Shownotes:
Step into "The Happiness Lab" with Dr. Laurie Santos in this engaging episode. Join us as Dr. Santos helps us overcome the ways our minds lie to us about happiness!🤔 Beloved for making complex science relatable, Laurie shares eye-opening insights that challenge conventional wisdom. From the power of social connections to embracing all your emotions, this episode will change the way you think about happiness. Get ready to unlock the transformative potential of well-being. Tune in now and embark on a journey to a happier you!
About Our Guest:
Teacher of the most popular class in Yale’s history, host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast, and creator of The Science of Well-Being on Coursera. Laurie’s goal is to help teach others to live happier lives through science-backed techniques.
More about Dr. Santos:
In addition to her work on the evolutionary origins of human cognition, Laurie is an expert on the science of happiness and the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. Her Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. The class became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of four students enrolled. Her course has been featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine. The online version of the class—The Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org—has attracted more than 4 million learners from around the world. A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds, and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, is a top-3 Apple podcast which has attracted 85+ million downloads since its launch.
Thrive Global Article:
Inside The Happiness Lab: Dr. Laurie Santos on the Science of Well-Being
Connect with and learn from Dr. Santos:
The Science of Well-Being for Teens
The Science of Well-Being for Everyone
Website – DrLaurieSantos.com
Instagram – @LaurieSantosOfficial
X/Twitter – @LaurieSantos
Pinterest – @DrLaurieSantos
Facebook – @happinesslab
YouTube – @DrLaurieSantos
About Lainie:
Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, social-emotional learning, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie’s client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at linktr.ee/lainierowell.
Website - LainieRowell.com
Twitter - @LainieRowell
Instagram - @LainieRowell
Evolving with Gratitude, the book is available here! And now, Bold Gratitude: The Journal Designed for You and by You is available too!
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Just fill out the forms linked above and someone will get back to you ASAP!
Transcript:
Lainie Rowell: [00:00:00] Hello friends. Okay, I'm gonna try and play it cool for this episode, but at no point am I able to accomplish that. And I don't have the guest with me right this moment because I already knew I was gonna fangirl so much when I was talking to her, I just thought I should do the introduction on my own where I could hopefully gather some composure.
So with us today is Dr. Laurie Santos. She is the teacher of the most popular class in Yale's history. She's the host of one of my absolute favorite podcasts, The Happiness Lab. And she's also the creator of the Science of Wellbeing course on Coursera. It is free, open to anyone. You can actually go take the Coursera course and it's amazing content.
I had a chance to go through the course myself. There's now one for teens as well. It's so much wisdom, so much knowledge. It's really, really helpful. And it is about bringing Laurie's goal to help teach others to live happier lives through science backed techniques.
You're going to love it. You're going to love the course. You're also going to love this episode. And I didn't say this on the podcast because again I was fangirling enough and I also just didn't want to embarrass her, but I will tell you all that years ago some friends and I were playing a game, well I call it a game, but Dr. Arthur Aaron's 36 questions where the goal is to really get to know people on a deeper level and up the closeness and one of those questions is "given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?" And years ago, a friend asked me this when we were playing the game, and I said, Dr. Laurie Santos. You know that . old saying, you should never meet your heroes? I met one of my heroes and she exceeded my expectations. Such a delight. Take a listen.
Thank you for being here, Laurie, and may I get the fangirling out of the way and not to make you uncomfortable, but you're someone who I feel like I know, even though I don't actually know you, but huge fan of the podcast and took your course, and I just love your work.
And. I really appreciate how you make everything so accessible. It's all grounded in science, and you bring us the research, but you make it so we can understand.
Laurie Santos: I'm so glad it's really nice to hear that it's impactful and that people are learning from it, so that's awesome.
Lainie Rowell: 100%. Your course, the Science of Wellbeing, the most popular course in Yale's history, and you also turned that into a free course via Coursera, and I just would love to hear, in your own words, what are some of the key insights from the course that people can apply in their daily lives, just to improve their wellbeing, especially challenging times, there's a lot of things stressful going on in the world, Like, help us.
