, you know. So he finds that people who experience more gratitude will, again, not only do nicer things for others, but they'll save more for retirement, they'll eat healthier, they'll work out more because it's like,

you get spared to get back a little bit. I haven't seen those data. That's amazing. Wow. That's really exciting. Just another reason why gratitude is just such a core. Mindset shifts. I think sometimes when we think about these mindset shifts of like, oh, presence or growth mindset

or gratitude, we think like, oh, it's just some thing or self-compassion. There's just some thinking thing, but these things are affecting, like, real-world behaviors that we think of as the bottom line. You know, like, you know, capitalism, bottom line, like saving more for retirement, performing better at work. One of my favorite new studies coming out of the University of Oxford is this study that looks at how does happiness at work impact a company. And so they were looking at people's ratings of happiness at work on Indeed, in part because it's Indeed is like this huge website where they have like 5,000 different companies rated by 15 million workers. It's like this huge data set to ask, okay, well, you know, if your company has an average higher happiness at work, what does that do to your company's stock performance? And they find there's this, like, beautiful linear correlation where companies with on average happier workers are making more money, right? And so it's like, I think we think all this stuff is like, oh, it's nice to have, you know, worry about that later.

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What do you know about psychological safety? And just, I suppose when you think about it, like in an organizational context, you know, just wondering like happiness and psych safety and are there any relationships there? Yeah, a huge one. I think, you know, psychological safety is really important for creativity, coming up with better ideas. And even in that Indeed data set I was just mentioning, one of the things they asked is like, okay, some people are happier at work, what causes happiness at work? And the biggest thing that they find in their data set is not salary or how good a manager you have or whatever, it's really

about a sense that you belong, which is kind of akin to psychological safety. Actually, one of the measures, yeah. It's like one of the questions that actually predicts whether you're happy at work is do I have a best friend at work? And when you think about like, if you have a best friend at work, you feel psychologically safe, you can goof around, you can share tough ideas. it's like safe for you to be you. And so we often in organizations don't realize the power of those things. Again, not just for happiness, but for performance too. And I think, you know, newer work, I think is causing companies to be smarter about the importance of this stuff. Yeah. We have a study, we partnered with Amy Edmondson and looking at psychological safety in the workplace. And one of the things

that we saw that was predictive of psychological safety was the sleep. So direct reports reported feeling less psychologically safe when the leader had sleep debt. This is such a huge thing that we forget, too, is that the emotional state of the leaders in our organizations matter a lot. I imagine it's like, you know, when you sleep more, you're kind of feeling better. You have the capacity to regulate your emotions more effectively and better decision-making, more eye contact, more patient, tolerant, you know. And this stuff like matters so much.

I mean, there's some lovely work at a Wharton Business School in the lab of Seagall-Barsade that looks at the phenomenon she calls affective spirals, which is kind of like, you're a leader, you come into work and you're just a little snippy, right? So you go to meeting number one, and that little snippiness comes out. But then everybody feels that snippiness, and they take it to their meetings and are snippy.

And eventually at the end of the day, everybody comes back and like the whole organization has got like, you know, one, two percent, a little snippier and it comes back to you. But she points out we can bring the affective spirals in the other direction. If a leader comes in and they're well slept and did their gratitude journaling right before they stepped in. It had a moment of love and kindness so they're able to deal with the hard folks and, you know, their team.

Like, now they're calm and on the ball and feeling optimistic. And that little bit of optimism and kindness can spiral through the organization too. And I guarantee that affects the bottom line in huge ways. I think this is the thing we really need to update when it comes to happiness at work. You know, for so long everybody, you know, so many organizations talk about like work-life balance. And I hate this term because the real suggestion in our heads is like, it's this like seesaw. It's like, well, if I want work to go up and be more productive, well, life's going to have to go down. And I think it's such a better metaphor is the idea of work-life harmony because everything we know shows that these things go together.

