Laurie Santos || The Science of Happiness

College at Yale University. Her course, Psychology and the Good Life is Yale's most popular course in over three hundred years and has been adapted into a free coursera program that has been taken by over three point three million people to date. Doctor Santos is a winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association. She's also the podcast host of the Happiness Lab. In this episode, I

talked to doctor Santos about happiness. People are unhappy not for lack of trying, but it's because they're applying ineffective strategies. Doctor Santos identifies some of the cognitive biases that can hinder our happiness. There's no magical antidote to our problems, but there are ways to boost well being in small but significant ways. We also discussed resilience, social justice, and mindfulness. It was great to catch up with Wari, who I've

known from my graduate school days. I've long respected her work and it's been really great watching her amazing developmental trajectory within her career. So, without further ado, I bring you doctor Laurie Santos. Lari Santos. Wow, so great to have you on the Psychology Podcast. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah, you're such a superstar now, and you were a superstar in my eyes when I was a grad student over ten years ago. It's amazing

how time flies. You look the same, same, same, same podcasting. Podcasting treats you well. You know, I think for both of us we're looking great. And really do I look recognizable at least? Yes, definitely. And you were a superstar in my eyes for a different reason than why you're a superstar today that I loved your work on cognitive

processes and non human animals. I'm in love your research during then, and I didn't even know at that time that you were interested in happiness, and I wasn't even interested in happiness then, So I didn't, I should say, I didn't know that I would become interested in happiness.

So I just bring this up to start because both of us are kind of I want to bond here for a second here with you, because I feel like both of us started were unusual within the positive psychology world, because you know, I'm a cognitive scientist, right, You're a cognitive developmental psychologist who then got interested in positive psychology.

And I think that's quite different than a lot of people in the field of positive psychology who start off in that field and maybe don't have the background on the brain and cognitive development. So I just wanted to kind of start offrom there. It's an interesting journey. Yeah, no, same. I mean if you had told me back then when you were agred student I was first starting at Yale that I'd be studying happiness, I'd be like, what, like monkey happiness, Like what are you talking about? So, yeah,

it's been an interesting journey, So catch me up. Yeah, I don't even know at what point, what year were you? Like, Oh, I'm going to teach a course in happiness at Yale? I didn't even know when that? Like, how that the origin story of that? Yeah? Yeah. So it started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. So I became a head of college. Right. So, for those that don't know, Yale is one of these weird schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like colleges within

a college. There's like, you know, the Yale gryffindor Yale Slytherin. I became head of Silomon College, and that means in that role, I was living on campus with students, right Like, I moved into their quad. I had a house like in the midst of students. I was eating in the dining hall and hanging out in the coffee shop. And I was expecting college student life to be like what college student life was like when I went to college,

you know, in the late nineties. You know, I expected students, you know, to have their issues, but to generally be kind of happy and not so stressed in enjoying college life. And that just like was not what I saw on the ground. Like, I just saw incredible numbers of students who were depressed or anxious or just stressed out. You know.

I'd run into students, even students who weren't struggling that much, you know, in the quad and say hey, how's it going, and they'd say, oh, if I could just fast forward to midterms or if I could just get to the summer,

and you know, it was heartbreaking. Right, here's this community that I'm supposed to be this like benevolent opt for, and I was just watching students, students struggle, watching them fast forward this like precious short college experience, and you know, it just struck me that, you know, we weren't necessarily giving students the right strategies to navigate this stuff, right,

which is kind of odd, you know. I mean it also caused me to look really carefully at the national statistics on what's going on on college campuses, and like, right now, over forty percent of college students report being too depressed a function, over sixty percent say they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one intent has seriously considered suicide in the

last twelve months. Like this was again, this is not Yale, this is nationally And so I was saying, like, whoa, I had no idea things were as bad as they were, and that really kind of a jolted me. I was like, you know, I'm not teaching them anything if sixty percent of the students in my classroom were so overwhelmed and so anxious they can't function right, you know, if like if one in five has probably had someone they know

maybe seriously consider suicide. Like these were just striking numbers, and so I said, we got to do something about this. Like of our psychology colleagues were like resting on their laurels and not like taking action here. And so that was what I kind of retrained. I mean, my goal was to really just retrain enough that I could develop this introductory class on strategies that students could use to feel happier. But then it kind of got bigger than that.

