From Decoding Women's Health: Decoding Happiness in Midlife

Midlife can be a period of immense change and, sometimes, challenging emotions. But it’s also an opportunity to cultivate deeper, more lasting happiness. Dr Laurie recently joined another Pushkin podcast, Decoding Women's Health with Dr Elizabeth Poynor, to share insights on how midlife women can thrive. Dr Laurie breaks down the components of happiness, explains why we’re often mistaken about what makes us happy, and provides practical tools and habits to boost wellbeing, manage negative emotions, and navigate burnout.

On Decoding Women’s Health, Dr Elizabeth Poynor makes the science of women’s health accessible—from hormones to metabolism to longevity—so you can thrive at any stage of life. A world-renowned gynecologic oncologist and advanced pelvic surgeon, Dr Poynor speaks with leading physicians, researchers, and educators to share the latest science on wellness, disease prevention, and what it really means to age on your own terms. Because mid-life isn’t a crisis—it’s an opportunity.

If you like what you hear, find (00:01:15) Decoding Women's Health wherever you listen to podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, today you're in for a
treat because in this special episode, we're switching things up
a bit. On most episodes of the Happiness Lab, you
get to hear me interviewing experts about the science of
well being, but today I'm the one in the interview seat.
In this special episode, I sit down with doctor Elizabeth

(00:35):
Poynter for an episode of her new podcast, Decoding Women's Health,
and we talked about a topic that doesn't get nearly
enough attention, happiness in midlife. If you're a fan of
The Happiness Lab, you may have heard me share that
I recently turned the Big five zero, and so these
days I've been thinking a lot about happiness in midlife.
But you certainly don't need to be middle aged or

(00:56):
even a woman to get something out of this conversation
with doctor Pointer. We dig into what research shows about
how happiness changes across all our lifetimes, why it dips
and rises when it does, and the strategies that we
can use to boom well being at all different ages.
I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do,
make sure to follow Decoding Women's Health with Doctor Elizabeth

(01:17):
Pointer wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
This show is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis,
or treatment. It is for informational purposes. Please consult your
healthcare professional with any medical questions.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
There are lots of structural things that make midlife hard,
but a lot of what makes midlife hard is that
we have very high standards for ourselves, like the world
has high standards, but we mirror those standards, and sometimes
we're worse than the world.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
I'm doctor Elizabeth Pointer. Today on the show, we're talking
about happiness. There's a lot of attention given to the
negative parts of midlife, and there's no denying that it
can be a challenging time for many women. Feelings of invisibility,
identity shifts, a sense of time speeding up, and the
pressure to peak professionally, all compounded by hormonal changes. But

(02:11):
midlife can also be a move toward deeper happiness, a
time of stronger, more meaningful relationships, growing professional confidence, a
clearer sense of self trust, and a feeling of becoming
more full of yourself. Getting there, however, takes some work,
and many of us were never given the tools to

(02:32):
really cultivate happiness during the stage of life. If any
group has been overlooked, it's midlife women.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
And if any.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Group needs these skills, it's us, which is why I
am so grateful that we have a renowned happiness expert
here to help light the way.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
I'm Laurie Santos. I'm a professor of psychology at Yale
and also the host of my own pushkin podcast, The
Happiness Lab.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Before studying happiness, Laurie's focus was actually on evolutionary psychology.
But about a decade ago everything changed for her.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
I became what's known as head of college on campus,
and so this is a faculty member who lives on
campus with students. So my house was in the middle
of their big quad, like just right in the center
of the dorms. I was eating with students in the
dining hall and kind of hanging out with them really closely,
and that was when I saw the college student mental
health crisis up close and personal. It's kind of embarrassing
as a professor to admit I was up at the

(03:28):
front of the classroom and I didn't really notice what
was going on in the community. But it was really
in this new role where I saw just how much
students were struggling right now. Nationally, more than forty percent
of college students report being depressed. Over ten percent have
seriously considered suicide in the last six months. Like, this
is what's happening nationally, and I was seeing it in
this small community. And so that was when I did

