April 10, 2023 • 35 mins
Laurie swaps seats in the studio to be interviewed by none other than Katie Couric. In this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Laurie's asked to define happiness; outline the best steps to reach it; and give an honest appraisal of her own struggles to flourish each and every day.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. If you're a regular fan
of this podcast, then you're probably used to me sitting
in the interviewer seat. But I recently had a chance
to switch things up a bit and get interviewed myself.
In fact, I had a chance to sit down with
none other than the legendary Katie krek for her podcast
Next Question. I'll be honest, it was pretty surreal to
(00:38):
sit across from Katie in the studio. I mean, she's
interviewed some of the most important and influential people on
the planet. But I quickly learned that Katie's got a
lot of her own thoughts about happiness, and she pushed
me to think more critically about the science behind my work.
I did worry that I wouldn't be as exciting a
guest as Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or some of
the other amazing people that Katie has interviewed, but she
(01:01):
still seemed pretty happy with our conversation, and so I
wanted to share it with you here today. I hope
you enjoy it. I'm Katie Kuric and this is Next Question.
You know, having a podcast on happiness teaching a whole
classed Ivyleague students generation after generation. Yeah, I mean I
think that we get happiness wrong. Happiness, that feeling of
(01:25):
joy or contentment that we all seem to crave, can
also seem totally unattainable in this day and age. In fact,
maybe we need to replace the word happiness altogether. True
flourishing is taking on challenges, embracing failure, you know, navigating
these negative emotions that might be normative. And so I think,
(01:46):
you know, it would be better to have a different word,
But in some ways we're stuck with happiness. Doctor Laurie
Santos is a cognitive scientist who's been studying happiness in
the lab as well as through the class she teaches
at Yale. But she's the first to admit even she
isn't happy all the time. Some of us are kind
of genetically lucky to have a little bit of a
(02:06):
predisposition to happiness. I'm probably the opposite. I think I
was born on a rainy, like, loudry, mixed kind of day.
So what do we need to understand about happiness? Why
is it so difficult to come by? And why is
true happiness such freaking hard work? By the way, if
(02:28):
you want to get smarter Every morning with a breakdown
of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness
and pop culture. Sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake
Up Call by going to katiecurreic dot com. Laurie Santos,
come on down. I'm so excited to be talking to you. Ditto, Ditto.
(02:50):
Let's start with the basics. What exactly is happiness? We
did a very long time answering that, Katie, But so
social scientists tend to think of happiness as being happy
in your life and being happy with your life. So
being happy in your life is like you've just got
lots of positive emotions. There's like joy and smiling and
after as opposed to kind of negative emotions like sadness,
(03:12):
anger and saying. It's not saying you have no negative emotions,
it's just that the ratio is pretty good. That's being
happy in your life. But being happy with your life
is how you think about your life. Is the answer
to your question, like all things considered, how satisfied are
you with your life? And if you say yes, then
that's pretty good. And I love this definition because you know,
we all know that there are times that those two
(03:32):
things dissociate right that you know you're doing something that's
making you incredibly satisfied with your life. You know, maybe
you have a new baby or a new job, but
it's hard, you know, in your life there's a lot
of stress and things like that. And I think we've
all met people, you especially being you know, with the
rich and famous folks, where in a second or no no,
in their life, like you know, you're flying first class
and great food, but with your life there's a real
(03:54):
sense of emptiness and a lack of meaning. And so
we have these misconceptions when it comes to the things
that make us happen. Are we using the wrong words?
Should it be contentment? Should it be fulfillment? I think
the Greeks, you know, and the ancients as usual had
it right. You know, they talked about you diamondy a flourishing,
and I think would be a better word, because to
have true flourishing, it's not like you're happy all the time.
(04:15):
Like true flourishing isn't toxic positivity where you're like smiling
like some terrible yellow emojing where you're like, oh my gosh,
I'm happy all the time. And so what I try
to do is to explain to folks that true happiness
allows for the normal kinds of spots where you're not
going to feel great, like that's typical, that's normal, that's
what you need for a good, ultimately happy life. But
people probably should think about the word flourishing or fulfillment, contentment.
(04:41):
It just seems much more stable. Happiness seems like at
the high end of the emotional scale, right, and that's
unattainable because nobody's happy all the time. Yeah. My colleague
Dan Gilbert, professor at Harvard, who comes a lot on
my podcast. Dan's vond of saying that you know, happily
ever after only exists if you have like three minutes
(05:01):
left to live, like, it's just not a destination. And
I think that's another thing we get wrong. We think
I'm going to do something and get there. You know,
I'll get married and I will be happy. Or I'll
get this new raise and I will be happy. Or
you know, my college students, I'll get into the perfect
medical school or get the perfect rates and I will
be happy. And that's just not how it works. My
late husband used to say that I was born on
(05:22):
a sunny day, which I thought was such a nice compliment,
and it made me wonder if some people are hardwired
for happiness, Is there a happiness set point that varies
from person to person, from biology to biology. Yeah, there's
some evidence that that might be at least partly the case.
And the evidence comes from these studies on what's called heritability. Right,
(05:45):
What is it called heritability? It's just not irritability irritability. Heritability,
which is this like big word of saying, you know,
how much of the variance that we see in the population.
You know, some people are happy, not so happy. How
much of that is due to your biology? How much
of that is due to kind of how you grow up? Right?
And the way we test heritability is to look at twins. Right.
(06:07):
Some twins are identical. That means they're genetically exactly the same,
the same way, raise the same way. Right. Some are fraternal,
which means they're genetically different, Like they're just as similar
as regular brothers and sisters. And so if happiness is
really built in, then identical twins should be much more
similar in their happiness level than regular brothers and sisters.
(06:27):
Tons of studies have looked at this, and what you
find is that's true, but a little bit. Heritability estimates
are at about thirty percent, and that's like, you know,
it's there, but scientifically speaking, it's kind of small. What
does that mean. It means there's something to be said for,
you know, being born on a sunny day. Some of
us are kind of genetically lucky to have a little
bit of a predisposition to happiness, but it's not as
(06:48):
much as we, I think assume. So it sounds like
nurture is more important than nature when it comes to happiness.
That's exactly right, and I think it's important not to
discount nature. Right. There are some people who have a
harder nurture than others because they've got to put more
work in, but everybody can put the right work in
to change things. Well, I wanted to ask you what
sets you up for happiness? I mean, is it a
(07:10):
secure home, life, loving parents, financial security, positive affirmation, success,
and however you define it. I feel like I'm really lucky, honestly, Laurie,
in all those categories. I think of people who have
parents who didn't give them unconditional love and how that
(07:34):
really kind of reverberates throughout their lives. Yeah, I mean,
obviously those things have an impact. Right. You know, trauma,
which is the kind of thing you're talking about, right
where parents you know, your abusive parents or with whole
subscene or exactly or you know, they could even be affluent,
you know, successful parents, just very distant or really harsh, right.
(07:54):
I mean, we all kind of grow up with different
levels of that, and you can look at levels that
are pretty extreme, and scientists do that, right. This is
a lot of the work on trauma and what's often
called post traumatic stress disorder. Many of us have heard
about that, right, And it comes from the fact that
when you experience trauma sometimes that can have a longstanding effect.