Laurie Santos: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest insights that we talk about a lot in the class and that I think is really important when we start to think about our own well being is this idea that our minds really lie to us when it comes to our own happiness. We assume that to be happier, we need to change our circumstances. We need to make more money. We need to switch jobs, become a rich influencer, that sort of thing, but the data really suggests that a lot of our happiness isn’t in our circumstances. Its really in our behaviors and our mindsets. I mean the caveat to that obviously, if you're in a war zone if you're living in trauma, if you're living in really dire situations than of course changing your circumstances will matter for your happiness. But for at least a lot of the folks listening to this right now listening and those circumstantial changes would not be as important for your well being as, for example, changing your behaviors, getting a little bit more social connection, doing more good things for others, getting more exercise and sleep, or changing your mindsets, right?
Improving your presence, getting more of an attitude of gratitude, finding ways to engage in better, more self compassionate self talk, right? All of those things will wind up mattering more. So I think that's kind of one of the big things that the class talks about is, we kind of get happiness wrong, and to do it better, to really engage the behaviors and the mindsets that will ultimately actually make us happier, we need to kind of recognize that our mind might not be leading us towards happiness in the way we think.
I think a second big insight of the class is really the power of other people for our happiness. I think sometimes when we think about happiness, we think about self care and me time and it's, me, me, me. But the science really shows that happiness comes from invoking not the I, but the we, right?
Thinking about just connecting with other people, doing nice things for other people. Kind of finding spaces where you can connect with other people even more, right, and really investing in that kind of community connection. All of those things are really essential for happiness, much more essential than I think we often think.
So that's I think yet another misconception and a big set of behaviors that we know can be really important for happiness. And then I think the final thing that I'll say that is another misconception, but it comes up a lot in the class, is this idea that we often think that, you know, happiness is about being joyful all the time, right?
It's all positive emotions all the time. And I think that's another big misconception. Really, what the science says is that a flourishing life involves engaging with some negative emotions, right? You mentioned we're living in challenging times. That means it's normative to be scared and angry and anxious about what's going on, to be sad about what we're seeing in the world. Those are correct emotions in the context of really challenging times, and I think we need to recognize that a flourishing life really involves those. We need to kind of listen to the signals our emotions are telling us, and then maybe really allow them so that we can get out of our emotions what they're evolved to be there for us. So there's some of the big themes of the class and also some misconceptions that can be helpful to overcome if you want to feel happier.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, and I think the term toxic positivity I have some struggles with that term. And I appreciate you saying it's normative to be scared in these challenging times.
I also want to be empowered and have the skills and the behavior and the mindset to shift out of it so it's not pervasive. So it's not ongoing. So it's not taking over my life. What's that line there?
Laurie Santos: I think this is important. I mean, I think that that line is really critical.
I think when we sometimes think of negative emotions and we experience them, our instinct is just to suppress those negative emotions, right? It's like, they're not there, you know, pretend that's not happening. And I think that that doesn't serve us well. Our negative emotions are there to tell us something really important, right?
If I'm feeling lonely, that's an active signal that I might need a little bit more social connection, right? If I'm feeling angry, that might be an active signal that there's some moral violation that I care about, that my community is in pain and I want to take action on. One that I experience a lot, if I'm feeling overwhelmed, right?
If I get that email asking me for yet another to do and my momentary experience is like, uggh, when I suppress that, then I answer the email a different way, and I wind up having consequences for myself that I don't often realize. And so I think it's important to think of these negative emotions not as kind of feelings that we're stuck in, that we're kind of trapped with, right?
That's not the message of this work. The message is that our emotions are there to tell us something. They're often these signals that are like a little alert. It's kind of like a notification from our minds that's saying, "Hey, that thing doesn't feel right right now." And then the key is what do we choose to do with them, right?
The message isn't that then you have to sit with those emotions and kind of ruminate with them for days and days or months and months. The key is that you notice them and then you have techniques for allowing them, , or kind of taking the right form of action on them so that you can kind of alleviate that.
Yeah, so the key is that the idea of toxic positivity isn't no positivity ever again, right? It's listening to your negative emotions so you can get back to the sort of flourishing that I think we all want to achieve.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, and then, I also think that sometimes what toxic positivity is about is me telling other people that they can't feel a certain way. That, to me, is where it becomes toxic. It's like, everyone's entitled to their feelings, right?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, you know, I think seeing other people's feelings and feeling like it's inappropriate for us to feel a certain way, right?