If you take the time for sleep as a leader, your team's going to do better. Like you're going to have a better product in the end. And so I think we have to overcome this idea that it's an either or. It's really growing the pie when we invest in both, the performance. side and the mental health and happiness side. I love that. I mean, we try to eat our own dog food here, but we are pretty hard charging at Woop and everyone works really hard. But I mean, we built a product on exactly the thesis you outline. You know, it's just that recovery is so critical to living a happy, fulfilled life, you know, because if we don't have the energy, really hard to show up

and, you know, the behavior, one of the biggest behaviors that I think would completely change the mental health that I see in my college students is just getting them to sleep more. It's such an easy fix, but we forget that it can be so powerful. I will say that at Princeton, that was one of the most transformative things that we implemented was just more intention around sleep. And it was a massive competitive advantage for us. I mean, we won 12 Ivy League championships in 13 years, the most of any team ever in the Ivy League in the history, unless, you know. And a big reason why, was because my athletes were just literally spending more time in bed than the folks at Harvard and Yale and Cornell. I guarantee we were because we were thinking about it. No one really was.

And I think that this, you know, I see this in my student athletes, especially, you know, y'all don't know if they're as progressive. I'm thinking about this of my athletes, you know, I got to get up to Roe Crew and I'm getting up at six in the morning and my practices go to late and I'm still trying to figure out my homework. And it's like, yeah, I can list study after study about the mental health costs of lack of sleep. There's one recent study that came out that just like, showed like for every extra half hour of sleep you get the decrease in negative emotions, whether that sadness, overwhelm, loneliness, you know, like depression, like just everything is better if you just get some rest. I know, I know. I love that you said that. I love that

you're talking to your students about it too. I wish they listen more, but they don't. I know. I mean, it's funny. It's funny our own theories about this stuff. One of the things we do in my happiness class is students get this homework where they're really supposed to change their behavior. So their homework is like, sleep eight hours a day this week or something. And I always put the sleep homework week during midterm season when they're all tempted to like stay up. And students will be like, well, I can't stay up because I have to study. I'm like, just try it. Like just try what it looks like to get the sleep instead of spending those hours studying. And the students will always be like, Professor Santos, like, I did the best in midterners that I've ever done. And I studied less hours. I'm like, yeah,

because sleep consolidates memory and like, it affects your overall mood, which affects your performance. It's like, but we don't believe that. We think we can kind of cheat our bodies and cheat the system to just like, oh, I can run on fumes. And sometimes it'll work. We know our batteries need to, you know, our like phone batteries need to like rest and recharge. We like plug in our iPhones, but we don't, we don't realize that we need to plug ourselves in. I know. The car analogy is also really powerful around that too.

You know, like we don't. Yeah. We fill it up with gas. Yeah. Yeah. It's empty, you know. And when we get the signals, we listen. We pay attention.

I love the car analogy for this stuff too because it's like, you could have a moment of overwhelm or notice that you're feeling lonely or notice that you're just like angry about what's in the news. And you don't have to like stop everything then and freak out and deal with that emotion. Right. Like when I tire, I mean, honestly, it's cold. So my tire lights on now. And I wasn't like, oh my God, I got to cancel this interview and deal with the time. But I'm like, oh, mental note to self.

Got to take some time for it. I think if we think of negative emotions like that, it can be helpful. Like, ooh, duly noted. don't initially have to drop everything this moment and deal with my overwhelm, but like, let me take 20 minutes later and look at my calendar and see what I can take out. I love that. Ooh, feeling a little lonely. You know, I don't have to like call my mom right now, but like let me set some time to give myself some space to check in with people I care about. How important is it to schedule worry and how important is connection?

Yeah. Well, scheduling where I think is really helpful because we need a space to notice like the worry loops, right? Yeah. So we need a space to notice those negative emotions, but we don't want them to be just like running in the background. A funny thing that we forget about our brains and how our brains interact, our brains and how our brains interact with our body is like our mind is, whatever is going on in our unconscious mind is affecting our body, right? We think it's only the conscious thoughts we have, but it's really the like loop that's running when we're in the shower and walking to the subway and doing the stuff. That's the stuff that's affecting cortisol and so on. And so like figuring out a way to notice like, oh, my brain is on repeat, freaking out about that upcoming presentation I have.

Let me take some time to just like, okay, what do I need to do to nail that? Do an outline, like whatever. So it's like what you want to do is catch the worry and be like, okay, I'm going to schedule it so I can make forward progress and like problem solving this thing. I don't want to leave this on repeat because that repeat is having a real negative effect on my stress and my body, right? So you want to kind of schedule the worry. I think you really also want to schedule social connection for kind of a different reason, which is like it's just so essential for health and happiness. Like pretty much every available study of happy people suggest that happy people are more social. And social science is pretty rare that like all studies go in one direction.