Got bigger than that, in part because the class got bigger than I expected. I expected, you know, thirty or so kids to take this new, weird class on strategies for improving happiness, but a quarter of the entire campus showed up the first time I tried to teach it. We had to teach it in a concert hall, Woolsey Hall, which you might remember on campus, and so that was

a minor logistical nightmare. But it also taught me that students are like voting with their feed They don't like this culture of feeling stressed and anxious, and I think they really wanted to do something about it. They wanted to do something about it, and like an EVI in spaced way, they were like, what does the science say the kinds of strategies we can use? Give them to me and I will put them into practice. Yeah, what year was that? This was in twenty eighteen, which is

also kind of funny, is not the right word ironic? Maybe, like you know, pression, like you know, to be talking about well being in college students before the COVID nineteen pandemic, right, Like I was worried about the levels of depression and anxiety then and you know everything has changed since then. Oh yeah, I experienced the same thing. I started teaching at Positive Psychology at Penn in twenty sixteen. While Angela Duckworth was writing her book Grit. She said, Scott, do

you want to teach my course? And I was like sure, And then it ended up becoming a whole thing that I just love doing so much. And I could just see firsthand how unbelievably stressed these students are, and I think it's complex, and I wanted to just have an honest,

open conversation with you about it. I think there's a one hand in the other hand here, I do see a lot more that teachers, that professors can can do to help students and have more compassion for all the balls they have the juggle, you know, and all the things they have to do. But on the other hand, I'm also starting to see a little bit of a rise in entitlement to happiness among the students, and I wanted to hear your thoughts, if you know what I mean.

If you maybe that's not happening at Yale, but I think it's gotta be happening at Yale. If it's happening at Columbia, an expectation that, well, I should be happy. And part of my training and teaching in my course is actually to to not think necessarily that way. You know what, Life doesn't really owe you anything, but it sure would be nice to help the students. And of course, but I think there's a little it's a little complex there,

and I wanted to get some of your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, this I think fits with some of the ways that I teach the Happiness class at Yale. You know, the class starts with this idea that our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. Right. There's so

many ways that we get happiness wrong. And I think one of them is just that that we think we should be happy all the time, that it's normative to be happy all the time, right, that one could even wrong, possible, something's wrong with you if you're not happy all the time. And then I think, you know, it's partly a lie of our mind, but it's partly comes from you know, the culture today. I think there really is an idea

of toxic positivity. Right, ooh, negative emotions. You've done something wrong, like you're feeling anxious, you're feeling scared, like you know you must be broken, Like, do something about that, right, And I think one of the things we talk about a lot in the class is that negative emotions are well, first of all, they're normative, right, They're just part and parcel of like a real good human life. But beyond that, there are these important signals that we need to pay

attention to. It's important to start seeing negative emotions like any other negative physical sensation, like you stick your hand on a hot stove. That's an important signal that you're supposed to do something you're supposed to move your hand, if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling angry. Those are in some ways normative responses to certain situations, but they're also really good sign posts that you might need to do something different, that you might

need to behave differently. And so I too kind of get the sense that one of the misconceptions is like, oh, I'm feeling a little depressed and WoT be you know, in the context of COVID nineteen, something must be broken? Why am I not happy all the time? And I think one of my goals is to clear up some of those misconceptions that happiness isn't something you get all

the time. It's also not a destination, right. I'm fond of telling my students this lovely quote from Dan Gilbert's psychology professor at Harvard, who says, Happily ever after only works if you have six minutes to live. It doesn't. It's not like you a permanent solution there. That's so funny. He is so witty. That guy is so witty. So I think I need to step back and just ask

you how you even define happiness? Maybe that should have been my first question, But I think there's different conceptualizations of it within the field. So what's your definition of it? Yeah, I kind of use the definition that Sonya Lubomirski's and other positive psychologist uses. She talks about happiness is being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So I think of being happy in your life as having a decent ratio of positive to negative emotions. It's

not no negative emotions. It's not positive emotion you know, happiness emoji all the time, but it's like generally having a decent ratio of things like laughter and joy to things like you know, sadness, anger and so on. That's happy in your life. But then happy with your life is separate, right, It's the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? It's a sense of purpose and meaning and kind of a

bigger picture. And I like that definition for two reasons. One is I think it shows you that these things dissociate, right, Like, you can be totally happy in your life and have all these wonderful hedonic experiences and positive emotions and just be completely empty when it comes to you know, purpose,

and what you're doing with your life. The other reason I like these definitions is that my read is that many of the interventions we have to improve happiness, many of the things we can do with our behaviors and our thought patterns to feel better, they wind up intervening on both of these constructs, right Like, they wind up increasing your positive emotions or decreasing your negative emotions in some but not all cases, And I think they wind

up making you a little bit more satisfied with your life. So that's the one we tend to use. And it's also worth noting that that leaves out a lot a lot of the ways I think culture characterizes happiness. But I think it's pretty good from a social sciencey perspective. Yeah, I've always been in awe of how predictive from a scientific point of view, a one item life satisfaction questionnaire survey can be. I mean, it's like one item, right like,

how satisfied are you with your life? And I've read some really technical justification papers justifying why that's actually probably the best measure, probably better than objective, because people in the field like, well, why can we have objective? You know, self reports unreliable well, it's like, yeah, but maybe that's the exception is when it comes to life satisfaction things. I want to know how you're experientially experiencing the world. Is that redundant to say that? But you know how

you're experiencing. Yeah, you're with me, You're with me. I use that phrase all the time. Yeah, No, I think, I think. I mean, yeah, I too. I mean, especially coming from you know, the work with animals right where you know, there have been these long debates about what can count as a real explanation and what can count as a real method. You know, when I kind of came through the happiness work and I'm like, oh, okay,

where's you know, where are our methods? It's like you just ask people and I'm like, what you just asked? It's like a BuzzFeed quiz. That's the entire of your like empirical method exactly. But I kind of, you know,