I do think sometimes when even people hear, oh, there's this happiness class at Yale, I'll sometimes get critics saying, oh, does that mean they can never feel sad or anxious? And the answer is, no, that's the path to kind of using your sadness and your anxiety in a positive way to not feel trapped by it or stuck with it, but to kind of use it productively and effectively.
So that we're engaging with our emotions in healthy ways.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, and I talk a lot about gratitude and I always try and say we want the full human experience. It's not that we just wanna be happy all the time. That that wouldn't be a very interesting life to lead. That wouldn't be very fulfilling.
I want to talk a little bit about gratitude and this is something that you share often, and I have a specific question to gratitude, but is there anything that you generally want to say about gratitude to improve our overall well being and happiness?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, I think, there's just so much evidence that gratitude can be a really powerful mindset for improving our happiness overall. And I think it's, again, one of these spots where our minds lie to us. At least for me, it's not the go to, right? If I'm, meeting up with a friend who I haven't seen in a while and they ask, how's it going?
My brain automatically goes to all the hassles in life, not the blessings, not the good things. I don't talk about any of the many people at work who I adore. I talk about the one colleague who's getting on my nerves that week, right? And I think that that's not what happy people do.
Happy people spontaneously bring to mind the blessings in life. They spontaneously bring to mind the silver linings and the evidence really shows that if you can train your brain to do that, there are a host of benefits. You feel better. Gratitude itself is a positive emotions. You're kind of getting this positive feeling.
But beyond that, you wind up more satisfied with your life. Overall, you wind up often feeling more connected to people because often we experience gratitude for the people around us, right? So noticing that their blessings in our life can make us feel more connected. And there's lovely work from Sara Algoe’s lab at the University of North Carolina showing that that can lead to what she calls the sort of find, remind, and bind of relationships.
So when you find things that you're grateful for, that can remind you of what you love about people. And then that can cause your bonds to increase over time too. So a whole, whole host of benefits. That gratitude can provide for our well being and even beyond. There's also evidence that prosocial emotions like gratitude can help us eat healthier, right?
Because it's kind of like where prosocial emotions kind of want us to invest in future or to kind of give back because we feel like we have this bounty of these blessings. And so that can help us. There's evidence from Dave Distetto's lab that that can help us save for retirement, eat a little bit more healthy, and so on.
So it has this host of benefits for our well being, but even beyond.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, and I talk about savoring a lot, which I connect to gratitude, and so I feel like when I'm savoring my food, I'm not just wolfing it down and consuming probably more than I should, because I'm truly present and enjoying it.
You've been talking a lot about social connection. I love the find, remind, bind, and it does feel like gratitude can be a path to nurture those relationships and not just focus on the I, but the we, which you mentioned earlier. I also want to talk about it in the context of social comparison. Because this is a big one, right? Your work shares this, with social media, we now have this extra, I mean, we've always had marketing and ads and TV commercials and things to make us feel bad about ourselves.
But now, now we have this whole extra layer of social media. And in your course you said that, "gratitude is the killer of envy", and I would love for you to elaborate on that.
Laurie Santos: Yeah, well I think it's the act of noticing what we have and savoring the things that we do have that can kind of make us feel like we have enough.
I think the key to gratitude is that when we notice the things that are great in our lives, we almost feel like we have this interesting bounty, right? We don't need to worry about the things we don't have because our plate just feels really full, almost overflowing. If I think about, all the people I'm grateful for in my life, all the great things that have happened to me, the circumstances I'm grateful for, that starts to put our energy on noticing the stuff that we do have, as opposed to the stuff you were mentioning, right, which is all the stuff we don't have, all the stuff that advertisers and to a certain extent, you know, influencers on social media want us to notice, like, oh, you know, I don't have those cool clothes or that great body or that fantastic vacation.
When we're feeling grateful for the stuff we do have, you're kind of like, oh, I didn't go on that vacation, but I have this family that I'm super happy with, or I did these other experiences that I'm really excited about. It can cause us to do what's not natural, which is to notice the stuff we have, as opposed to the stuff that we're missing out on.
And I think it can be a great antidote to some of the social comparison that a lot of us, so many of us experience online. It can kind of protect us from some of the negative effects of social comparison.
Lainie Rowell: Does social media play into our reference points being out of whack?