But on social connection, my read is like all studies go in the direction. That if you just get more social connection, you'll feel happier. Whether that's with your close friends and family members, whether that's with, you know, the barista at the coffee shop and some weak tie, just somebody you're chatting with. like all that stuff just makes us feel better yeah i'll say the little gal at dunkin donuts i just love seeing her face every day yeah yeah yeah and i'm so you're so boston with the duncan notice i know i know i'm with you yeah we're getting your ice coffee and 20 degree weather no no but those like little moments kind of matter right like i think we think of happiness as being this like big thing we have to make this like massive change in our life but it's better to think of you're

going back to our car analogy it's better to think of happiness almost like a little weekie tire where it's like you just got to do these little infusions of gratitude or quick chat with the Dunkin' Donuts, you know, like cashier or something to kind of boost your happiness up. And so these little things do matter. I think, you know, the type A folks who are listening sometimes feel like it doesn't count unless I make this like massive, you know, exercise doesn't count unless I like run a marathon and my sleep doesn't count unless I like completely overhaul. It's like, nah, these tiny things make a big difference. With regard to social connection, is there a spectrum. I mean, I suppose the extrovert needs more social time, introvert needs less.

Like, what does the research say as it relates to happiness for introverts and extroverts? Are there any differences? Interestingly, you're probably going to get hate mail for this because whenever I talk about it, I might have a podcast. I get hate mail. The studies really show that both extroverts and introverts need social connection and that the benefit that you get from social connection is shocker, the same for extroverts and introverts. Now, introverts are like, oh my God, that's not true. And notice I didn't say, like, you know, You can pick and choose which social connection you want.

Social connection doesn't have to be going to some huge party or like doing so. But like the benefit that an introvert gets from like calling a really close friend that you haven't connected with in a while. Right. Like, you know, just sharing these sort of quiet moments of connection with the people you love, those benefits are just as good for an introvert and an extrovert. Problem is that we have these minds that are going around predicting. And studies by folks like Nick Epley and others find that the difference between introverts, and extroverts is that introverts have a prediction mechanism that's a little bit off. They're predicting, like, oh, God, talking to the cashier at Dunkin' Donuts, that's going to be

awkward, it's going to be weird, it's going to suck so much. But then when you actually go around and do it, now it feels just as good. But if you think about what happens when you're off on your prediction, that means what will tend to happen if you're introvert. And I put myself in this category when I'm sharing this research, is like you predict like, it's going to feel awkward to talk to that Duncan Notice cashier. So you never do. You don't get the benefit. You don't notice the reward, so you don't know to update your behavior over time. And if anything, you develop more friction for having these quick social connections because you're like out of practice. Kind of like all of us or post-COVID were a little out of practice with all forms

of social connection. It's kind of like for an introvert because you're not seeing the, because you don't do it, you don't see the benefit of it. Yeah. You get out of practice. And then it is harder to develop the habit of engaging with other people. I purposely don't order my coffee online. So I am forced to interact with the adorable little cashier. Yeah. And then this is, you know, I have a whole podcast episode about this because a yucky thing that our technology does sometimes is make it very easy for us to lose. Just no contact.

Yeah. There's this very cool MIT magazine article by the musician David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads called Elimidating the Human. And this was kind of prescient because it was now about 10 years ago, but he was like, you know, all these apps like from, you know, know, a driving app that I don't have to talk to the driver, I'd just say in the app where I'm going to go to, like, you know, a music playlist where I'm not going to a record store, I'm not going to someone's house and seeing their like big wall of CDs to learn what they listen

to, you know, a shopping app where I don't have to go into a store and talk to anybody to the, you know, the Dunkin' Donuts app where it's like, you just put it in and you don't have to talk to the cashier. All these, from an ATM, for example, where you just take money out and don't talk to it. Yeah. Yeah. And so all these are like stealing these tiny interactions that we have. with other humans. And it reduces friction, right? It probably makes it faster. But the question is,

like, are we missing something really critical in these moments? Are all interactions created equal? Like, you know, text versus bone versus Zoom versus... Yeah, yeah. Well, this gets back to the evolutionary question, right, where these evolved primates that are evolved for a certain kind of interaction, which is like in real life, you know, not over text or something. But studies show that it doesn't have to be in person. In fact, what seems to matter is that interactions take place in real time. You know, what do I mean? Like, you know, we're here doing this live, but we could have done this over Zoom or over, over some sort of like, you know, what you're calling about? We could have done this like online where we're doing a video chat or something like that, right?