(03:49):
a new deep dive into this work on the science
of happiness. You know, the field of psychology has all
these strategies we can use to feel less stressed, feel
less burned out, deal with our negative emotions in more
effective ways. And I felt like our field wasn't doing
such a hot job of telling people this stuff that
we knew as facts from our field, and so I
decided to first teach college students about this stuff. I

(04:09):
made a new class on campus called Psychology and the
Good Life, which was like aimed at giving students all
these practical strategies, and that had this funny history where
it went a bit viral on campus. Over a quarter
of the entire Yale student body decided to take the
class the first time I taught it, which so is
that college students are feeling pretty burned out and they
want some strategies to feel better. But the other funny

(04:31):
thing that happened was that the class really went viral
off campus, right. There were just lots of conversations saying,
what these you know, nineteen year old Yale kids need
a class on happiness? What about the rest of us?
What about folks in midlife who aren't going through you know,
their own problems and aren't going to college parties every week?
And that just made me realize that, you know, so
many people need these practical strategies for what they can

(04:52):
do to feel better.

Speaker 4 (04:54):
So this was over the past decade, and is this
an uptick? Actually? I mean have people always been unhappy?

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah? I think I think there are two things going on.
One is, like, you know, just like midlife, college is
a time of a lot of transitions, a lot of
new stresses, a lot of life changes that can feel
particularly stressful, right, And so as a time of transition,
it's tough. And that's been true just historically. But that said,
there's also been a spike in really specific mental health

(05:20):
stuff that goes beyond the typical things that students go
through during these transition periods. And this is the kind
of thing that folks like Jonathan Height and others have
talked about It's often referred to as the sort of
hockey stick pattern where around like two thousand and seven ish,
kind of around the time that smartphones came out. Interestingly,
you see this big spike in things like depression, anxiety, suicidality,

(05:44):
all these negative mental health indicators just seem to spike up,
and there's probably lots of reasons for it. Technology is
probably part of the puzzle. It's not the whole story,
but definitely these things are increasing. College age students are
showing the lowest rates of happiness that they've shown since
we've been recording people's happiness. That rate of depression I mentioned,
that's doubled since twenty fifteen. So that's among college age people, right,

(06:09):
So how does that translate into broader age categories in
terms of increases in specific areas of depression and lack
of happiness. Yeah, we have some interesting data on this
in the US especially. This comes from data sets like
the World Happiness Report, which is a very representative study
that tries to look at happiness across different countries. And

(06:29):
the story in the US is a pretty depressing one. Unfortunately,
it's pretty much in every age category you look at,
people are showing more markers of negative mental health less happiness.
That's especially true in young people, but it's also seen
in midlife. And this pattern is worrying because it goes
against what we typically think of is that patterns related

(06:50):
to age and happiness. So historically people have often talked
about what's called a U shaped function of happiness, where
you tend to be happy early in life as a
kid and a teenager. You're spry and excited about things,
and there's lots of wonder and so on, and then
you start going sort of down the U and happiness
drops and drops and drops till you get to the nature,
which happens in midlife. In some studies, this is somewhere

(07:13):
between forty eight to fifty years of age. That's like
the lowest point in happiness. Not great for midlife happiness.
But historically what happens with this ushee pattern is that
happiness tends to go back up right, So you know,
as you enter your fifties and sixties, happiness is getting
higher and higher and stays really high into the late
parts of life, which is sometimes shocking to people. I

(07:33):
think we think of our seventies and eighties as a
time of lots of health problems, lots of Greece as
your friends are passing and so on. But for most people,
historically that's been a time of relatively high happiness. What
these new data are showing us is people are less
happy than they have been before. Hopefully we can give
people strategies to prevent that.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, hopefully people like yourself get the mechanism for people
to find happiness. Which leads me into my next question,
what is happiness? How do you define it? Are there
different types of happiness? Like what exactly is it?