I came around. I mean I came around in part you know gas all this stuff you know, right, which is that these self report measures correlate with a ton of things that you might think of as like slightly more objective, right, you know, if I take all your tweets and I do machine learning on them to pull out the emotion words. If I do these detailed like

friend and family interviews, you know. And in cases where we have you know, biological constructs, which for the most part, we don't for happiness or positive emotion, but in cases where we have things we could look at, like cortisol or things like that, these things tend to correlate with it. But it, you know, so I came around to like, oh,

maybe this isn't a silly BuzzFeed quiz. It really is a like a detailed scientific like construct that we can be using, or not a construct, a detailed kind of scientific method for testing how you're really feeling. Yeah, it's also just an interesting intellectual exercise to think through. Well, let's say we could develop an objective well being measured supposed to subjective of well being. Okay, what would that

even mean? First of all? But second of all, what if it clashes with the What if it's like does it? What if you disagree? Yes, what your mormometer is saying that you're only at a ninety eight point six on happiness, I'm like, no, I feel great, So yeah, like, are

you allowed to like Trump what the test says. It's almost I think of all as well with my whole work, and I start off in intelligence, what if my actual intelligence that I'm in the real world, you know, it like defies what you predicted my intelligence will be based on your IQ test, you know. So I'm kind of like thinking of it a little bit analogous. Well that even mean, I think the subjective is a lot more powerful in a lot of ways, exactly how you are

experiencing the world. And sometimes people can experience the world it positively even if people all around them are experiencing it negatively. And that's fascinating too. I mean, that's the whole resilience literature. And then you know, George Bonano and my colleague a Columbia doing great work on that, you know, But like what explains how and why insern environments some people act one way and other environments people at another way.

What have you come across in your research and your personal experience with the students that are the best predictors of that kind of resiliency to whatever life throws at you. I think, honestly, my sense is that it's the kind of strategies they use. I mean, I've really come around to think that, you know, there are behaviors we can

engage in that make us feel better. There are thought patterns we can engage in to make us feel better, and a lot of that's for many people that's really intentional. I think, you know, there is obviously, you know, heritable

differences and happiness. There's some part of the variants out there in the world and people's well being that's explained by you know, what genes you happen to get in the lucky gene lottery, right, But I think my sense is that people who tend naturally to have a higher subjective well being, they just tend naturally to do the behaviors that like wind up improving your happiness. You know, I have this one friend who I went in my brain when I think of like, oh, you know this

happy person. I tend to think of this one friend of mine. It's the wife of one of my college friends, and I think of what she does naturally, and she's naturally like just the most grateful person ever, Like, she's naturally like the most social person ever. I don't think I've ever heard of a night when she's like plopped down and watch Netflix, Like, you know, she she's not like a you know, a fitness freak, but she like

moves her body with regular frequency. She sleeps like she just does all things that like, you know, if I was like listing all the criteria that people should engage in to feel better, she does it naturally hardwired. Yeah. What's funny is people often assume, you know, now that I'm this newfound you know, like happiness teacher, that I do this stuff naturally, and I'm like, hell no, that's

not like I like, my instincts are the opposite. I think this is one of the reasons that the students resonate with me teaching this stuff, and my my podcast listeners resonate is like, my instincts are exactly the wrong ones. So I kind of get it. If you're struggling, it's like nope. But I also think that it would be better to you know, be solo and just like leisurely watch TV. I also think I definitely don't want to

move my body. I also think, you know, like every single negative thing you could be doing, I'm like, yep, that's my instinct. But I think of doing better is to overcome those instincts is to recognize that your intuitions might be leading you astray. It's funny you brought that up because I was going to ask you, after all these years teaching this, how has it impacted your happiness personally?

And I'm sure you get that question all the time, but I am curious, like it must change you and in small ways that up over time that maybe even you're not fully aware of. But no, totally, no, I'm aware. I mean, you know, Scott, I'm a nerd, like I like do my own little perma once a month, just check out it's going. And honestly I have I've gone up on like a you know, a standard ten point is happiness scale, you know about a point right, So it's not like these practices take you from zero to

one hundred. That's not their goal, right. I think it's you know, small but significant movements upwoard And I definitely have experienced that. But I've experienced that in part because I do a lot more of these behaviors. You know, when you teach a class on this stuff, your students will love to call you out, like if mine my students sees me in the Solomon courtyard and I'm like,

on my phone and not talking to someone. They'll say, hawk santo is, that are our title is head of college, so I'm hawk satist, like hax santo is, Like I thought you were supposed to be on your phone, like or if my podcast producer catches me like beating myself up and engaging in self compassion, he'll just send like little emojis that are like, hey, like just a reminder like now supposed to do that. You know, you have