And that works pretty well because we're talking together in real time. I'm seeing your reactions. You can react to me. What doesn't work as well is if we were to do it like over text or over some like chat or something because it's kind of like I text you, voop, you know, you text me back, whoop. It's like too slow for the brain to, you know, like, yeah, people are checking their messages right now. But yeah, but it's like that, we don't really see that nutritiously, psychologically, a social connection.

I often joke that that's like the NutraSuite of social connection, where it's like it feels social, but we're not getting any, like, chloric benefit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's kind of like that. So I think whenever possible, you know, try to do things in person, but, you know, reality, we can't do things in person. Try to figure out a way to do them in real time. You know, try to use your phone like it was really intended, like a phone. No one knows this. I'm putting my hand to my figures. Like nobody knows that expression for phone anymore.

But yeah, try to try to use a phone like it was intended to talk in real time. What does the data say around how much social time do you need in a week for happiness? Yeah. Has that been quantified? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think there's like really good quantified. But most people in the modern age need a little more. Than what we're getting. Than what we're getting. Yeah.

I think what the studies show is that if you look at happy people, so a lot of these studies do these time budgets with happy people where they split people into groups, you're like, this is the group of very happy people, this is a not so happy people. How are they spending their time? And what you find is that happy people tend to just be spending more time around other people. That doesn't mean that all of us spend 100% of our hours social. But if you can just bump it up a little bit for most of us, it'll feel better. Yeah.

I mean, I definitely, there's no question. I'm absolutely an introvert. So I'm one of those people where I kind of have to like force myself. But when I do, I'm so much happier. Like, way happier. It just, but I don't know why I fight it. It's just so annoying. I annoy myself, you know, like.

No, it's, our brains are dumb. Our brains are dumb. Yeah. We don't have great mechanisms to create. a lot of these behaviors and mindsets that matter for happiness, which is kind of weird. It's like maybe over-evolution. It's like diabolical kind of. I know.

But like we didn't ever need to have mechanisms to go after social connection because when we were evolving, we were in small bands of people. It was like it was never, yeah, we were just forced. Yeah, we like to think of it as like, you know, we didn't mean mechanisms back in the evolutionary day to crave, you know, lots of green leafy vegetables because like, that was most of what we had. We needed mechanisms to crave the sweet stuff or meat or fatty stuff. And I think social connection sort of the same way.

It was like it was just in the ether, so we didn't notice it. But in the modern day, we can just be stuck working from home and a house and not get any social connection at all for some people. And so we kind of need to build it more in. What about movement and happiness? Yeah, that's a big one. You know, studies show that a half hour of cardio a day can be as effective as an antidepression prescription. Exercise is medicine. Yeah, and they're like meta-analysis showing the power of this stuff.

And there's also studies showing just like the long-lasting power of movement. So there was one study that showed that you get a half hour of cardio, say like Monday at 9 a.m. And you get a little kind of happiness boost. How long does that last? Probably like through Tuesday at like 11 a.m. So you get longer than 24-hour boost of happiness that comes from movement. Now, since we're again talking with some type A folks, this is not running an ultramarathon. This is literally like a half hour of walking, moving your body.

So it doesn't, you don't have to do it a lot or very forcefully to get the benefit. There's a diminishing point of return. Yes. If you're going just for like, you know, the little, you know, like happiness boost, you can't just like take a walk around. 30 minutes is funny. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

I definitely, the runners highs is a real thing, you know. And I think, too, there's like such an opportunity for a community too with movement, you know, that obviously is super. And just all the stuff. All the stuff. I mean, so many of these strategies build on themselves, right? You know, again, I don't know about your exercise, but I like to do it like often in a group or with friends of mine or meet friends at the gym. So sometimes you get social connection. Often, depending on the form of exercise you're doing, you get a lot of presence, right? You're just kind of in the present moment and sort of savoring it. You're kind of embodied in this way. It's hard to be anything other than present.