Speaker 1 (08:04):
So I'll give you the social scientist definition of happiness,
which I like, is that we can think of piness
is having two parts, a cognitive part and an affective part.
This is loosely translated into how you think your life
is going and how you feel in your life what
researchers have called being happy in your life and being
happy with your life. So let's take those two parts,
right first, the emotional or affective part of happiness. There's

(08:26):
something that it feels like to be happy, right, you know,
there's happiness in the moment, there's you know, joy and
laughter and lots of positive emotions versus anger. Sadness, anxiety, overwhelm,
the kind of negative emotions we experience. And part of
the definition of happiness is having a decent ratio between
the two of those. That's sort of being happy in
your life. But there's a second component of happiness, which

(08:47):
is the cognitive part, how we think our life is going.
That's the answer to the question, all things considered, are
you satisfied with your life? Do you have meaning? Purpose?
Do you think things are going well? And the best
case scenario for a social scientist is that we're boosting
both of those at once. We're kind of making it
feel better in your life while at the same time
making you think your life is going better. And I

(09:08):
think it's worth noticing that there are lots of times
where those things to associate. First, baby, right, you know,
you've a newborn in your life for the first time.
Maybe in your life there's dirty diapers and less sleep
and that's feeling kind of frustrating. But with your life
you feel the sense of meaning and purpose that's different, Right,
you know, you can have it associate that way. But
I think we can also think of lots of people
in our life that have the other dissociation. Maybe folks

(09:30):
have every hedonic pleasure it feels really good in their life,
you know. And by hedonic pleasure, I just mean this
idea of like experiencing all these positive moments in your life,
like flying first class and the best wine and restaurants
or whatever. I think people often start thinking of happiness
as just the part about in your life. We want pleasure,
We want all the hedonic things to feel really good,

(09:53):
and we sometimes do that so much that we forget
that there has to be kind of a there there.
We forget that there has to be a sense of
meaning and purpose that goes alongside it. And just focusing
on the hedonic parts of happiness isn't necessarily a recipe
for getting the bigger cognitive parts happiness. It's not necessarily
a recipe for thinking that your life has meaning or purpose.

(10:14):
And so I like to think of both of these
parts together as building towards what I called my class
right psychology and the good life. It's really about finding
the good life. This is the kind of thing that
philosopher is back in the day, like Aristotle called you diaminia,
the sense of having a fulfilling, rich, good life overall.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
And you all can say that our mind lies to
us in telling us what will make us happy. Can
you unpack that a little bit?

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah. I think the pursuit of happiness would be super
easy if we knew what we were going for and
we knew how to get there. And the sad thing is,
it's not just that we don't know. It's not that
we're ignorant about how to become happier. It's that we
have these mistaken ideas of the stuff that's going to matter.
So we're pursuing stuff that we believe is going to
work to make us feel like we're happy in our
life and with our life, but we're going about it

(10:59):
the wrong way. I think a big one is salary
and success. People want to become richer with the idea
I think that if they were richer, they would be happier.
And that is true for some people. Statistically, probably for
most of the people listening to this podcast right now,
getting more money won't make you as happy as you think.
We often give up so many important things in our life,

(11:22):
whether that's social connection or free time or sleep, to
work harder and achieve success and achieve money, and it's
probably for many of us just not going to do
what we assume it's going to do. Another one is
just changing our circumstances. I'm going to buy this new thing.
I'm going to get this promotion at work. You know,
I'm going to get into the perfect relationship, and I'll
be happy. Then we can sort of think of happiness

(11:45):
as almost like this Disney thing of like happily ever after.
I'll achieve this thing, I'll get this new circumstance, and
then I'll be happy forever. And there's sort of two
problems with that. One is that circumstances in our life
don't make us as happy as we think, or for
as long as we think. You know, it might be
that if you get that new promotion, you have a
little blip of happiness, but it's not as big as
you assume, and it fades super quickly. The other problem

(12:07):
with the arrival fallacy is we think once we've got there,
we're done, you know, happily ever after, like can dust
yourself off and you don't have to work on it
ever again. But as my colleague Dan Gilbert, this professor
at Harvard, is fond of saying, happily ever after only
works if you have three minutes to live, like, you
just go back to baseline really quickly, and you need
to start working on it again.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
So how do you educate people about this in terms
of like, you know, more money is not going to
make me happy. More success necessarily is not going to
make me happy.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Honestly, I try to take that approach that you do
so well on this podcast, right, which is to give
people the evidence. But these misconceptions are deep. You know.
I'm the professor that teaches the stuff, and I still
have to remind myself like, oh, you know, if my
podcast does really well and it gets a ton of listeners,
that's probably not going to make me as happy as
I think. I do lots of professional talks, so I

(12:56):
take on another talk, you know, which would earn me
some money, but it's going to make me miss out
on this event with my family. My instinct is like,
oh my gosh, more prestige, more money, that will work,
But in practice that's probably not going to work the
way we think. So you can help educate people by
teaching them the science, right, seeing the data and realizing like, oh,
this might not work in the way we think, but
that stadly is still not going to overcome the full misconception.