Laurie Santos: Oh, definitely, for sure.
You mentioned that we've always had advertisers and people trying to convince us to buy stuff, but actually for human history we haven't, you know, that's like been a lot in the development of for sure television, maybe a little bit radio, but before that there was just a smattering of magazines.
There wasn't something dinging in our pockets all the time telling us to check the latest notification of some cool thing that someone's doing or some cool ad that's popping up, right? And so I do think that we as a species are getting bombarded with these other reference points, these other social comparisons where other people's lives feel better than our own.
We're kind of getting that more than we ever have in our species history. And I think we forget how much that's affecting our psychology. It's affecting it really unconsciously. None of us, I don't think, go on Instagram to say, I'm gonna feel bad about myself and look at everybody else's great bodies and vacations.
Right? But that kind of information gets in there whether we want it to or not. And so I think it's worth remembering that some of these practices, when we're seeing these reference points, they kind of get in automatically. And so they're hurting our happiness whether we want those things too or not.
Lainie Rowell: Just out of curiosity, there's obviously an evolutionary advantage to the negativity bias. It served a critical purpose thousands of years ago, helped our ancestors make choices to survive. And like we've already discussed negative emotions, serve a purpose. It's all about keeping us safe. But was there ever an evolutionary advantage to social comparison? To like looking over at the guy in the next hut and seeing what's happening over there.
Laurie Santos: I think there may be an evolutionary advantage to social comparison, right? Ultimately social comparison is really about kind of, making guesses about the things we should have or the things we should do in life based on what other people are doing.
And I think that, evolutionarily speaking, that might have been useful in some context, right? So I'm a forager, I'm out, I have to find berries today. How many berries should I get? I don't know. There's not like an obvious objective answer, but if you're walking around with 10 berries and my other friend's walking around with 10 berries, then maybe 10 seems like a good, a good thing to go for.
And if I get 12, then I don't need some psychological mechanism to get super excited. That would be a waste of time. But if I only get eight or five, then I might want psychological mechanisms to make me feel a little bit bad to kind of motivate me to work harder. Right? So I do think that there's some reasons that social comparison might be there, but those reasons aren't about our happiness, right?
They're about our survival. And most of us aren't out in the world, getting berries. Again, there's some people who might be listening whose circumstances are truly dire, but most of us have enough food on the table and a roof over our head that we're fine. And so I think social comparison might have been a mechanism that was helpful in these extreme cases, but it was never helpful for our happiness.
And even we don't really need it as a survival mechanism in the way that we probably needed it, maybe way back in the evolutionary day.
Lainie Rowell: Obviously a lot of us are pursuing happiness and we don't always get in our crosshairs, what would get us to happiness. I think you kind of already answered this, but I'm just going to put it out there if there's anything else you want to cover with it. And so what are some of those common misconceptions about happiness that you've encountered in your work and maybe how you've even seen that in your Yale students and over time as you've been doing this work?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest one and the one where I get the most pushback from my Yale Students is money. And again, this requires a little bit of a caveat. If you don't have money at all, then that's a real big hit on your happiness, right? If you can't put a roof over your head or food on the table, then that's a huge problem, you know?
But the research really shows if you're making a decent middle class- ish income, and we can fight and quibble about what that exact number is, our rising inflationary economy and so on. But there is a number at which you are probably not gonna be happier if you get more money, but most of us don't think that, most of us think if we won the lottery tomorrow or got some huge windfall of cash, that we'd wind up feeling happier.
And the data just seems to suggest that's not the case. Again, this is one where I get pushback from a lot of people, especially my students, right? Because I think the students at Yale have in lots of ways, sort of structured their lives and a lot of their achievements to go to a really good Ivy League school so that they can go out and get a really good job and so on.
And to say, hey, probably you're just going to be fine. You don't have to keep pursuing that. I think it's a real shock to the values that they've grown up in and so money and material possessions kind of is a big one. I think we also get a lot of parts wrong in terms of the way we assume motivation works and that self talk works.
My Yale students definitely are really high achieving students, and that means they're pretty type A personalities, and they often try to push themselves with some pretty nasty self talk, right? The self criticism that my students at Yale experience is just terrible, and when they hear that a better path to pursuing their goals and to motivating themselves might be through a little bit more self compassion, to talking to themselves as though they were talking to a friend, rather than some sort of terrible drill instructor, I think that that's pretty shocking to them.