But even though you know post traumatic stress disorder PTSD
(08:16):
gets a lot of airtime, scientists have also looked at
what you might consider the opposite, which is called post
traumatic growth. Right. You go through an awful, terrible incident
that you never would have wished on yourself or anyone else,
and some good comes from that. You feel like you
come out stronger, you feel like you come out more resilient,
you feel like you come out more socially connected to
the people you really care about. And this is what's
(08:38):
called post traumatic growth. And I'm kind of curious. I mean,
you know, you and I are talking after you've been
so helpfully public about your breast cancer diagnosis. That could
be a trauma that leads to PTSD. You know, individuals
who experience cancer diagnosis and have to go through the process,
you know, terrible and awfully traumatic. But you kind of
resonate with that, this idea of the post traumatic growth
a bit. I mean, I think because I've had so
(09:01):
much experience witnessing cancer much more severely in both my
late husband and my sister who also passed away, and
I became so knowledgeable about cancer. I have a very
really healthy and solid understanding about my particular situation, and
(09:23):
instead of being traumatized, it actually increased my gratitude because
I know, unlike them, both my husband and sister were
diagnosed with stage four cancer. Mine was discovered early, when
it's not only treatable but curable, and so if anything,
(09:43):
it wasn't traumatic. It was actually weirdly life affirming. It
was a death sentence for my husband and my sister
when they were diagnosed, and the fact that it was
twenty twenty two, the fact that science has really progressed,
I felt grateful and so This is what we hear
(10:06):
a lot, both with kind of diagnoses like yours, but
even cases where individuals find out they have a terminal
situation or things that you couldn't even imagine, you're There
are accounts of parents who've lost young children who obviously,
you know, the most traumatic thing any parent could imagine.
You know, Obviously they're not happy about it, they wouldn't
wish it again, but they'll say on mass more good
things came of it than I expected, right, And that
(10:29):
is a profound thing about human psychology and human nature.
The worst thing possible that we could ever imagine happens,
and we say, there are parts of this at least
that I'm grateful for, or there's parts of this that
I wouldn't change. I've grown from this. This is one
of the biggest mistakes that we make about happiness. We
think it's only our circumstances. If things go well, I'll
be great, and God forbid things go badly. But in practice,
(10:51):
when these things actually happen to people were much more resilient,
and we often take much more meaning and purpose from
those events than we often expect. And I think my
resilience you mentioned going public just as I try to
spread awareness and educate people about calling or prevention and
encourage them to get colonoscopies, and got one on television myself.
(11:15):
I knew that by being a public figure and talking
about it, I had the potential to actually save lives.
And so for me translating it into I don't mean
to sound cheesy, but some form of service, it actually
is very grounding and satisfying and fulfilling for me. And
(11:37):
that's what I think sometimes we get wrong about happiness.
I think resilious it's finding strength within. So sometimes we
are in a situation that we're unprepared for and you
find yourself digging deeper into something that you didn't even
know you possessed more after the break. I'm an artist
(12:05):
in New York City, so when I'm creating or discovering,
that's where i find my happiness usually most of the time.
So happiness, you can try and find it, you can
try to inspire it. I also think you got to
give energy to get energy, so do that you can
find a lot of happiness. We're back with Lorie Santos.
(12:27):
All this focus on quote unquote self care, which I
think to a certain extent we need to focus and
take care of ourselves and the oxygen mask and all
that jazz. On the other hand, it seems like we
have become so self focused that we're missing the point
about serving others, being kind to others. Those things are
(12:49):
proven to increase your happiness, right, Lorie. Yeah, I mean
one of the biggest cross cultural universals in happiness science
right now is that doing nice things for other people
makes you happier. If you look at people who are
controlled for the level of income they have, people who
donate more of their money to charity are happier. People
who just tend to just be more self focused are
(13:10):
less happy than the people who are out there doing
stuff for other people. And even if you force people
to do nice stuff for others, they wind up feeling happier.
And do you think this whole emphasis on self care
and wellness has had the adverse effect in some ways?
Have you looked at that? Yeah, definitely. It's a relatively
new phenomenon, isn't it. I mean I feel like sort
(13:31):
of the self care wellness industry has really blossomed and
just the last five years. Yeah, I think it's problematic
in two ways. Again, One is this focus on the self, right,
you know, me, me, me, when again all the data
suggest that doing for others would be better. I think
another problem is it like reflects this notion that we
have that like our circumstances matter for happiness. Right, if
(13:51):
I could just like have it be you know, bubble
bats and rainbows and first class flights, then my life
would be great. And it's really missing out on the
things that can actually matter for our happiness. Were in
some ways even just a simple act of spending our money,
We're doing it wrong. Spending on things that we think
are going to make us feel good, I think aren't
going to bring us joy, and they might not bring
us the joy we think. We're in New York City,
(14:12):
the epicenter of type A strivers, right, and I think
there's one thing that has hurt my happiness quotient, if
you will, is always striving, because once you get something,
it's like, Okay, what am I going to do next?
Where am I going to go? How am I going
(14:32):
to achieve something? More? Talk about how these type A
kind of super driven people, because I'm transitioning to your
your Yale class where you at them in droves, how
that impacts your happiness. I mean, it's sometimes funny to
people when they hear I teach this class on happiness
to Yale students, because the lay person's assumption is like
(14:55):
Yale students haven't made They're nineteen, you know, many of
them are wealthy or at least well connected. Yet you know,
one fourth of them decided to take a class on happiness.
What year did you start teaching it? First? In twenty eighteen,
and it was It became the largest class ever in
Yale's history, and one quarter of the students enrolled, right,
And I cannot tells you that these you know, type
(15:16):
A very driven Yale students are voting with their feet.
They've especially at Yale, they've gotten everything they've wanted. You know,
probably since these kids were twelve years old, they dreamed
of getting into an Ivy League school, and now they're
there and it's still not doing what they expect, which
only proves like all these things that we talked about
are not necessarily the key. What's missing for them? Yeah,
(15:37):
I mean it's often the things that they are having
an opportunity cost on because they're so driven at their academics.
It's simple things like sleep and taking care of their
physical health. It's often social connection, right. These are students
who are working on homework into the night. They're not
getting the same social connection that you expect. And honestly,
it's just having this kind of mistaken idea that more
and more and more is going to be good. Right.
(15:59):
It's not stopic to kind of you smell the roses
and reflect on the accomplishments you've gotten, because they're thinking
about what grades are going to make, and how are
they going to get into a good law school, and
how are they going to get that job at Goldman
Sachs or you know, all those things that I would
imagine detract from just being present and enjoying the moment exactly.
There's work on what's known as journey mindset, right, which
(16:22):
is this idea that you're not kind of going for
the next thing, you're not looking at what you're arriving towards.
The goal is not then it's not law school or
Goldman Sacks, we're even getting into Yale. It's kind of
what you're going to learn and get along the way.
It's really being present across that and I think that
we've raised, honestly, not just my Yale students, but a
generation of young people that have dropped the journey mindset right.
They are careerist from as early as we can detect,
(16:43):
and that means that they're just going to jump to
the next accolade. How can we tamp down this tremendous
pressure that's really detracting from being a happy, whole person.
You imagine if Yale and Harvard and Stanford and all
the big schools got together, like a nuclear d escalation,
and we all said, you know what, here the minimum
(17:05):
standards you need to be a good Yale student. Once
you meet this minimum standards, go into a lottery and
you'll might get in or you might not. I think
this would be first of all, I think you'd be accurate,
But I think it would also allow students to see that, like,
you know, you don't have to keep hustling, and I
think the hustle starts earlier and earlier. I think you
know what you said is correct. I think parents really
have a role to kind of scale this back. And
(17:26):
I think, you know, it can sometimes be really tough
for parents because they obviously want what's best for their kids.
You know, if there's a kind of accolade out there
that your child doesn't have it so easy to kind
of want them to strive for it. I think working
with your kids to kind of back them up, talk
to them about what they're learning along the journey, make
it clear that you're going to love them no matter what,
and don't push them just because you want that Yale
(17:47):
sticker on the back of your car. You can buy
one even if your kid doesn't go to Yale. Dirty
So I'm curious what you heard from your students. You
talk to so many of these kids. I mean, you
had a whole case study every semester. What did they
talk about and why were they taking your class? There's
lots of evidence that this generation, and this is true
(18:08):
at Yale too, is just facing the biggest mental health
crisis that we've seen in the history of the human species.