a whole freaking episode on this. You know, you got a lot of these students, you know, they're just like it's just I'm like, oh, you know, it's such a privilege we have, first of all, to be able to transform their lives in meaningful ways. Like I'm very grateful for that opportunity. I'm sure it's a yell as well. But at Barnard College very social justice oriented. They're very

social justice oriented. So you know, a conversation that continually comes up in the classroom and I'm wondering if this this has come up in your classroom is well they're like, well, Professor Kaufman, you know what about systemic issues? Right? What about like structural issues? And like does this work that we're doing and validate that in some way or say that it's not important, and we always it always leads

to a really rich discussion in my classroom. I'm like, well, we need to stop me either or thinking, you know, like like it's not let's change even the phrasing of that question. But that question always comes up, you know, and I'm wondering, has that come up in your classroom? Oh? Yeah, definitely mean dealt with it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I try to, you know, also make it clear that we're not talking about either or, but also that it's

not even not either or. There is an important synergy and a balance that comes from thinking about both of these issues at the same time. I actually cover some work really looking at the extent to which happier people engage more in social justice stuff. This is a work by Costa Khushlaff and his colleagues that looks at this directly. Right. They go and look at people who go to a Black Lives Matter protest or people who go to a climate change rally, and they measure people's level of wellbeing.

So they survey, For example, in one study, they surveyed all these UVA students right after that kind of nasty white supremacist incident, and they asked, hey, did you donate money to Black Lives Matter? Did you do something? Right? And what they find is that the people who are taking action are the ones who are have the highest

self reported subjective well being. So the idea is subjective well being gives you kind of the bandwidth to like not be you know, in your house, like eating ice cream, when you feel like the world's falling apart, you actually go out and do something. They did similar studies on climate change, right, so they look at who's worried about climate change, and what you find is that people who have lower levels of self reported subjective wellbeing are more

worried about climate change. Right. It makes sense. You're just miserable everything, and climate change looms really large, you feel really anxious about it. But then they say, okay, well, who donated money to climate change, who went to a protest, who did anything? And what you find is exactly the opposite pattern, right, So people who have that self reported highest levels of subjective well being are doing stuff. And so I share this study with students because I say,

you know, like you know, you're the future. Yale students like, you know, college students, you're the future. But like, if you're all so miserable that sixty percent of you are, you know, so anxious that you can't function most days, like you're not going to get out there and fix these problems. And so I think it's not I think we need to move students away, not just from the either or, but to recognize there's a synergy here, right. You know, you can actually help more if you're taking

care of yourself. You know, the African American poet Audrey Lord talked about, you know that self care is a political act, right, And I think taking care of your own health through positive psychology interventions you can also consider a political act, right, And so so that's one that's

kind of one way to deal with it. The other is just to recognize that again, these structural changes are so needed, but they're they're not inexpensive this stuff, right, Like, there's no reason we can't be doing both of these at the same time. Yeah. I love that the trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led many of us to ask life's biggest questions, such as who are we? What is our highest purpose? And how do we not only live through, but thrive in the wake of tragedy, division,

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can voter now at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay, now back to the show. There's a lot of things that were raised with what you just said, So I'm trying to like think Whi's one of the first something interesting I find about the subjective well being researched is that that one item, you know, someone may think, oh, well with happiness, Like, surely that just means hedonism. Surely that just means you know, feeling

good all the time. But even the data itself shows and didn't have to be this way. This is how the data came out. It shows that subjective well being is much more strongly correlated with pro social purpose than hedonism. So I think that just telling people that, like, you know, because they it's not like even like we're top down saying the theory is that purpose is more gives you

greater life satisfaction and hedonism. We're saying this is what the data shows, right, I mean, you know, we start we start with you know, our our mutual colleague when we were Yale, Peter Salve's idea of the feel good do good effect, right, which is just like, if you are in a better mood, you do nicer stuff, right like,

and it's like, so, yeah, I think it's fun. I mean I think again, you know, these are students who are facing these structural issues head on for the first time, you know, in college, and I think are learning about them, are learning how important they are. So I think it

makes sense that they're like, wait, what about this? And I think the key is just to recognize, like all these structural issues are solved by individuals with a certain set of like psychological processes, and so we just need to remember that to fix these things, we need to pay attention to those psychological processes and the kind of

psychological bandwidth and resilience that people are bringing with them. Yeah. Absolutely, One thing that I felt has been remiss in the field of positive psychology is integration with the fields of personality psychology, the fields of developmental psychology. I mean, how is it not better into CRAT with the field of development and the field of cognitive science. It has just been something I've been just like, It's like I go to the conferences, right, I go to IPPA, and I'm like,

there's no developmental psychologist at this entire conference. But how is that possible? Right? So, like, just the question of how do these things develop seems to be so important as opposed to just like taking having people take the questionnaire and then just seeing where they're at. Where do you think the non genetic component. We don't need to go into the genetic component, but the non genetic the non genetic component of developing happiness. What are the main