Totally. You know, which is I think one of the reasons why it's, you know, we know kind of, you know, thinking about the future in the past, like, makes us, can tend to make us anxious. But when we're exercising. We're so present because we have to be, right? We have to focus on our breath and our body and, you know, if we're moving, our gait and yeah. I do, I do a lot of yoga and I've really had bad knees, as I mentioned, bringing my knee before, but I like, I hate chair pose, but I've come to kind of come around to it. It's like, when I'm in chair pose, I'm like, well, at least I'm in chair pose. Like, I'm not thinking about this work that I have to do or this difficult conversation I have to have coming up, but like, I'm just in chairpos and it's okay.

What about married versus unmarried folks and happiness? An interesting one. Yeah. Some controversy here. I think one thing about marriage is that it's yet another thing that we have a lot of hedonic adaptation for. In other words, we sort of get used to it. There are these very sad curves that I show my students where it's like right before you get married, your happiness increases the moment you get married and then it kind of just goes down and like a standard slope. Interestingly, you see the same thing for divorce. When you get divorce, it's really bad, but then it kind of goes back up in the moment of divorce.

So marriage doesn't necessarily make us as high. as we think, but there are strategies we can use to do a little bit better and just sort of continue noticing and savoring our marriage. And honestly, a big one is spousal gratitude. Just like taking time to notice and say the things you appreciate by your spouse can be huge for just like completely getting rid of that hedonic adaptation curve. I love that hedonic adaptation curve. It's a fancy way of saying you get used to it. If you don't want to get used to your wonderful partner who you loved very much in that moment you got married, just find ways to like notice it. That's another spot for the negative visualization, right?

You know, if you're partnered up right now, imagine the last time you saw your partner, that was it. You can imagine whatever terrible thing you want. They're gone. That was a yucky visualization, but I bet the next time you see that person, you'll just hug them a little closer. I'm all in on negative visualization, although I have to keep myself under control. Yeah, only the stoics did to say, do it all the time, you know, whenever you're walking

around, just five minutes a day. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. But it does, I think, reframe in a very, very powerful way. It changes behavior, I think, also in ways that are really adapted, which you've outlined, which is exciting. When we think about, you mentioned ruminating about the future and, like, what could happen and the stories we kind of tell. And what kind of, you mentioned it briefly, that it obviously has a negative impact on our happiness and overall well-being. Can you just explain a little bit more of, like, like what's happening in the brain and like, and strategies for folks who find themselves, like, just, you know, mind reading and like, you know, replaying, like, things that happened at work or whatever, like, you know, just people get in that cycle of negativity, you know? Yeah. And the cycle makes a lot of sense if you look at the neuroscience.

So there's this funny part of our brain that neuroscientists call the default mode network. What does that mean? It means there's a part of our brain that's just kind of like, whenever things chill out and there's nothing else going on that we need to focus on, just automatically turns on. There's some fascinating physiology to this, that these parts of the brain that automatically turn on are actually less energetically costly. So it's kind of like we're running our brain on like cheap mode or low energy mode. But what are these parts of the brain? They're the parts of the brain that allow us to get out of the here and now. So they're the parts of the brain that we use to mind

read to think about, well, what is somebody thinking like, what does my spouse think? Like what's going on my kid these days? They're the part of the brains that we use to think about the past. Like, oh, what happens? before. So that was crummy this morning. They're the part of our brain that we used to think about the future or counterfactuals. Like, oh, if I didn't do that at the meeting, what would I have done? Right. So this energetically cheap part of our brain is the part of our brain that steals us from the here and now. It's wonderful. It's this like human unique part of the brain that maybe other species don't have this ability to think about the future. What couldn't have been, you

know? But it sucks when we're running it because usually we use those parts of the brains to go two terrible, awful things that we ruminate about. And so what we want to do is kind of shut off that default mode network. And studies really show that a way that we can do that is through the practice of meditation. One of the things that meditation does is it tries to kind of get back your focus so that you're not running those default mode parts of your brain all the time. But that takes work. It puts you back in control.