Like right now, there's race of depression nationally at colleges
are at levels like forty percent of students report being
too depressed to function most days. Over sixty percent say
they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in ten has seriously
considered suicide. So if you're looking at a group of
ten college students, one of them might be contemplating taking
(18:29):
their own life, right, Like, that's really how bad the
mental health situation has gotten on campus. But that doesn't
even tell you what you're just seeing in the low
grade kind of stress and disappointment these students are facing.
You know, I'll run into a student in the courtyard
and be like, hey, how's it going, And they'd be like, oh,
if I could only get to mid terms or if
I can only fast forward to the summer to get
out of this. And I would have kind of two
reactions to that of like, what college is so precious
(18:52):
since so short, Like how can you be fast forwarding this?
But then my other reactions like, oh, yeah, we could
only get to mid terms, you know. So I was
like realizing, like, wow, you know, these are misconceptions that
I was having too. You know, even though it was
so acute in my students that kind of overwhelm and
stress they were facing, I kind of saw it in
my self too. You know. I'm worried that we weren't
being good mentors for them to help them out of this.
(19:13):
You know. I guess maybe because I'm I'm a big
fan of self flagellation, but I do wonder if people
of my generation parents fucked up. Well it's yes, you
know it did the best secret Yeah, yeah, blah blah.
And I wonder, I wonder if my generation style of
(19:34):
parenting has contributed to this, because you know that everybody
gets a trophy. You have to fix things for your kids.
You can't have them suffer because it's too painful for you.
You can't have them be disappointed. And are the chickens
coming home to roost? I think so, although I think
(19:57):
there's also lots of evidence that you know, society and
a lot of these structure has changed, right. You know,
the last twenty years were also the time when the
news was talking a lot about stranger changer. You know,
you wouldn't be seen as a good parent unless you
were trying to protect your children. Again, I think institutions
like mine, you know, like focused on meritocracy, and in
a way that's great. You know, anyone can get into Yale, now,
(20:17):
anyone can get into you. Oh why aren't you giving
your child the resources they need to do that? And
I think that that focus on higher education in these
next steps made it so that failure seemed scary. But
I think that that did mean that the kids today
are growing up with different kinds of norms when it
comes to failures, different kinds of norms when it comes
to parental involvement, different kinds of norms when it comes
(20:39):
to what they're expected to know, just at different ages.
We have college students who have never used an alarm clock.
Their parents are their alarm clock. They call, you know,
to make sure their child gets up in the morning,
you know, at nineteen twenty one years old. Lily from
New York. I'm a teacher. I think the pandemic really
affected kids really negatively, and they're having a really hard
(21:02):
time figuring out how to socialize in the way that
we did when we were kids, when life was quote
unquote normal. So I think the socializing, the lack of
social skills is we're finding kids like really inverting and
struggling to reach out to people. We'll be right back.
(21:27):
There's things within your control and there's things outside. Focus
on those things that are within your control and you'll
do better and we're back. You have just started an
online course that's free to teenagers. It's called The Science
of Well Being. What prompted you to do that, Laurie, Well,
it had done this class, you know, live on Yale's campus,
(21:48):
and we got tons and tons of press for it,
but a lot of the emails I was getting from
parents was saying, you could you make this available? Was
there any way I could see the syllabus? I want
my daughter who's in middle school, I want my son
who's in high school to get this content. And it
made me realize that a lot of the skills I
was teaching Yale students, we want kids who are younger
than that to learn these things. So is it different
(22:10):
teaching teens than it is teaching college students. Yeah, yes
and no. Yes in the sense that you know, teens
face different kinds of contexts where these kinds of principles
and these misconceptions come up. Right, They're not worried about
salary and you know, getting married. They're worried about, you know,
getting good grades and thinking about colleges and navigating how
they're portrayed on social media rights. In some ways, there
(22:32):
are lots of similar stressors, but they kind of play
out in different ways, And so the new class really
uses the same kind of science concepts. Those things are
the same, but we're kind of talking about them in
a context that teens can really relate to them. You know,
so if we're talking about your circumstances don't matter. We're
not using examples of like getting promotions at work. We're
using examples of like, you know, the grade that you
got on your homework lass Thursday. We're sort of talking
(22:53):
about the kinds of things that are on teens minds.
Are there some basic skills that you're really trying to
give both the kids in college and also teenagers. One
of the great things that I've seen with the Yale
students in so far, with the teens who've taken the glasses,
they want an evidence based approach. They don't want to
hear a bunch of platitudes about what they should do.
They like, what does the science say? Because that's great.
(23:15):
But then we just walk through just really simple behavior
thought pattern changes that you can engage with when a
stressor comes up. You know, so if you're feeling stressed,
what are good behaviors? You know, maybe spending more time
on TikTok not as good the evidence suggests, But if
you can move your body a little bit more, if
you can contact a friend, if you take a walk, sleep,
maybe take a walk or even you know, think about
what you could do for someone else, you know, getting
(23:36):
back to this idea of being other oriented, these behaviors
that you could use in the moment to fix this.
We also spend a lot of time on changing your
thought patterns. I think we think we are our thoughts
like you know, they just pop up and that's reality.
But there's so much evidence to say, no, that's just
the voice in our head, and there are simple techniques
we can use to change our thought patterns. You know.
A big one for teenagers is trying to sort of
(23:58):
shut off that self critic in your head. You know that, Yeah,
for teenagers. I mean I do negative self talk all
the time. And some of my friends here at Katiekirk
Media say, you know you are what you say, and
that actually is scientifically proven, right totally. I mean, there's
so much evidence that what you're saying to yourself is
affecting how you perform. For example, if you're really self critical,
(24:21):
it's very easy to procrastinate because you're screaming yourself. You
can have set up this fear in your own mind.
There's also lots of evidence at what you say it
to yourself can affect your physiology. The best advice is
to talk to yourself like you would a friend. If
your best friend was really screwing up, you wouldn't be like, oh,
it's fine, you know, it's great, You're wonderful, everybody loves you.
You'd be like, you know, we need to deal with this,
(24:41):
like what's going on? Like I love you and I
really care about you, and I want you. Wouldn't be
like you suck, like why are You wouldn't scream at
your best friend and be great him or her, but
you would, you know, call a spade a spade and say, hey,
we got we gotta deal with this. This isn't going well,
And you would be curious. You'd be like what's going on?
Like why are you doing this? Like how can we
fix this? You'd be you'd be gentle, you'd be proactive,
(25:02):
you'd be problem solving oriented. But you wouldn't scream. You
wouldn't be mean. And that's the kind of voice we're
trying to to kind of cultivate. But the evidence suggests
that these practices really work. So what can we do
with social media? I means the genie out of the bottle?
How are you talking to teens and to ladies like
me about kind of monitoring it and moderating it. Yeah, well,
(25:27):
in some sense, the genie is out of the bottle, right.
We're not ever going to go back to, you know,
the way we were, you know, when you and I
were in college. We're always going to have probably these
devices in our pockets that have the temptation of comparison,
that have these technologies available. I think what we can do, though,
is that we can be a little bit more mindful
about how these things are making us feel. And I
(25:49):
think that that's important, right, because we don't want to
deny the benefits of these things. One of the strategies
I teach my students comes from the journalist Catherine Price,
who's this lovely book called How to Break Up with
Your Phone, where she argues, you don't have to break
up with your phone, but like couples, counseling probably required,
you know, for the relationship. And she has this acronym
that she uses called WWW to help you be more mindful.
It stands for what for, why now? And what else?
(26:11):
And so she argues, whenever you find your phone in
your hand, you should think, oh, www, like what for?
Was was there a purpose? Like I was checking my
email or I was going to text a friend. You know,
maybe it's just my addictive go to right. Why now? Right?