(13:18):
But even the people that know this stuff have a
hard time overcoming these biases.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
So if our minds keep steering us towards the wrong things,
what are the right ones? Doctor Laurie Santos and I
will get into this.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Just after the break.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
We talked a little bit about the things that won't
make us happy, right or don't make us happy in
terms of a better job, more money, that type of thing.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
What are the things that do make us happy?

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, Well, the good news is that there's lots of
stuff that we can do intentionally to improve our happiness.
And I like to think about these as being divided
up into behaviors that we can engage in to feel happier,
and then mindset shifts we can engage in to be happier.
So let's start with behaviors. Community is a huge one.
Pretty much every available study of happy people suggest that

(14:06):
happy people are more social. The physic we spend more
time around other people, and then they also prioritize their
friends and family members. It just seems like social connection
is a necessary condition for high happiness. But other people
impact our happiness in a second way, too, which is
that we tend to be happier if we're focused on
other people, especially if we get to intentionally choose to

(14:27):
be focused on other people. And there are lots of
studies showing that if you force people to spend their
money and their time on other individuals, they wind up
feeling happier than if they spend that same amount of
money and time on themselves. Another behavior that I think
matters a lot for happiness, maybe especially in midlife because
it might be harder for folks in midlife are the
healthy habits that I know you talk a lot about
on the show, Just things like sleep and exercise. Not

(14:50):
running a marathon, not becoming a fitness influencer, but just
moving your body a little bit can actually make us
feel a lot better. And sleep is really a huge one.
For every hour less of sleep that you get than
the recommended amount, your incident's rate of getting depression, anxiety,
feeling overwhelmed. It just takes up a little bit. And
so I think as a basic behavior, we just need

(15:11):
to get back to the healthy habits that we know
are good for our physical health, but we forget are
so good for our mental health. A final behavior that
we know is super important for happiness, and I think
one that's particularly relevant at midlife is prioritizing a little
bit of free time. There's lots of recent social science
work on this new concept of time affluence, feeling wealthy

(15:32):
in time, And we just talked about how feeling wealthy
with money doesn't necessarily matter for happiness as much as
we think, but feeling wealthy and time really does matter.
Our researchers like Ashley Willin's at Harvard Business School have
been promoting the idea that maybe what's going on with
low incomes negatively affecting happiness might actually be less about
money and more about not having any free time. You know,

(15:53):
if you think about low income individuals having to work
multiple jobs and commute really far, like they're monetarily impoverished,
but they're also temporarily impoverished. But the problem is that
that's not just true for people at very low incomes,
even people at very high incomes, even people who have
a lot of wealth, tend to be really famished when
it comes to time. And Ashley Willins's work shows that

(16:15):
if you self report being time famished, that's as big
a hit on your well being as if you self
reported being unemployed. Probably a lot of people that are
listening right now who have employment, like, you know, be
very sad if you lost your job tomorrow. Just feeling
like you have no free time is as bad. How
do you correct that? I mean, how do you do
schedule free time for yourself? Like free time is kind

(16:35):
of active, right, yeah, not passive. I think we forget
that we have more agency over this stuff than we think,
especially if you do it over longer time horizons. Right, so,
right now, go on your calendar and block off, you know,
sometime in like I don't know, February March. This is
an hour that just says time affluence. I promise when
you get to that hour block it will feel amazing.
And this is kind of a funny trick about time

(16:57):
affluence is that the study show it's not about the
objective amount of free time that we have. It's our
subjective sense that we have free time and that means
something interesting. We don't have to open up a lot
of free time to feel like we have some mental space,
you know, teaching this whole class about these strategies, and
I was going to give students a whole lecture about
time affluence. It was going to take, you know, an