It puts you back in control. Of your attention, your thoughts. Yeah, you wind up like a little bit more focused on the present. moment. And if you've ever tried to meditate, you know, you talked about loving kindness meditation before, which is a form of meditation where you're thinking about feelings of compassion or giving compassion to others. You know, when you practice that, you probably experience what most people experience? So, wow, you're like, oh, you know, may you feel happy, may you feel happy? Then you're like, what am you going to have for dinner or night? You're like,

oh, wait, I'm supposed to be focused. And so you kind of like yank your, you know, yank your attention back and yank your, those yank backs are like little bicep curls for your mind, right? You're practicing this active. One, one, noticing like, oh, my mind went away from what I was trying to focus on and you do the you snap it back to like what you were thinking about and studies by folks like hetty coper and others find that like the more you do that it's like doing more reps for getting your brain to notice oh i'm not on task let me go back to task and she finds that even novice meditators you know when they do five to ten minutes of this kind of practice whether it's a loving kindness practice or a breath prayer or like whatever it is you just get better at it

over time so you don't need to do a lot of it especially if you haven't done it very much to see the benefits. Meditation versus mindfulness meditation. Is there one that stands out as being morificacious? It might be a controversial answer, but I feel like kind of very similar. They're similar if they have the same components. And one component is... Ellen Langer would say they are very different. Oh, yes, that's true. That's true. I was Ellen student back in the day. I know you. I interviewed her a while back and she just... Yeah, she just adores you. My sense is the important ingredients are the following. ingredient number one is what what Ellen might call mindfulness which is like you are you are paying attention you are intentionally focused on a thing I'm watching my breath paying attention to this

compassion thing I'm doing the dishes and paying attention to the movements and how the suds feel right you're just like in the moment so this is an attention part but there's a second part that's the intention part which is that you're doing that in a particular way usually with non judgment so when you're trying to watch your breath and your mind wanders away. You don't say, oh, I suck. Why can I know? You know, like, you say, oh, that's how minds do. Let me go back. And so there's this kind of radical acceptance part of it, too. I think when you have those two ingredients, you wind up getting the benefit. It seems like the attention part is the benefit for the default mode network, right, because you're bringing your brain

back to a thing. But the true benefits of the practice and why it's been a practice not just in secular circles when we're talking about performance and so on, but why it's been a spiritual practice for so long is the non-judgment part as well. Amazing. How do we think about stress and happiness? Yeah. Well, a couple things there. I think one is to remember that all stress isn't bad, just like all negative emotions are not bad. Some stress is good. In fact, stress is really important for enhancing our performance. One of the earliest things we've known since the field of psychology began since the 1950s is this idea of the upside-down, you-shaped stress function that like a little bit of, you know, a lot of stress is bad, but so. so too is like no stress. The key, though, is that we want to have stress that we can shut off. It's helpful when you think about stress to remember, you know, back to your AP biology class, that we have this nervous system that has these like two parts, right?

There's the sympathetic nervous system part, which is the fight or flight mode. And then there's like when you shut off fighter flight mode, which is the parasympathetic part of the nervous system or the rest and digest part. And the best case scenario is like, you know, when there's a tiger jumping out it, you spike fight or flight. but then you flee away and then you shut it off and go back to rest and digest. And the problem with so much of our stress is that we leave it on. We leave that fight or flight mode on.

And not even at like high intensity, just like low grade. Like it's not a tiger. It's just like that work report that's just sitting around that like whenever I go to think about it is like left on. Again, it's our unconscious mind that we're not controlling that's leaving these things on. And that is what physiologically seems to hurt us. That's the kind of thing that causes what, you know, doctors these days are calling inflamaging or it's like the inflammation that continues because you're running your

low-level chronic stress. Yeah, exactly. Low cortisol, just one of our stress hormones all the time leads to this stuff. And biologically, it's like awful stuff. Like a recent episode of my podcast, I was interviewing a stress researcher who was talking about how much stress affects our telomeres, which are the top of our DNA. If you look at the aglet on a shoelace, you know, that's what we have on our DNA, and those things fray.