What was the trigger? You know? Maybe again you had
something to do, but maybe it was I was feeling anxious,
or I was feeling bored, or you know, for my students,
(26:31):
often it's I was feeling a little bit scared about
engaging in real life social connection talking to someone in
the dining hall. So I just, you know, picked up
my phone. But the biggest one, I think is what else, right,
what's the opportunity cost? What else could you be doing?
Could you be just like taking a deep breath talking
to a friend, sleeping? Right? What are you not doing
because you're on your phone? And what are you missing?
You know? Sometimes if I land in a new city,
(26:53):
I am going to the hotel, and I realized I
didn't even look around at this new place and take
in being in a totally different environment because I've had
my face and my phone, and I think this is
so dumb. Why am I doing this? It is such
a default, though, Lorie, you know, now, yeah, I think
(27:16):
it's a default. And often the thing we're missing is
other people, That's right, because it's distracting. It's very presence
is distracting. It also prevents you to engage in deep
thinking because it's interrupting you all the time. Right, And
it makes sense, right because our brains aren't stupid, like
they know on the other end of this device, you know, imagine,
you know, we're having this lovely conversation here and it's
(27:38):
very fun. But imagine if to the conversation, I brought
this big wheelbarrow, and in the wheelbarrow, I had like
my photo album since like nineteen ninety two and print
outs of everything every politician or you know, Kardashian has said.
And the last week there was like cat videos and porn,
just like this huge pile of stuff in the wheel
and sort of food that you could learn to make. Like,
(27:59):
your brain isn't stupid. It knows that all that stuff
is right next to you. But it's having a huge
effect on our attention and our performance and our social connection.
Let's talk about global happiness because I mean, look what
you started learning now there than these worldwide surveys about happiness,
and what are we learning about those? I think so
(28:20):
many interesting things. I mean, first, I think we're learning
that just having a metric is powerful, right. This is
the World Happiness Survey that goes around globally and tries
to measure happiness using the sort of standard survey tools
that we have, and then they rank countries. What we've
learned from the metrics so far, though, is that there
are differences. There are countries that since this survey has
been out there have standardly been around the top, you know,
(28:42):
places like Denmark, Norway, you know, these Scandinavian countries. And
there are otherwise very wealthy countries like the US that
have been surprisingly low on the list, like sixteenth. Yeah,
not at the bottom, but like not as high as
we would expect given that, you know, the pursuit of
happiness is like literally in our Declaration of Independence. And
I think that can be powerful because we can start
to ask questions about like, Okay, what are those nations
(29:04):
that are doing well doing well? And what are we
missing out on? And have you learned earned anything? I mean,
is it sort of quality of life? Is it providing
you know, parental leave and accessible childcare, things that reduce
stressors for people? It's all of those things. I mean,
I think it's it's actually having access to you know,
those sorts of things that we know mean for a
(29:26):
good life. And so I think what these countries do
well is that they build things into the structure of
how they live their lives that make it easier to
get things like social connection, presence, exercise, and so on,
and what you have is a lot more equality. Surprisingly,
COVID did not decrease the happiness metric in many of
(29:47):
these countries, which says a lot about our resilience. And
in fact, I think the pandemic in some ways was
a reset for us. I think so. I think there
was a little bit of this idea of post traumatic
growth that we talked about before right where you know.
It caused us to socially connect more. It caused us
to recognize our own resilience. It's sort of brought back
(30:07):
our gratitude for simple things. I think it also really
taught us to reevaluate what we were doing with our lives.
I think many people during the pandemic fought a little
bit more critically about the hustle culture that they might
have been engaged in, about what it was for. We
saw that there was a path when we could work
at home and spend more time with our families. I
think that's what's leading to this so called great resignation,
(30:29):
things like quiet quitting. Right now, I think people are
reevaluating their relationship with work and are maybe considering some
kind of patterns that might be healthier. I think many
people are starting to realize that they're frantically climbing up
this ladder that they might not even want to be
on in the first place, and they're burning out before
they even graduate from college. And it's even affecting college
(30:50):
professors like you, because you took a sabbatical because you
were afraid you were going to totally burn yourself out.
So did taking a step back? I know you're still working,
but getting a change of scenery, etc. Didn't make you happier?
Oh definitely. I mean, and I'm a nerd, right, so
(31:10):
I take, you know, like literally data on this. I've
gone up about a point on a ten point happiness scale. Yeah,
I mean, I was really I really started to notice
in the midst of this pandemic all the classic signs
of early burnout. Right. I was emotionally exhausted, not just
physically exhausted. It was just like kind of tired, like
if one more email came like I was gonna, you know,
just lose it. It It was just like too much. I
(31:32):
was feeling really cynical, right, My fuse was really short
with the people around me, especially my students. That was
that was the thing that affected me most. That's not
normal for me, and that was really big. But the
biggest thing I think I experienced during COVID on college
campuses was the third kind of symptom of burnout, which
is a sense of personal ineffectiveness, like even if you
did your job the best that you possibly could, it
(31:53):
wouldn't be good enough. And I was like, wait, you know,
I've read the papers. I know where this leads. I
need to make some changes. And the good news is
I think, you know, for me, at least, the changes
have been great. That actually made the very difficult decision
to step down as a head of college on campus
in part because I was realizing that, you know, to
do that job as well as I wanted to, I
just didn't have the bandwidth anymore. Have you regained your
(32:16):
happiness equilibrium as a result of stepping back? And you know,
will it change when you re enter the Yale campus?
Will it change me? Yeah? I think I'll make, you know,
some big changes. You know, stepping down from this role
has been a big one. You know, I'm already sort
of thinking about how i can have a better balance
with some of the stuff I'm doing. There Again, you
(32:36):
have to remember, happiness isn't this destination. This is going
to keep and taking a more constant It's not a constant.
Let's close this out with some Laurie Santo's happiness tidbits.
One is, as you mentioned, it takes work. So what
does that mean, Like if you were saying, Katie, if
you want to be happy and happier, this is what
(32:57):
you should do. What kind of work do I have
to do? I think the first piece of work is
just recognizing that your intuitions are off right, that you
just have these normal things that you think, Oh, i've
had a bad day, I'll you know, I'll get a manicure.
Oh you know, this is I'll do, or I'll keep
pushing at work. You know, for X, Y, and Z,
we have these intuitions about the things that we should
be doing, that we're supposed to be doing. I think
you have to realize that those intuitions are wrong, right.
(33:18):
You have to say the science says, do something else
in really simple domains, right. You know, if you have
a long day at work, you might have the intuition of, like, oh,
I just want to PLoP down and just a glass
of wine, which is a depressant, by the way, exactly
when you know so much. Science suggests that if you
instead called a friend, went for a walk, you know,
just try to engage in something that was a little
bit more challenging of a form of leisure than plopping
(33:40):
down to watch that pickall lesson, take a pickleball lesson.
You know, just like on your phone, do a lingo
something right like that would be better. Text a friend
that you're a little bit worried about, right, Become a
little bit more other oriented. When we're in these moments
where we're feeling stressed, we're feeling overwhelmed, we're feeling a
little sad, there are just simple behaviors we can engage
in that are going to work better than what our
(34:01):
natural intuition is. Laurie Santos, this has been so fun.
Thank you for spending so much time with me. I
feel I just went to therapist and I owe you
whatever a lot. Thank you, Lourie. Thanks so much. Thanks
for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
or want to share your thoughts about how you navigate
(34:22):
this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short
message at six oh nine five one two five five
oh five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram.