I think that they kind of experience some pushback on that. But then I think that's another spot that when they try it out, they start to realize, Oh, kind of being kind to myself is actually pretty helpful and makes me procrastinate less and obviously makes me a lot happier. And so I think those are just two of the biggest domains, I think, where I see it with my own students.
Lainie Rowell: So I'm going to open it up pretty wide right now because I know I need to let you go. Looking at your work with your Yale students, you've got the Coursera, which really opens up your content to the world, which is so lovely, this free course. You've also got one for the teens, right?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, called Science of Wellbeing for Teens, and it's basically a high school, middle school version of the content that we created originally for our college students and then for adult learners. And so it covers a lot of the same material, but it's actually giving students examples that matter to them.
So it's not so much money and salary, it's more the kind of social connection that folks experience on social media, and the kinds of problems that high school students are facing, things like grades and so on. But they end up learning exactly the same content that my Yale students learn.
Lainie Rowell: That's so amazing that that's accessible to them.
And I have tweens right now. They're headed to your course in the very near future. They're already a little bombarded on the gratitude side of things, but I'm happy they're going to hear it from someone else. So to open it up really wide, you've got the Yale students, you've got the Coursera course for teens too now, and you've got The Happiness Lab.
In all of that, which is of course huge, vast, what are some of the things that are highlights to you out of the impact of these lessons that you're sharing?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, one of the things we've started to do is to really do some pre and post testing of students who are taking our classes online.
We've been able to do this. in collaboration with Coursera, and even for other scholars at other universities have started using the class. My colleague Bruce Hood, who's at the University of Bristol in the UK, has started offering a similar class live for his students. And so we've re really been able to test, okay, does teaching these kinds of things, as a student, hearing about some of these kinds of practices and putting them into effect yourself, does that actually move the needle on people's well being?
And excitingly, the answer we seem to be getting is yes. In one of the studies. People who take the class report going up about one point on a 10 point happiness scale. And I think that that result is, is pretty telling, right? I think a lot of these practices we talk about, whether it's gratitude or more social connection or exercise or sleep, they're not the kind of things that are going to take you from zero to a hundred on a happiness scale, right?
But they're going to have a small but significant effect and a lasting effect. And that is pretty cool. You know, if you were a 6 on a happiness scale, you might really want to be a 7. And if you're a 4 you might definitely want to be a 5 or a 5 ½ and it seems like learning about these practices and really putting them into effect is the kind of thing that does seem to empirically move the needle. And so that's really exciting for us. It means that as we put this content out there, if people are hearing it, and most importantly, not just kind of learning about it, but really engaging with it, putting these practices into effect in their own lives it really can help you.
Lainie Rowell: Yeah, and it's this timeless wisdom that's backed by science, but you also go the extra mile, in my opinion, where you have been, like, this is the W.O.O.P.
Laurie Santos: Yeah Wish Outcome, Obstacles, and Plan, yeah.
Lainie Rowell: And so bringing those strategies in. If you want to do more gratitude, if you want to bring meditation in, you can't just will it into being.
You actually have to go the extra mile and do those things. So I really appreciate that helping us form those habits that are so important in our wellbeing.
Laurie Santos: Awesome. And I think that that's really critical, right? I mean, even for me as somebody who knows all this content, it's hard to put it into effect in your daily life.
It's one thing to know that gratitude is really important. It's another the next time I'm getting a drink with my girlfriend to cue up the blessings in my life when I'm ready to start complaining about things. And so I think that really committing to putting these things into practice and finding ways to turn them into habits is so critical.
Lainie Rowell: Laurie, you're amazing. I will put all of your ways to reach you in the show notes, but just in your own words, what's the best way for people to connect with you and your wisdom?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, people should check out The Happiness Lab podcast, which you can download wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you want to take a version of the Yale class, you should check out the Science of Wellbeing, or if you're a little bit younger, the Science of Wellbeing for Teens on Coursera.org.
Lainie Rowell: So they say you should never meet your heroes.
And you have exceeded. I didn't imagine this conversation could go this well, but it has.
And so Laurie, thank you for your time. I appreciate you so much and thank you all for listening.
Laurie Santos: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