environmental sources you think that really comes from? Yeah, I mean I think they're from a lot of different places. I mean, I think one way to answer that question, especially when we think about those scary statistics I just talked about in college students, is to ask where did those kind of terrible statistics come from? Right? I think one thing to know about those statistics is they've gotten really much worse, even just over the last ten and

twenty years. In fact, that statistic about college student depression, my understanding, has doubled since twenty twelve, which is kind of terrifying. And so one could then flip the question on its head and say, Okay, well, what has changed in the last ten or twenty years that's causing some

of these like really devastating mental health outcomes? And I think we could point our fingers a bunch of different ways, right you know, I think if you plot the slope of college student depression and you plot the slope of cell phone use or social media use, you know, the lines line up in a very you know, scary No correlation doesn't equal causation, but this looks really close kind

of way. We also see, you know that I think this is also the time when achievement culture is kicking in in a really incredible way, right you know, Since the eighties of No Child Left Behind in the US News and World Report college rankings, I think, you know, the idea of student achievement has just been at the forefront in a way that causes many students before they get to college to like, you know, not be sleeping enough,

not prioritize their friendships, like prioritize achievement and grades at all costs. And I think these cultural factors are really impacting, you know, the psychological development of our young people, honestly, and in many ways and ways we don't really understand. And so I don't know if there's like a red herring of like here's the one thing that has caused these changes over time. But I think it's important to start looking at these things to figure out like how

did this change and how did it change so rapidly? Yeah? Absolutely, And then you know, we could of course talk all day nerding out about the genetics and coactive you know variation where people genes can subtly influence us to make certain choices which in the long run do add up to happiness or the feeling of being happy, or a feeling of being satisfied with one's life through the own

the active process, not just the passive process. So that that's interesting too, But all this stuff are deep deeply intertwined culture, environment, genes. As there's a recognition that we need to pay attention to well being even more and that it's a scientific pursuit. I mean, I think that's another misconception that a lot of people have. It's like some fluffy wu thing that we leave to the like you know, I don't know, Gwyneth Paltrow type people to

like talk about happiness. Right, we realized, like, then this is like a real true scientific basis of study. Then we can start like doing a deeper dive into some of the epigenetics using the kind of really cool tools that we have now that I understand way less well than you do, but that you can tell us what we should be doing on the genetics side. Well, who's at Yale right now that is studying the science of well being? Besides you? Is there? Who's at Yale right now?

I mean we have lots of folks who are doing yeah, yeah, not many. I mean, honestly, I think there's there's a lot of folks doing the like when when things go downhill, you know, clinical mental health side, right, But not as many people doing positive psychology, which is kind of interesting. You know, I put you know, Peter in the camp of doing some really pivotal work on you know this

feel good do good effect and emotional intelligence. But yeah, not as many like card carrying positive psychologists as you'd expect. That's a shame. That's a shame. I always you know, may he rest in peace. But one of my advisors, Jermo Singer, you know, I always found his work relevant like daydreaming and creativity, and I love how you infuse that into clinical psychology, and I love the emerging field

of sorry going. I think, you know, I'm saying there's not any card caring positive psychologists, but I don't think they're the only ones that are strongly contributing to work in the domain of kind of happiness science. Like we have people at Yale who are looking at the neuroscience of mindfulness and meditation, people like Hetty Kober, right, you know, we have philosophers who are thinking about the good life and how we use imagination and fiction, people like Tamar

Genler who are thinking about this stuff. So I think even though Yale doesn't have, you know, folks who might go to IPA and all these kind of you know, but like I'm a positive psychologist and that's who I am, we have people, you know, who are adjacent, who are really thinking about these questions more broadly and honestly. Maybe this is just you know, a show of my heritage of not growing up as a positive psychologist in the same way you didn't grow up as a positive psychologist.

I think that's where the real answers are going to come from. I look at the work that I find most exciting right now, and it's often done by people who didn't grow up in that field. People like Liz Done and people like Mike Norton, people like Nick Epley, who are you know, doing this great work about social connection and money and how it impacts our happiness. And you know, they don't necessarily go to these conferences either,

but I think they have really important things to say. Definitely, Definitely. Yeah, that's a funny idea. I didn't grow up in positive psychology, and I know what you mean. Well, I was just going to make some joke like just like yeah, like if possichology is is your core identity, and like I'm

a positive coology, that's a certain vibe, that's a vibe. Well, this kind of came up, you know, like I think, you know, in the midst of when I taught this class, it was really like white knuckling, like you know, with thousands of students. I didn't expect it was the first time I was teaching the class. We'd depressed there, you know. So I'm like checking my PowerPoint for typos because the first time I made the PowerPoint when like the Today Show is there or something, I'm like, ah, but the

class got this tremendous amount of press. And I think it's just like anything Yale does is going to get pressed. Yale is just one of these places that, like anything that happens on campus, the New York Times is going to show up. But I guess there was a lot of discourse among the positive psychologists about like, who's this chick that she's going to come in and like, you know, be in the New York Times or being a positive psychologist,