I would love to hear from you. Next Question is
a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kurik Media. The executive
producers are Me, Katie Curik, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising
(34:44):
producer is Marcy Thompson. Our producers are Adriana Fasio and
Catherine Law. Our audio engineer is Matt Russell, who also
composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
us at Katiecurrek dot com. You can also find me
(35:05):
on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. If you're a regular fan
of this podcast, then you're probably used to me sitting
in the interviewer seat. But I recently had a chance
to switch things up a bit and get interviewed myself.
In fact, I had a chance to sit down with
none other than the legendary Katie krek for her podcast
Next Question. I'll be honest, it was pretty surreal to
(00:38):
sit across from Katie in the studio. I mean, she's
interviewed some of the most important and influential people on
the planet. But I quickly learned that Katie's got a
lot of her own thoughts about happiness, and she pushed
me to think more critically about the science behind my work.
I did worry that I wouldn't be as exciting a
guest as Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or some of
the other amazing people that Katie has interviewed, but she
(01:01):
still seemed pretty happy with our conversation, and so I
wanted to share it with you here today. I hope
you enjoy it. I'm Katie Kuric and this is Next Question.
You know, having a podcast on happiness teaching a whole
classed Ivyleague students generation after generation. Yeah, I mean I
think that we get happiness wrong. Happiness, that feeling of
(01:25):
joy or contentment that we all seem to crave, can
also seem totally unattainable in this day and age. In fact,
maybe we need to replace the word happiness altogether. True
flourishing is taking on challenges, embracing failure, you know, navigating
these negative emotions that might be normative. And so I think,
(01:46):
you know, it would be better to have a different word,
But in some ways we're stuck with happiness. Doctor Laurie
Santos is a cognitive scientist who's been studying happiness in
the lab as well as through the class she teaches
at Yale. But she's the first to admit even she
isn't happy all the time. Some of us are kind
of genetically lucky to have a little bit of a
(02:06):
predisposition to happiness. I'm probably the opposite. I think I
was born on a rainy, like, loudry, mixed kind of day.
So what do we need to understand about happiness? Why
is it so difficult to come by? And why is
true happiness such freaking hard work? By the way, if
(02:28):
you want to get smarter Every morning with a breakdown
of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness
and pop culture. Sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake
Up Call by going to katiecurreic dot com. Laurie Santos,
come on down. I'm so excited to be talking to you. Ditto, Ditto.
(02:50):
Let's start with the basics. What exactly is happiness? We
did a very long time answering that, Katie, But so
social scientists tend to think of happiness as being happy
in your life and being happy with your life. So
being happy in your life is like you've just got
lots of positive emotions. There's like joy and smiling and
after as opposed to kind of negative emotions like sadness,
(03:12):
anger and saying. It's not saying you have no negative emotions,
it's just that the ratio is pretty good. That's being
happy in your life. But being happy with your life
is how you think about your life. Is the answer
to your question, like all things considered, how satisfied are
you with your life? And if you say yes, then
that's pretty good. And I love this definition because you know,
we all know that there are times that those two
(03:32):
things dissociate right that you know you're doing something that's
making you incredibly satisfied with your life. You know, maybe
you have a new baby or a new job, but
it's hard, you know, in your life there's a lot
of stress and things like that. And I think we've
all met people, you especially being you know, with the
rich and famous folks, where in a second or no no,
in their life, like you know, you're flying first class
and great food, but with your life there's a real
(03:54):
sense of emptiness and a lack of meaning. And so
we have these misconceptions when it comes to the things
that make us happen. Are we using the wrong words?
Should it be contentment? Should it be fulfillment? I think
the Greeks, you know, and the ancients as usual had
it right. You know, they talked about you diamondy a flourishing,
and I think would be a better word, because to
have true flourishing, it's not like you're happy all the time.
(04:15):
Like true flourishing isn't toxic positivity where you're like smiling
like some terrible yellow emojing where you're like, oh my gosh,
I'm happy all the time. And so what I try
to do is to explain to folks that true happiness
allows for the normal kinds of spots where you're not
going to feel great, like that's typical, that's normal, that's
what you need for a good, ultimately happy life. But
people probably should think about the word flourishing or fulfillment, contentment.
(04:41):
It just seems much more stable. Happiness seems like at
the high end of the emotional scale, right, and that's
unattainable because nobody's happy all the time. Yeah. My colleague
Dan Gilbert, professor at Harvard, who comes a lot on
my podcast. Dan's vond of saying that you know, happily
ever after only exists if you have like three minutes
(05:01):
left to live, like, it's just not a destination. And
I think that's another thing we get wrong. We think
I'm going to do something and get there. You know,
I'll get married and I will be happy. Or I'll
get this new raise and I will be happy. Or
you know, my college students, I'll get into the perfect
medical school or get the perfect rates and I will
be happy. And that's just not how it works. My
late husband used to say that I was born on
(05:22):
a sunny day, which I thought was such a nice compliment,
and it made me wonder if some people are hardwired
for happiness, Is there a happiness set point that varies
from person to person, from biology to biology. Yeah, there's
some evidence that that might be at least partly the case.
And the evidence comes from these studies on what's called heritability. Right,
(05:45):
What is it called heritability? It's just not irritability irritability. Heritability,
which is this like big word of saying, you know,
how much of the variance that we see in the population.
You know, some people are happy, not so happy. How
much of that is due to your biology? How much
of that is due to kind of how you grow up? Right?
And the way we test heritability is to look at twins. Right.
(06:07):
Some twins are identical. That means they're genetically exactly the same,
the same way, raise the same way. Right. Some are fraternal,
which means they're genetically different, Like they're just as similar
as regular brothers and sisters. And so if happiness is
really built in, then identical twins should be much more
similar in their happiness level than regular brothers and sisters.
(06:27):
Tons of studies have looked at this, and what you
find is that's true, but a little bit. Heritability estimates
are at about thirty percent, and that's like, you know,
it's there, but scientifically speaking, it's kind of small. What
does that mean. It means there's something to be said for,
you know, being born on a sunny day. Some of
us are kind of genetically lucky to have a little
bit of a predisposition to happiness, but it's not as
(06:48):
much as we, I think assume. So it sounds like
nurture is more important than nature when it comes to happiness.
That's exactly right, and I think it's important not to
discount nature. Right. There are some people who have a
harder nurture than others because they've got to put more
work in, but everybody can put the right work in
to change things. Well, I wanted to ask you what
sets you up for happiness? I mean, is it a
(07:10):
secure home, life, loving parents, financial security, positive affirmation, success,
and however you define it. I feel like I'm really lucky, honestly, Laurie,
in all those categories. I think of people who have
parents who didn't give them unconditional love and how that
(07:34):
really kind of reverberates throughout their lives. Yeah, I mean,
obviously those things have an impact. Right. You know, trauma,
which is the kind of thing you're talking about, right
where parents you know, your abusive parents or with whole
subscene or exactly or you know, they could even be affluent,
you know, successful parents, just very distant or really harsh, right.
(07:54):
I mean, we all kind of grow up with different
levels of that, and you can look at levels that
are pretty extreme, and scientists do that, right. This is
a lot of the work on trauma and what's often
called post traumatic stress disorder. Many of us have heard
about that, right, And it comes from the fact that
when you experience trauma sometimes that can have a longstanding effect.