We're literally fraying over time. And you can see the effects of stress. That's a marker of aging. It's a marker of age. Yeah. Right. Right. And sadly, researchers who study stress tend to study this in caregivers.

So people who are caring for an adult parent or a spouse who has had some disability. It's like you can literally see these things fraying over time and you can measure it in the signs of aging if they're experiencing. So bad to be running our low-grade stress on repeat. How do we fight that? Big way to fight it is to stop the unconscious rumination that's like keeping the stress on. As I said, like, oh, let's schedule some time for worrying.

Then you can spike it and shut it off. Another way to hack your stress system, interestingly enough, is to just like get some hardcore stress. Yeah. So this is often called hermetic stress. So you do a super hard hit class. So now your body's like, fireflight's really on. Yeah.

But then you stop the hit class and you go away. This is some of the recent work on things like, you know, taking a cold plunge or a hot bath. Like what those things do is like, you know, if you like do a cold plan, you jump into the, you know, Boston Ocean, these folks who do these like polar plunges, your body will be very stressed. Your fighter flight system will be on, but you get out, you towel off. It shuts off. So what you're doing is you're retraining your body. Oh, this is what it feels like to shut off the stress system. And it turns out that that seems to be powerful as well.

That contrast. Yeah. It's like you remind your body like, oh, cortisol systems, you can shut off. Right. But interestingly, you do that by like spiking them, which I find so interesting. Because you force, you can't possibly keep it at that level. Correct. For any sustained amount of time.

So you're forced to come down. And you usually do something that like, you know, your hit class doesn't continue low grade for days and date. Right, right. You leave and you take a shower and you're done. Yeah. And so you kind of remind your body like, oh, this is what these systems can do. They can shut off again.

All right, this is the million dollar question. So how do you define a good life? Ooh, it's a tricky one. For me, it's making sure that I have both parts of happiness intact, that I'm feeling good in my life and with my life. If you can achieve that over time, you're living a good life. Sometimes when people fight about the good life, they're like, well, you've just made it all about you.

Like, don't you want to do good things for the world and other people? Well, implicit in that is like if I'm feeling good with my life, If I'm getting a sense of purpose, probably I'm doing something that's bigger than me. And that's because happiness isn't all about you. So I think if you're feeling good in your life and with your life, you're doing the kind of right moral things to also live a good life in the way a philosopher or moral psychologists might define it too. That's beautiful. You have provided our listeners with great tips and tricks on how to live a more meaningful life, which I think leads to happiness. If you were to just give us three of just your top behaviors or ways of thinking that can increase that happiness quotient, what would it be?

Yeah, I think the first one would be a mindset shift, which is like, I need to recognize and radically accept all my emotions, not just the happy ones, right? It's to make sure you're not ignoring that alert light on your car, noticing those negative emotions. And kind of almost thanking them. Like, overwhelmed, thank you. Thank you for reminding me that my calendar is too full. Loneliness. Oh, thank you for reminding me. I got to make time to call my friend.

Make sure you give space and notice that. Tip number one. Tip number two is remember that happiness is about the behaviors you experience. We've talked about so many social connection, exercise, getting rest and so on. Happiness is in some ways active, so you've got to put some work in. But those behaviors are the work that you put in. And the third thing is that your thoughts matter. You know, if you're running, you know, your rumination, low grade all the time,

that's going to affect your body, it's going to affect your performance, but you can hack that with some quick mindset changes. You can engage in a little self-compassion. You can do a little quick meditation to become more present. You can just take a moment to think about some things you're grateful for, or little delights you've seen along the way. You can remember that you have control over your thoughts, and that control can make a big difference to how you feel and also how your body feels too. I love that. Well, I am so grateful for the time today. See gratitude learning already. Oh, yeah, no, believe me.

Beyond grateful. Really appreciative for just everything that you contributed to the space. As someone who studied psychology and physiology, as I said, I've been following your work for a very, very long time. And very grateful. So thank you. Thanks so much for having you on the show. Yeah, this is fun. If you enjoyed this episode of the WooP podcast, please leave a rating or review.

Check us out on social. At Whoop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast to Whoop.com. call us 508-443-49-2. If you think about joining Whoop, you can visit Whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members to use the code Will, W-I-L, to get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening.

We'll catch you next week on the Whoop podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.