She's not really one of us. And in fact, it was Marty Seligman forward to me this kind of thread that was in one of these new you know, like kind of like group lists, and he's like, well, let's let's let Laurie speak for herself on this. And it was funny to see all these you know, so called positive psychologists. In fact, it was one research who studied humility who was like, who is this, you know, who

is this interloper who's coming in? You know? And I wrote back and I'm like, you know, like, hey, I think we can retrain, right, you know, and it's helpful to have people. I think some of the best people doing animal work are people who weren't necessarily trained in the comparative cognition tradition, Right, you do bring other things. I was like second, like, you know, I'm not like showing up and trying to get a job in positive psychology.

I'm just like teaching an undergrad class. That was how this all started, right, And yeah, I mean I didn't say it a lot of way. I didn't say, like, in third you study humility, dude, like like go on, But I didn't say yeah, I know, yeah, and a lot of ways, like I mean, it's like I didn't choose his life. This life chose me. Folks like, yeah, you wanted to start out with a thirty person seminar, you know. Yeah, I can't even imagine, Like it must have felt like a circus to have the media there,

to have that many students. I mean, what did that feel like? Do you feel like did you feel like a rock star? Like like these mostly felt exhausted. Yeah, there's a kind of deep irony about this path to happiness about you know, apart from you know, students calling me out and me doing more of these practices myself, whether or not the busyness that came with this, is really helpful for my happiness. And one thing I talked about a lot in the class is time affluence. I mean,

this is a lovely work, fashly one. It's another kind of non card carrying psychologist who's doing really great work in positive psychology. You know, she finds that, you know, our our sense of having free time, it was really matters for our well being much more so than our wealth affluence. Our time affluence matters a lot. And I think if there's one thing that's taken a major hit since I started doing a lot of this happiness work,

it's my it's my time affluence. And especially true that semester. It was a rough time, a little bit of a surreal time. But again it's put me on this path, you know, I think, you know, I loved doing the work with primates and that was amazing. You know, I still have a lab that does some of that stuff.

But just the impact that you can have teaching people about these concepts and hearing the emails about people like oh I tried, you know, social connection as you suggested, or I tried a gratitude list, and like it's really changing my life. Like there's this sense that I'm doing something that's meaningful in a different way than the work I was doing before, and definitely reaching way more people

than I was reaching before, and that feels pretty good. Well, I'm glad you didn't feel imposter syndrome, or at least you didn't feel it enough to prevent you from going for it. Oh, I definitely felt it, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel it. It It did stop you. It didn't stop you. And because you just look at how me students you've helped like will come and in a lot of ways, it must be very, very worrying for you. I don't need to ask, like it's more

wording than the Capuchins. You've changed their lives. But but I will guess that it has been very meaningful for you, and really, you know, I imagine they send you cards at the end of the semester, right like, oh, this is actually a really funny story, not just my Yale students.

Because we now put that class online as one of Yelle's online digital offerings on Courserra, do or it's called the Science of Wellbeing and four million people have taken it, which is completely a little bit yeah like nuts to me. But I had this funny situation, so you know, cut to like, you know, like August of twenty twenty, everything shut down, like no one's been in the office for forever.

I haven't been in the office for forever. And this is around the time that some of the staff were coming back, and I get this email from one of the administrators in the psych office. You remember for these lovely folks who are like so kind and nice and never never have a harsh word, but one of them had a harsh word for me. They were like, you got to come in and empty your mailbox. Your mailbox is overflowing. You need to get in here, like right now.

And I was like what, And so by go in and you remember the little cubbies we used to have so for folks that don't know, this department of these little cobbies. So my cubby was full. The whole little bench under my cubby was full and had spilled onto the floor, and it was just cards and letters and artwork by people who'd taken the online class. That like when I tell you there was like a tiary afternoon when I went. Well, first of all, it was like

impossible to carry back. I had to make do drifts to the department to get all these cards and letters. But it's beautiful. Wow. I mean, when you see that, you're really impacting people. Yeah, it's just amazing. It's just amazing. So you've really, in recent years really been interested in this idea of how we lie to ourselves. What are some of the other things we led ourselves about? Can you tell me some of the things forefront of your mind right now? Yeah, I mean, you know so many things.