But even though you know post traumatic stress disorder PTSD
(08:16):
gets a lot of airtime, scientists have also looked at
what you might consider the opposite, which is called post
traumatic growth. Right. You go through an awful, terrible incident
that you never would have wished on yourself or anyone else,
and some good comes from that. You feel like you
come out stronger, you feel like you come out more resilient,
you feel like you come out more socially connected to
the people you really care about. And this is what's
(08:38):
called post traumatic growth. And I'm kind of curious. I mean,
you know, you and I are talking after you've been
so helpfully public about your breast cancer diagnosis. That could
be a trauma that leads to PTSD. You know, individuals
who experience cancer diagnosis and have to go through the process,
you know, terrible and awfully traumatic. But you kind of
resonate with that, this idea of the post traumatic growth
a bit. I mean, I think because I've had so
(09:01):
much experience witnessing cancer much more severely in both my
late husband and my sister who also passed away, and
I became so knowledgeable about cancer. I have a very
really healthy and solid understanding about my particular situation, and
(09:23):
instead of being traumatized, it actually increased my gratitude because
I know, unlike them, both my husband and sister were
diagnosed with stage four cancer. Mine was discovered early, when
it's not only treatable but curable, and so if anything,
(09:43):
it wasn't traumatic. It was actually weirdly life affirming. It
was a death sentence for my husband and my sister
when they were diagnosed, and the fact that it was
twenty twenty two, the fact that science has really progressed,
I felt grateful and so This is what we hear
(10:06):
a lot, both with kind of diagnoses like yours, but
even cases where individuals find out they have a terminal
situation or things that you couldn't even imagine, you're There
are accounts of parents who've lost young children who obviously,
you know, the most traumatic thing any parent could imagine.
You know, Obviously they're not happy about it, they wouldn't
wish it again, but they'll say on mass more good
things came of it than I expected, right, And that
(10:29):
is a profound thing about human psychology and human nature.
The worst thing possible that we could ever imagine happens,
and we say, there are parts of this at least
that I'm grateful for, or there's parts of this that
I wouldn't change. I've grown from this. This is one
of the biggest mistakes that we make about happiness. We
think it's only our circumstances. If things go well, I'll
be great, and God forbid things go badly. But in practice,
(10:51):
when these things actually happen to people were much more resilient,
and we often take much more meaning and purpose from
those events than we often expect. And I think my
resilience you mentioned going public just as I try to
spread awareness and educate people about calling or prevention and
encourage them to get colonoscopies, and got one on television myself.
(11:15):
I knew that by being a public figure and talking
about it, I had the potential to actually save lives.
And so for me translating it into I don't mean
to sound cheesy, but some form of service, it actually
is very grounding and satisfying and fulfilling for me. And
(11:37):
that's what I think sometimes we get wrong about happiness.
I think resilious it's finding strength within. So sometimes we
are in a situation that we're unprepared for and you
find yourself digging deeper into something that you didn't even
know you possessed more after the break. I'm an artist
(12:05):
in New York City, so when I'm creating or discovering,
that's where i find my happiness usually most of the time.
So happiness, you can try and find it, you can
try to inspire it. I also think you got to
give energy to get energy, so do that you can
find a lot of happiness. We're back with Lorie Santos.
(12:27):
All this focus on quote unquote self care, which I
think to a certain extent we need to focus and
take care of ourselves and the oxygen mask and all
that jazz. On the other hand, it seems like we
have become so self focused that we're missing the point
about serving others, being kind to others. Those things are
(12:49):
proven to increase your happiness, right, Lorie. Yeah, I mean
one of the biggest cross cultural universals in happiness science
right now is that doing nice things for other people
makes you happier. If you look at people who are
controlled for the level of income they have, people who
donate more of their money to charity are happier. People
who just tend to just be more self focused are
(13:10):
less happy than the people who are out there doing
stuff for other people. And even if you force people
to do nice stuff for others, they wind up feeling happier.
And do you think this whole emphasis on self care
and wellness has had the adverse effect in some ways?
Have you looked at that? Yeah, definitely. It's a relatively
new phenomenon, isn't it. I mean I feel like sort
(13:31):
of the self care wellness industry has really blossomed and
just the last five years. Yeah, I think it's problematic
in two ways. Again, One is this focus on the self, right,
you know, me, me, me, when again all the data
suggest that doing for others would be better. I think
another problem is it like reflects this notion that we
have that like our circumstances matter for happiness. Right, if
(13:51):
I could just like have it be you know, bubble
bats and rainbows and first class flights, then my life
would be great. And it's really missing out on the
things that can actually matter for our happiness. Were in
some ways even just a simple act of spending our money,
We're doing it wrong. Spending on things that we think
are going to make us feel good, I think aren't
going to bring us joy, and they might not bring
us the joy we think. We're in New York City,
(14:12):
the epicenter of type A strivers, right, and I think
there's one thing that has hurt my happiness quotient, if
you will, is always striving, because once you get something,
it's like, Okay, what am I going to do next?
Where am I going to go? How am I going
(14:32):
to achieve something? More? Talk about how these type A
kind of super driven people, because I'm transitioning to your
your Yale class where you at them in droves, how
that impacts your happiness. I mean, it's sometimes funny to
people when they hear I teach this class on happiness
to Yale students, because the lay person's assumption is like
(14:55):
Yale students haven't made They're nineteen, you know, many of
them are wealthy or at least well connected. Yet you know,
one fourth of them decided to take a class on happiness.
What year did you start teaching it? First? In twenty eighteen,
and it was It became the largest class ever in
Yale's history, and one quarter of the students enrolled, right,
And I cannot tells you that these you know, type
(15:16):
A very driven Yale students are voting with their feet.
They've especially at Yale, they've gotten everything they've wanted. You know,
probably since these kids were twelve years old, they dreamed
of getting into an Ivy League school, and now they're
there and it's still not doing what they expect, which
only proves like all these things that we talked about
are not necessarily the key. What's missing for them? Yeah,
(15:37):
I mean it's often the things that they are having
an opportunity cost on because they're so driven at their academics.
It's simple things like sleep and taking care of their
physical health. It's often social connection, right. These are students
who are working on homework into the night. They're not
getting the same social connection that you expect. And honestly,
it's just having this kind of mistaken idea that more
and more and more is going to be good. Right.
(15:59):
It's not stopic to kind of you smell the roses
and reflect on the accomplishments you've gotten, because they're thinking
about what grades are going to make, and how are
they going to get into a good law school, and
how are they going to get that job at Goldman
Sachs or you know, all those things that I would
imagine detract from just being present and enjoying the moment exactly.
There's work on what's known as journey mindset, right, which
(16:22):
is this idea that you're not kind of going for
the next thing, you're not looking at what you're arriving towards.
The goal is not then it's not law school or
Goldman Sacks, we're even getting into Yale. It's kind of
what you're going to learn and get along the way.
It's really being present across that and I think that
we've raised, honestly, not just my Yale students, but a
generation of young people that have dropped the journey mindset right.
They are careerist from as early as we can detect,
(16:43):
and that means that they're just going to jump to
the next accolade. How can we tamp down this tremendous
pressure that's really detracting from being a happy, whole person.
You imagine if Yale and Harvard and Stanford and all
the big schools got together, like a nuclear d escalation,
and we all said, you know what, here the minimum
(17:05):
standards you need to be a good Yale student. Once
you meet this minimum standards, go into a lottery and
you'll might get in or you might not. I think
this would be first of all, I think you'd be accurate,
But I think it would also allow students to see that, like,
you know, you don't have to keep hustling, and I
think the hustle starts earlier and earlier. I think you
know what you said is correct. I think parents really
have a role to kind of scale this back. And
(17:26):
I think, you know, it can sometimes be really tough
for parents because they obviously want what's best for their kids.
You know, if there's a kind of accolade out there
that your child doesn't have it so easy to kind
of want them to strive for it. I think working
with your kids to kind of back them up, talk
to them about what they're learning along the journey, make
it clear that you're going to love them no matter what,
and don't push them just because you want that Yale
(17:47):
sticker on the back of your car. You can buy
one even if your kid doesn't go to Yale. Dirty
So I'm curious what you heard from your students. You
talk to so many of these kids. I mean, you
had a whole case study every semester. What did they
talk about and why were they taking your class? There's
lots of evidence that this generation, and this is true
(18:08):
at Yale too, is just facing the biggest mental health
crisis that we've seen in the history of the human species.