(17:17):
hour where I shared all the studies on this stuff.
And I thought just how ironic that was, because I'm
going to be lecturing these students on time affluents who
are themselves feeling overwhelmed all the time. And so I
did this funny thing where students came to class and
instead of getting a lecture from me, my teaching assistants
handed out this little flyer that said, you know, today
I'm going to teach you about time affluence and to
teach you what that is, I'm going to give you

(17:38):
some no class today, you have a free hour and
a half that you didn't expect. But what was amazing
was one student who got this flyer and burst into
tears and she was like, this is the first free
hour and a half I've had all semester. And I think,
especially in midlife, so many of us feel like that.
Another thing the studies show we can do well is
we can use the fact that in midlife we are

(17:59):
often at a high point in our career, we're often
making more money than we were maybe in our twenties
and thirties, and we can use that to buy back time.
Lots of research coming out of Harvard Business School shows
that the more you spend money to get back time,
the happier you are. What does that look like? You know,
hire the neighbor's kids to mow the lawn, buy the
pre chopped veggies, get some takeout, right healthy takeout. Just

(18:21):
these little moments of spending money to get back time
can matter. The key is that you have to frame
it that way. So the next time you buy takeout,
you know, busy day, might just pick up some bad
tie on the way back from work. Think, huh, how
much time did I save with this pad time? If
I had to cook this myself, that'd be an hour
and a half. You know, I had to chop up
the veggie like, ah, I just bought myself an hour
and a half. What did I do with that? Just

(18:42):
that little reframe makes you realize that there's ways you
can intentionally get little chunks of time back and that
does matter.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, So don't feel bad about spending the money. You're
spending the money to buy back that time.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
So interacting such an investment in your happiness.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
So mid life women face a lot of challenges in
this area. You know, sense of communities changing, kids are
growing relationships are changing, sleep is disrupted. Can you like
review and point out some of the specific challenges that
midlife women will have with binding happiness.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, well, I think even just you know, these demographic
patterns show those challenges are affecting us a lot. We
just talked about that U shape of happiness in the
bottom of you is like smack dab in the middle
of midlife, between forty eight and forty nine, that's the
lowest point you're going to get. I just hit fifty
and so I'm like, oh, phew, finally I'm going up
the curve all of it. But I think the reason

(19:37):
we see those demographic patterns is for all the reasons
you're just talking about. You know, let's just take community.
A lot of people in midlife are just feeling lonely.
Rates of loneliness and all demographic groups are going up.
But I think we really see it in midlife why
people are really busy. You're doing childcare, you're shuttling your
kids around, You're often taking care of aging parents, you're

(19:59):
at the height of your career. Something needs to give.
Women in midlife experience lots of negative emotions normatively, like
it makes sense to experience those negative emotions, but a
big the one we don't talk a lot about is overwhelm.
It just feels like there's too much on your plate
all the time, and that can make it hard to
squeeze in social connection. I think it's normative to realize, like, oh,

(20:20):
it makes sense that I'm going through a tough time
right now. It makes sense that I'm feeling lots of
negative emotions, makes sense that I'm not as happy as
I was at thirty, at twenty five. Give yourself some grace,
because there are real challenges that women at midlife are facing.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
Anxiety and depression have a big uptick in midlife, also
due to hormonal changes, neurotransmitter changes and such. How do
you recognize the difference between what is kind of normal
overwhelm like a lot going on, loss of community or
loss of sleep, and like real anxiety and real depression

(20:56):
that needs some real attention paid to it. I mean,
this needs attention paid to it, but medical help. I
think that's such.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
An important question because the strategies we need to fix
things if we're feeling overwhelmed, feeling like we're not flourishing,
feeling like we're not as happy as could be. That
looks really different than the kind of thing you need
if you're experiencing true clinical depression, if you're experiencing suicidality
or acute anxiety, then all the suggestions I'm making of