And I think this is a spot where the work on happiness really aligns closely with my work on capuchins in a very weird way. I mean, but back in the day, I was really interested in whether or not these cognitive errors that we have as humans are shared with monkeys. And we looked at things like lots of version, We looked at things like cognitive dissonance, We looked at like we looked at all these kind of classic biases to see are these things built in? Are these things

that are evolved? Are they going to be hard to overcome? And I think this is the kind of perspective that I've taken on a lot of the happiness work is that a lot of the reason we're not as happy as we could be isn't because we're not trying. We're putting in tons of effort. We're just like doing it wrong. And I think we're doing it wrong in part because

we don't think about happiness the right way. We have these cognitive biases when it comes to happiness and achieving happiness, and so you know, one of the big ones is that we don't realize our minds. We get used to stuff. You know, we assume that you know, we're going to buy the next gadget and we'll be happy forever, and we get married, we get that new promotion at work, and we'll be happily ever after. You know, this term that we just show in is wrong. You know, a

tall bench here calls this the arrival fallacy, right. You know, it's like we think we're going to get there and we're going to be good forever, but not so. And that's in part because not just because of hetonic adaptation, but because we're blind to heatonic adaptation. We don't realize

that we get used to stuff over time. I think another bias of our mind is that we you know, we assume that we pay attention to things in absolute terms, that I get absolutely more money, you're absolutely more success. I'd feel happier. But in practice, that's just not how our mind looks at things. Our minds are big relative machines. We just compare against some random reference point, and that's

how we feel. And stupidly, our minds are very good at picking random reference points that make us feel terrible. This is like, in a way, you're kind of like you're like adding on to the cognitive biases list, you know, like you're adding things within the realm of things that have more direct implications for our happiness. I don't know if you thought of about it that way at all, within that framework, but yeah, yeah, I mean I think

you know, I think you know. I'm not the one who's identified these biases, right, I'm just synthesizing the great work, you know, in the case of heudon'tic adaptation of Dan Golbert, you know, and you know social comparison, tons of folks, including Connmon and Tversky, you thought about this, and you know, want a Nobel Prize apart for this stuff, right, But you know, the way I think about it is these aren't just kind of haphazard ways that our minds work.

These could be deep seated, structural ways that our minds work, just like the kinds of things I was studying in Capuchins. And that means they're going to be hard to overcome. That merely understanding these mechanisms doesn't mean that you somehow can avoid them, And I think that's really important. That kind of changes the calculus of like, Okay, how do we deal with these things? Right? We have to kind of work with our biases instead of against them. Well, yeah,

awareness so important. Awareness so important, Which actually does lead me to a discussion of the latest science of mindfulness, because I mean, I think that some of the claims are a bit overhyped some of these mindfulness programs. When you actually look at the data, you're like, you see a much more circumscribed set of things that has reliably been that mindfulness produces. I was worrying where you kind of stand on that, what your thoughts are about the

latest science of mindfulness and what it shows its benefits are. Yeah, I mean I think you know, mindfulness is definitely not a panacea empirically, But none of these positive psychology interventions are, right, My read is like every single one of them in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases for most people because of course individual differences. I don't

have to tell you about individual differences, but yes, individual differences. Right. Like, what they do is they, on average give a small but consistent boost, right. I mean, if you look at like gratitude journaling, that on average gives you a small but consistent boost. But you're looking at like again, it depends on the study, but you know, like not more than a point bump up on a ten point happiness

scale on average. Right. The key though is that for a lot of these I think it's and again it's on average, right, Not everybody is necessarily going to show that bomb. The key though is I think that these things give us some tools that we can try out, Right, We can try them out on ourselves and see are these the kind of things that make us feel better? And I end to put mindfulness in this category. If I try this, is it going to make me feel

anxious and we're going to hate it? Or is this going to like give me a practice that allows me to be more present. That mean, it allows me to notice stuff that allows me to curb my mind wandering. And you got to do like the experiment for yourself. And I think, you know, to be fair, these small but like like significant and consistent happiness was like, I'll take them. You know, I'd much rather be a seven on a happiness scale than a six out of ten, you know, like out of ten, right, and so yeah,

but I think it is important. I think whenever these things get talked about in the popular media, they wind up like way more hyped than, you know, than than the results often show. And I feel like that's not exactly the fault of the researchers. Might be the fault of some researchers, but most researchers I think are honest about the magnitude of their effects sizes, but then they get written about, you know, in these huge ways. But

that's true. You know, I've never read any paper that like, you know, chocolate or coffee or wine and cancer and not like it will stop cancer. I'm like pretty sure, like it's an overall average of a small percentage, you know. Yeah, I think it's very important to point that out that any specific exercise or targeting any one specific domain really doesn't move it that much more than one two points. But I want to be one more optimistic and say, wait, wait,

that is optimistic, Like I mean likes auto music. I guess that's crazy. Like like if you if there was like a drug company that had a pill that they were like, if anybody takes this pill, they're going to go up one point on a ten point happy a skill, that drug would make so much money and we have that free drugs and all these interventions. Yes, but more optimistic. Don't let me stop you there, I was going to say.

I was going to say, I don't want people to then extrapolate that to mean that the most you can increase your happiness is only one to two points, because I think the point here is the more exercise, the more you make this a daily part of your life and you have it, you can even more substantially move the dial on your life satisfaction. So I just wanted to make that point, just wanted to make that point.