Like right now, there's race of depression nationally at colleges
are at levels like forty percent of students report being
too depressed to function most days. Over sixty percent say
they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in ten has seriously
considered suicide. So if you're looking at a group of
ten college students, one of them might be contemplating taking
(18:29):
their own life, right, Like, that's really how bad the
mental health situation has gotten on campus. But that doesn't
even tell you what you're just seeing in the low
grade kind of stress and disappointment these students are facing.
You know, I'll run into a student in the courtyard
and be like, hey, how's it going, And they'd be like, oh,
if I could only get to mid terms or if
I can only fast forward to the summer to get
out of this. And I would have kind of two
reactions to that of like, what college is so precious
(18:52):
since so short, Like how can you be fast forwarding this?
But then my other reactions like, oh, yeah, we could
only get to mid terms, you know. So I was
like realizing, like, wow, you know, these are misconceptions that
I was having too. You know, even though it was
so acute in my students that kind of overwhelm and
stress they were facing, I kind of saw it in
my self too. You know. I'm worried that we weren't
being good mentors for them to help them out of this.
(19:13):
You know. I guess maybe because I'm I'm a big
fan of self flagellation, but I do wonder if people
of my generation parents fucked up. Well it's yes, you
know it did the best secret Yeah, yeah, blah blah.
And I wonder, I wonder if my generation style of
(19:34):
parenting has contributed to this, because you know that everybody
gets a trophy. You have to fix things for your kids.
You can't have them suffer because it's too painful for you.
You can't have them be disappointed. And are the chickens
coming home to roost? I think so, although I think
(19:57):
there's also lots of evidence that you know, society and
a lot of these structure has changed, right. You know,
the last twenty years were also the time when the
news was talking a lot about stranger changer. You know,
you wouldn't be seen as a good parent unless you
were trying to protect your children. Again, I think institutions
like mine, you know, like focused on meritocracy, and in
a way that's great. You know, anyone can get into Yale, now,
(20:17):
anyone can get into you. Oh why aren't you giving
your child the resources they need to do that? And
I think that that focus on higher education in these
next steps made it so that failure seemed scary. But
I think that that did mean that the kids today
are growing up with different kinds of norms when it
comes to failures, different kinds of norms when it comes
to parental involvement, different kinds of norms when it comes
(20:39):
to what they're expected to know, just at different ages.
We have college students who have never used an alarm clock.
Their parents are their alarm clock. They call, you know,
to make sure their child gets up in the morning,
you know, at nineteen twenty one years old. Lily from
New York. I'm a teacher. I think the pandemic really
affected kids really negatively, and they're having a really hard
(21:02):
time figuring out how to socialize in the way that
we did when we were kids, when life was quote
unquote normal. So I think the socializing, the lack of
social skills is we're finding kids like really inverting and
struggling to reach out to people. We'll be right back.
(21:27):
There's things within your control and there's things outside. Focus
on those things that are within your control and you'll
do better and we're back. You have just started an
online course that's free to teenagers. It's called The Science
of Well Being. What prompted you to do that, Laurie, Well,
it had done this class, you know, live on Yale's campus,
(21:48):
and we got tons and tons of press for it,
but a lot of the emails I was getting from
parents was saying, you could you make this available? Was
there any way I could see the syllabus? I want
my daughter who's in middle school, I want my son
who's in high school to get this content. And it
made me realize that a lot of the skills I
was teaching Yale students, we want kids who are younger
than that to learn these things. So is it different
(22:10):
teaching teens than it is teaching college students. Yeah, yes
and no. Yes in the sense that you know, teens
face different kinds of contexts where these kinds of principles
and these misconceptions come up. Right, They're not worried about
salary and you know, getting married. They're worried about, you know,
getting good grades and thinking about colleges and navigating how
they're portrayed on social media rights. In some ways, there
(22:32):
are lots of similar stressors, but they kind of play
out in different ways, And so the new class really
uses the same kind of science concepts. Those things are
the same, but we're kind of talking about them in
a context that teens can really relate to them. You know,
so if we're talking about your circumstances don't matter. We're
not using examples of like getting promotions at work. We're
using examples of like, you know, the grade that you
got on your homework lass Thursday. We're sort of talking
(22:53):
about the kinds of things that are on teens minds.
Are there some basic skills that you're really trying to
give both the kids in college and also teenagers. One
of the great things that I've seen with the Yale
students in so far, with the teens who've taken the glasses,
they want an evidence based approach. They don't want to
hear a bunch of platitudes about what they should do.
They like, what does the science say? Because that's great.
(23:15):
But then we just walk through just really simple behavior
thought pattern changes that you can engage with when a
stressor comes up. You know, so if you're feeling stressed,
what are good behaviors? You know, maybe spending more time
on TikTok not as good the evidence suggests, But if
you can move your body a little bit more, if
you can contact a friend, if you take a walk, sleep,
maybe take a walk or even you know, think about
what you could do for someone else, you know, getting
(23:36):
back to this idea of being other oriented, these behaviors
that you could use in the moment to fix this.
We also spend a lot of time on changing your
thought patterns. I think we think we are our thoughts
like you know, they just pop up and that's reality.
But there's so much evidence to say, no, that's just
the voice in our head, and there are simple techniques
we can use to change our thought patterns. You know.
A big one for teenagers is trying to sort of
(23:58):
shut off that self critic in your head. You know that, Yeah,
for teenagers. I mean I do negative self talk all
the time. And some of my friends here at Katiekirk
Media say, you know you are what you say, and
that actually is scientifically proven, right totally. I mean, there's
so much evidence that what you're saying to yourself is
affecting how you perform. For example, if you're really self critical,
(24:21):
it's very easy to procrastinate because you're screaming yourself. You
can have set up this fear in your own mind.
There's also lots of evidence at what you say it
to yourself can affect your physiology. The best advice is
to talk to yourself like you would a friend. If
your best friend was really screwing up, you wouldn't be like, oh,
it's fine, you know, it's great, You're wonderful, everybody loves you.
You'd be like, you know, we need to deal with this,
(24:41):
like what's going on? Like I love you and I
really care about you, and I want you. Wouldn't be
like you suck, like why are You wouldn't scream at
your best friend and be great him or her, but
you would, you know, call a spade a spade and say, hey,
we got we gotta deal with this. This isn't going well,
And you would be curious. You'd be like what's going on?
Like why are you doing this? Like how can we
fix this? You'd be you'd be gentle, you'd be proactive,
(25:02):
you'd be problem solving oriented. But you wouldn't scream. You
wouldn't be mean. And that's the kind of voice we're
trying to to kind of cultivate. But the evidence suggests
that these practices really work. So what can we do
with social media? I means the genie out of the bottle?
How are you talking to teens and to ladies like
me about kind of monitoring it and moderating it. Yeah, well,
(25:27):
in some sense, the genie is out of the bottle, right.
We're not ever going to go back to, you know,
the way we were, you know, when you and I
were in college. We're always going to have probably these
devices in our pockets that have the temptation of comparison,
that have these technologies available. I think what we can do, though,
is that we can be a little bit more mindful
about how these things are making us feel. And I
(25:49):
think that that's important, right, because we don't want to
deny the benefits of these things. One of the strategies
I teach my students comes from the journalist Catherine Price,
who's this lovely book called How to Break Up with
Your Phone, where she argues, you don't have to break
up with your phone, but like couples, counseling probably required,
you know, for the relationship. And she has this acronym
that she uses called WWW to help you be more mindful.
It stands for what for, why now? And what else?
(26:11):
And so she argues, whenever you find your phone in
your hand, you should think, oh, www, like what for?
Was was there a purpose? Like I was checking my
email or I was going to text a friend. You know,
maybe it's just my addictive go to right. Why now? Right?