(21:23):
like get more social connection and more sleep, those will
be good once you're in the clear. But no, you
need a different kind of care. And I think we
need to give ourselves the grace to seek out professional
care if we're going through a really tough time.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
So let's talk about some strategies for midlife women. And
I love this term third spaces for community. And I
guess social media has taken that away from us a
little bit, or the Internet's taken this away.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, I love that you brought up third spaces. This
is a concept that comes out of this idea of
seeking community. First space is like home and a second
space is like work. But historically we had third spaces,
you know, whether that's going to church or the barbershop
or community center, just a place you know, like in
Cheers that you know eighties TV show where everybody o
your name. These spaces where you go where you just

(22:12):
have community. And you know, even back in the late nineties,
political scientists like Robert Putnam. We're talking about how these
third spaces were going away, and at the time, I
think his work was really prescient, right, he was talking
about the rise of TV, you know, making us stick
at home and watch our screens instead of going out
to meet other people. Nowadays, I think we could just

(22:32):
scroll TikTok and feel like we're getting some sort of
interesting social stuff happening. But in practice that's not really
nutritious for us when it comes to our psychology. And
so I think one thing that we get from this
work on community is that we really benefit from creating
these kinds of third spaces. There's also lots of evidence
from folks like Sonya Lubermirski and others that what we

(22:53):
really need when it comes to connection is not necessarily
in real life social connection, but definitely in real time
social connection. You call someone on the phone and you're
hearing their voice in real time. You know, you and
I are talking over zoom for this podcast and can
see your expressions. We're talking in real time. That feels
like real social connection. When we're just texting or using

(23:13):
a like group chat, or scrolling on social media, it
kind of just doesn't activate our normal primate psychology for
how we'd normally be connecting in real life, and so
getting back to these third spaces is a real way
to get back to in real time social connection. But
we have to prioritize them, and some great strategies I've
heard for doing that would be to really carve out

(23:35):
the time, you know, put in your schedule time to
be out a third space if you have one that
you haven't been going to, or the time needed to
kind of carve out finding these things. The other is
to try to set up your own opportunities for third spaces.
My podcast, we talk a lot about this idea of
scruffy hospitality, which is like a lot of us would
love to have friends come over, but we feel like,

(23:55):
oh my god, I got to clean the house, I
got to deal with things, I got to schedule things.
People are able to build these third spaces by doing
that in a very scruffy way where you're like not
going to clean the house, not going to worry about it,
We're just going to like have people over and kind
of connect. And so those kind of moments of building
your own third spaces can matter a lot when it
comes to happiness.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
So as physicians, we say, you know, find some community,
go exercise, eat right, find a sense of purpose. Right,
so we know how to counsel on nutrition. Now most
of us from many of us know how to counsel
on exercise. But boy, finding a sense of community.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Like, how do I do that? Like?

Speaker 4 (24:32):
What do I?

Speaker 3 (24:34):
That is so easy to say, go find your community,
and it's very difficult.

Speaker 4 (24:38):
So I love the scruppy hospitality.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Any other ideas, some examples, some advice, and how to
find your community.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, I think one of the examples I really love
is this idea that we often get social connection wrong.
We often get focused on whether social connection is coming
to us right, Like I feel lonely, I don't feel loved,
I don't feel like I have friends. But the answer
to that often comes from being loving, being a good friend,
being the type of person that reaches out yourself. You

(25:07):
have to wave first. My colleague nic Eppe is fond
of saying everybody waves back, but you kind of need
to be the one that waves first, right, And that
means that a really easy way to kind of seek
out community for yourself is to bring community to others.
And this can start with something simple. Just text a friend,
I'm thinking about you, I'm paying attention to you. Right

(25:29):
when you start up conversations even with a stranger, ask questions.
Becoming a good listener, becoming the type of person that
reaches out, can build opportunities for bridging these connections. Back
in why don't we do this stuff? Well, One is
that we feel like it's going to be awkward, people
don't want to talk to us. But there's so many
psychological biases that show like why that's wrong, or something

(25:50):
I like to tell my students about the liking gap,
which is that we assume that people just aren't going
to like us as much as we think, whether that's
a stranger or even a good friend. But study after
study shows that when you ask people questions, you say
hi to them, you try to reach out. People like
that more than you think. We're not as annoying as
we assume. Another bias I love to tell my students
of is this thing called the beautiful mess effect. We