I think this is one of the reasons I love Sonya Lubermerski's work so much, as you know she talks about like it's work, yo, like you gotta just sid like put the work, like just like anything else. You know. I saw one of my students had posted a meme about you know, it's like like, you know, hopped on the treadmill for fifteen minutes and I'm not a size you know, extra anymore, Like WTF? And I think people

think this with the happiness interventions too. It's like I wrote in my gratitude journal, why am I still having any sadness? I mean it was a joke. Yeah, it was a mean right, It's like you know, but but I think we think we think that with fitness, right, We're like I went to the gym every day this week, Like what's going on? Like why you know, like why can't I fit in my pants? And I think the

same about happiness. We just we want quick fixes, right our brain Just this is I think another interesting bias of the brain is like it's hard for us to see small incremental changes, you know, especially ones that don't go up in alinear slope, that kind of go up and down over time, Like we just can't integrate that. But that's what's happening with these interventions. If you if you do them and you're consistent about them, and you make them a daily practice. They do work in a

small but significant way. At what point should people accept some things really won't change that much within themselves and then actually for their happiness that self acceptance is actually

the most important thing for them. I think about this all the time, you know, because it's like some things that you know you would it would be happier if you put your efforts into something else, right, Like, for instance, some people are obsessed with their physical appearance, right, and it's like, actually, I think you'd be a little happier if you got more obsessed about your pro social purpose then yet another sort of facial you know, reconstruction surgery.

So I just try to think about this and how what have you thought about that? Yeah? I mean one of the things we talk about the way is structure the classes. We start with things that won't make you happier and things that will make you happier. Things that won't make you happier. You know, if you're living above the poverty line with a decent middle class income, more money is not going to make you happier, you know,

like body and looks. You know, there's so much evidence that in many cases, diet and weight loss, plastic surgery, doesn't you know, increase your happiness at least in the way people are predicting, right, We make incorrect, affective forecasts about how good this stuff is going to ultimately feel. Right, and like, by and large, if your circumstances are reasonable,

like changing them is not going to help. And so you know, I explicitly point this stuff out to students, and this is the part where I get like the most student pushback. I mean, you deal with these smart Ivy League kids right like they'll show up and be like okay, but hag Sanchez, Like, what if you know, I really make this much money and I donate this money, like you know, like can I get my like a million dollar investment banking job. So I think knowing what's

not gonna work is really important and really critical. And that way, again, you can start putting your energies towards the kind of stuff that really will improve your happiness. Again, it's not I don't think people are you know, resting on their laurels hoping happiness is going to show up. I think people are actively working towards this stuff. They're just kind of going at it the wrong way. Nice, very well put. So, what are some things you'll be

talking about in the upcoming season of your podcast? Do we get any previews coming attractions? Yeah, you have a really famous psychologist coming up whose name starts with an S. Scott. Yes, you're actually you will be featured. Not in the next season. We have I want to transcend this to be its own episode. So it's sitting there waiting until we come back for like a full interview show because I didn't want to mix and match you with other other folks.

So you're you're waiting in the wings my Transcendence episode, which I love, and we do it. Yet this season is actually really fun. We're talking about the psychology of negative experiences, why we sometimes like pain and fearful things like haunted houses and so on, and so that is we do have Paul Bluemont, and we have this wonderful journalist Lee Cowart, who, like Paul, has written a book

about things painful experiences and why they feel good. But Lee, they have decided to experience all those experiences, so they ate like the World's Hottest Hot Pepper, and they engaged very publicly in the book in like BDSM like sex play, like so they like unlike Paul, like we like they pure like their money with their mouths. It's like they really like went for Well, you don't know about Paul. Well,

we chatted about that in the podcast. He said, you know, like, you know, if I, if I do engage in that stuff, I'm not going to talk about it in the books. That's right, that's but yeah, but why why do we like that stuff? You know? And in some cases when we know it's fake, like in the context of sad books and scary movies, why do we fall for it? We're also doing a whole episode on fandom and why fandom can bring us happiness. This allows me because I'm

like a huge sci fi nerd to nerd out. We have will we End on the show, who talks about how being a geek isn't about what you love, it's about how you love it and the happiness inducing practices of loving something like your life depends on it. So it's a little bit of a you know, mixed bag of all kinds of interesting things. But it's going to be a fun season. I love it. I love it. Well,

congratulations to you. I hope you're getting some real rest I don't know if it's public knowledge that you're you're on sabbatical as it was in the New York Times, like she's so burned out, like there's like the big header and there she's so in fact, my mom lens right now. Yeah, my mother in law wrote to me. She's like, I just read in the New York Times you're taking some time off. Like you're gonna tell her

your mother in law so hilarious. Yeah, well, I just really hope that this is a real restorative time for you. And congratulations on all your successes and also congratulations on a knocking your head. You're like the same Lauri Santos that I remember from like a decade ago. I mean, you're humble and sweet and smart and funny. So yeah, it's just it's it's really nice to reconnect with you. And thanks for being on my show today. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode

of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.