What was the trigger? You know? Maybe again you had
something to do, but maybe it was I was feeling anxious,
or I was feeling bored, or you know, for my students,
(26:31):
often it's I was feeling a little bit scared about
engaging in real life social connection talking to someone in
the dining hall. So I just, you know, picked up
my phone. But the biggest one, I think is what else, right,
what's the opportunity cost? What else could you be doing?
Could you be just like taking a deep breath talking
to a friend, sleeping? Right? What are you not doing
because you're on your phone? And what are you missing?
You know? Sometimes if I land in a new city,
(26:53):
I am going to the hotel, and I realized I
didn't even look around at this new place and take
in being in a totally different environment because I've had
my face and my phone, and I think this is
so dumb. Why am I doing this? It is such
a default, though, Lorie, you know, now, yeah, I think
(27:16):
it's a default. And often the thing we're missing is
other people, That's right, because it's distracting. It's very presence
is distracting. It also prevents you to engage in deep
thinking because it's interrupting you all the time. Right, And
it makes sense, right because our brains aren't stupid, like
they know on the other end of this device, you know, imagine,
you know, we're having this lovely conversation here and it's
(27:38):
very fun. But imagine if to the conversation, I brought
this big wheelbarrow, and in the wheelbarrow, I had like
my photo album since like nineteen ninety two and print
outs of everything every politician or you know, Kardashian has said.
And the last week there was like cat videos and porn,
just like this huge pile of stuff in the wheel
and sort of food that you could learn to make. Like,
(27:59):
your brain isn't stupid. It knows that all that stuff
is right next to you. But it's having a huge
effect on our attention and our performance and our social connection.
Let's talk about global happiness because I mean, look what
you started learning now there than these worldwide surveys about happiness,
and what are we learning about those? I think so
(28:20):
many interesting things. I mean, first, I think we're learning
that just having a metric is powerful, right. This is
the World Happiness Survey that goes around globally and tries
to measure happiness using the sort of standard survey tools
that we have, and then they rank countries. What we've
learned from the metrics so far, though, is that there
are differences. There are countries that since this survey has
been out there have standardly been around the top, you know,
(28:42):
places like Denmark, Norway, you know, these Scandinavian countries. And
there are otherwise very wealthy countries like the US that
have been surprisingly low on the list, like sixteenth. Yeah,
not at the bottom, but like not as high as
we would expect given that, you know, the pursuit of
happiness is like literally in our Declaration of Independence. And
I think that can be powerful because we can start
to ask questions about like, Okay, what are those nations
(29:04):
that are doing well doing well? And what are we
missing out on? And have you learned earned anything? I mean,
is it sort of quality of life? Is it providing
you know, parental leave and accessible childcare, things that reduce
stressors for people? It's all of those things. I mean,
I think it's it's actually having access to you know,
those sorts of things that we know mean for a
(29:26):
good life. And so I think what these countries do
well is that they build things into the structure of
how they live their lives that make it easier to
get things like social connection, presence, exercise, and so on,
and what you have is a lot more equality. Surprisingly,
COVID did not decrease the happiness metric in many of
(29:47):
these countries, which says a lot about our resilience. And
in fact, I think the pandemic in some ways was
a reset for us. I think so. I think there
was a little bit of this idea of post traumatic
growth that we talked about before right where you know.
It caused us to socially connect more. It caused us
to recognize our own resilience. It's sort of brought back
(30:07):
our gratitude for simple things. I think it also really
taught us to reevaluate what we were doing with our lives.
I think many people during the pandemic fought a little
bit more critically about the hustle culture that they might
have been engaged in, about what it was for. We
saw that there was a path when we could work
at home and spend more time with our families. I
think that's what's leading to this so called great resignation,
(30:29):
things like quiet quitting. Right now, I think people are
reevaluating their relationship with work and are maybe considering some
kind of patterns that might be healthier. I think many
people are starting to realize that they're frantically climbing up
this ladder that they might not even want to be
on in the first place, and they're burning out before
they even graduate from college. And it's even affecting college
(30:50):
professors like you, because you took a sabbatical because you
were afraid you were going to totally burn yourself out.
So did taking a step back? I know you're still working,
but getting a change of scenery, etc. Didn't make you happier?
Oh definitely. I mean, and I'm a nerd, right, so
(31:10):
I take, you know, like literally data on this. I've
gone up about a point on a ten point happiness scale. Yeah,
I mean, I was really I really started to notice
in the midst of this pandemic all the classic signs
of early burnout. Right. I was emotionally exhausted, not just
physically exhausted. It was just like kind of tired, like
if one more email came like I was gonna, you know,
just lose it. It It was just like too much. I
(31:32):
was feeling really cynical, right, My fuse was really short
with the people around me, especially my students. That was
that was the thing that affected me most. That's not
normal for me, and that was really big. But the
biggest thing I think I experienced during COVID on college
campuses was the third kind of symptom of burnout, which
is a sense of personal ineffectiveness, like even if you
did your job the best that you possibly could, it
(31:53):
wouldn't be good enough. And I was like, wait, you know,
I've read the papers. I know where this leads. I
need to make some changes. And the good news is
I think, you know, for me, at least, the changes
have been great. That actually made the very difficult decision
to step down as a head of college on campus
in part because I was realizing that, you know, to
do that job as well as I wanted to, I
just didn't have the bandwidth anymore. Have you regained your
(32:16):
happiness equilibrium as a result of stepping back? And you know,
will it change when you re enter the Yale campus?
Will it change me? Yeah? I think I'll make, you know,
some big changes. You know, stepping down from this role
has been a big one. You know, I'm already sort
of thinking about how i can have a better balance
with some of the stuff I'm doing. There Again, you
(32:36):
have to remember, happiness isn't this destination. This is going
to keep and taking a more constant It's not a constant.
Let's close this out with some Laurie Santo's happiness tidbits.
One is, as you mentioned, it takes work. So what
does that mean, Like if you were saying, Katie, if
you want to be happy and happier, this is what
(32:57):
you should do. What kind of work do I have
to do? I think the first piece of work is
just recognizing that your intuitions are off right, that you
just have these normal things that you think, Oh, i've
had a bad day, I'll you know, I'll get a manicure.
Oh you know, this is I'll do, or I'll keep
pushing at work. You know, for X, Y, and Z,
we have these intuitions about the things that we should
be doing, that we're supposed to be doing. I think
you have to realize that those intuitions are wrong, right.
(33:18):
You have to say the science says, do something else
in really simple domains, right. You know, if you have
a long day at work, you might have the intuition of, like, oh,
I just want to PLoP down and just a glass
of wine, which is a depressant, by the way, exactly
when you know so much. Science suggests that if you
instead called a friend, went for a walk, you know,
just try to engage in something that was a little
bit more challenging of a form of leisure than plopping
(33:40):
down to watch that pickall lesson, take a pickleball lesson.
You know, just like on your phone, do a lingo
something right like that would be better. Text a friend
that you're a little bit worried about, right, Become a
little bit more other oriented. When we're in these moments
where we're feeling stressed, we're feeling overwhelmed, we're feeling a
little sad, there are just simple behaviors we can engage
in that are going to work better than what our
(34:01):
natural intuition is. Laurie Santos, this has been so fun.
Thank you for spending so much time with me. I
feel I just went to therapist and I owe you
whatever a lot. Thank you, Lourie. Thanks so much. Thanks
for listening everyone. If you have a question for me,
or want to share your thoughts about how you navigate
(34:22):
this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short
message at six oh nine five one two five five
oh five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram.
I would love to hear from you. Next Question is
a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kurik Media. The executive
producers are Me, Katie Curik, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising
(34:44):
producer is Marcy Thompson. Our producers are Adriana Fasio and
Catherine Law. Our audio engineer is Matt Russell, who also
composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
us at Katiecurrek dot com. You can also find me
(35:05):
on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more
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