(26:12):
assume if we ask for help, if we show our vulnerabilities,
if we see messy, that people won't like us. But
in fact, people like that a lot. Right. People feel
kind of excited that you've reached out to them to
share what you're going through. Right, People sort of enjoy
that more than we expect. And so I think one
of the secrets to forming community is to be the
one that waves first, is to take the first step,

(26:34):
to put yourself out there and show other people love
and connection and compassion and listening. And we are just
a reciprocal species. People will start doing that back to you.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Because we all kind of in general want the same thing, right,
We all kind of want attention, we want love. So
it goes back to the recurring kind of thought pattern
that oh, nobody's going to come to this party if
I have it, or nobody's going to come to dinner,
or if I invite them over, but realizing that everybody
else wants that sense of community or wants that human connection. Right. Yeah,

(27:07):
So for individuals, for women who maybe stuck, who are
overwhelmed to start out with, and then oh gosh, now
I've got to go find a sense of community now
to help myself. Right, that's like a lot to get
unstuck from. How do you get unstuck?

Speaker 1 (27:20):
I'm so glad you asked this question about getting unstuck,
because this is something that we've been thinking about a lot,
especially as the new year is coming up. We're actually
doing a whole Season of Happiness lab on how you
can get unstuck in the new year. So definitely top
up mind for me. But in terms of how you
can get unstuck, you know, we talked before about these
behavioral shifts, but they are also mindset shifts that we
need to make to be happier. And a big one
is a mindset shift of self compassion, which starts with

(27:43):
the idea of recognizing your common humanity. You are just human.
Midlife is tough for everybody, right, This is why we've
a whole podcast on it, Like everybody is having a
tough time with this. Just give yourself a little grace
and that means that when you think about these strategies
we're talking about, you know, particularly the community stuff, but
all the strategies baby steps, tiny change like I'm just

(28:05):
going to reach out to one friend and that will
count as a win. I don't have to be perfect this,
and so I think that to get unstuck. A big
way that we do that is to just recognize I
don't have to do this perfectly. There's lots of things
about midlife structurally that make it really hard.

Speaker 4 (28:21):
But a lot of what.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Makes midlife hard is that we have very high standards
for ourselves, like the world has high standards, but we
mirror those standards, and sometimes we're worse than the world.
Sometimes midlife is hard because we're these terrible drill instructors
that are streaming at ourselves in our own head about
how much we need to exercise and how much we
need to see our parents and how perfect we need
to make the dinner meals and so on, and if

(28:42):
we can just relax some of those expectations, the irony
is that we wind up performing better because we perform
better when we're not miserable, and being so ungraceful to
ourselves makes us pretty miserable inside. And so I think
a big mindset shift that helps us get unstuck is
just to recognize that, to give ourselves some grace, to
remember this is just hard. I'm just human. I'm doing

(29:03):
the best I can. What can I do to take
care of myself? What do I know about what I
need right now? Those kinds of stresses can help a lot.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
It's time for a short break after this, Doctor Santos
and I explore how negative emotions can actually work for
us and not against us. We'll be right back. You're
a happiness expert. Do you feel pressure to be happy? Like,
we can't be happy all the time. You can't have
that without some sadness, right, No, definitely feel some pressure.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
I mean it's in some ways it's nice to be
the happiness expert because A I know what I should
be doing, and B I have this community that can
help remind me when I'm not doing it. But yeah,
I know. I think there can be real pressure to
be happy. And I think part of this comes from
these misconceptions we have about happiness, that it's really about
this positive mood or hedonic pleasure being happy all the time.

(29:57):
But I think one thing I've learned from the research
is that if you really understand what it takes to
build a good life, you're not going to reject negative emotions.
Negative emotions I like to think of that is this
very important evolutionary signal. You know, natural selection built in
these feelings that feel not very good, and it wouldn't
do this just to make us miserable. It did those

(30:18):
because those feelings are functional. It's almost like the feeling
of pain you'd experience if you touched a hot stove. Right,
If you touch a hot stove, that doesn't feel good,
but it's telling you something really important as a signal
of what you need to do to change your actions.
Get your hand off this hot stove immediately. I think
our negative emotions work a lot like that. We need
to see them like that. We need to see them

(30:39):
almost like the dashboard light on our car that tells
us if our tire is low or if our engine light.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
Has come on.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
Those are our evolutionary engine lights. When you're experiencing sadness,
that's an evolutionary engine light that tells you some thing's amiss.
You might need to get some social connection, you might
need to look for some joy in your life. When
you're feeling angry or frustrated, that's an evolutionary engine light
that's telling you there's some of your values that are

(31:05):
being compromised here, Like there's something that feels unfair, really important. One.
When we're feeling overwhelmed, when it's like I can't even
because there's way too much on my plate, that is
an important evolutionary signal that you need to get some
stuff off your plate, and just like the dashboard light
in our car, those emotions don't need to be acted
on immediately. They're kind of not like the hand on

(31:26):
the stove in that respect. It's like kind of like
your tire light. When it comes on, you're like, oh,
tire light. Maybe after work today or tomorrow. I'll make
sure to give some time to fix that and go
put some air in the tire. I think our emotions
often work like that. You know, if you're feeling sad,
if you're feeling overwhelmed, you don't need to deal with
it today, but you kind of got to address it.
Or just like your car is going to run down,
you're going to run down. You're going to hit burnout

(31:48):
and have health problems and not be able to sleep,
have real issues because you're not addressing those negative emotions.
So often we want to push them away. Those are
good signals sometimes. I like to remind myself when I'm
feeling really overwhelmed and I'm like, you know, slamming stuff,
putting in the dishwasher and I'm like really short with
my husband, I like to have a moment where like,
oh wait, thank you, thank you. Evolutionary signals for reminding

(32:09):
me got to make some changes. There's something I gotta
deal with. It's great to have something telling us and
reminding us that we need to do that.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
How do you personally deal with these issues? Like we
all feel overwhelmed, right, we experience loss, grief? What are
your mechanisms in terms of being a midlife woman?

Speaker 1 (32:27):
One is it give space to mindfully notice, to not
suppress it, to not reject it, to be like, oh,
this is what's going on, and then give yourself some
space to try to figure out how can you take
care of this? Right? How can you be kind to yourself?
One of the very specific practices I like to use
is a meditation practice. I like these very practical things
that are like, here's the thing you do in ten

(32:47):
minutes to deal with this, right. There's not always that
to do for happiness, but sometimes there are these good
techniques and for negative emotions. One I really like is
a meditation practice that's been popularized by the meditation teacher
tar Brock. And it comes with this acronym of rain
RAI in which stands for recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.
And so the idea is like, you notice your experience

(33:09):
a negative emotion. I'm slamming things in dishwasher. I am like,
what's going on. Take five to ten minutes to do
this rain practice, and the first step of RAIN is
are recognize, I'm feeling really frustrated right now, I'm feeling
at my last nerve. You kind of label these emotions
and notice and get very specific. Don't just be like
I feel bad, Be like, I'm really frustrated, I'm feeling overwhelmed.

(33:31):
I'm feeling a little lonely, you know, with a side
of like anxious, right like, really try to label it.
That's the first step, are recognize. Then you do the
really hard step, which is a allow. You say, okay,
you know, frustration at the point of my wits end,
I commit to sitting with you for five minutes to
notice what you feel like in my body. I'm just
going to allow this emotion to be there, just as

(33:52):
it is hard. But now you're giving your emotion some
space to pay attention to it. And then you give
your brain something to do while you're allowing that emotion
to be there. And that's step three. I investigate. You say, okay,
pissed off, what do you feel like in my body?
I'm mad, like my brow is farrowed, my chest is
feeling tight, I have a strong craving to maybe have

(34:14):
a drink or check my email, whatever it is. You're
just noticing what that emotion feels like in your body.
And the key to the investigate step, why I think
it works so well, is that we just never sit
with our emotions. We're often just too busy or we
don't think we can handle them. We run away. But
emotions are like waves, they'll take a certain course, you know.
Clinicians often talk about this phenomenon of urge surfing or

(34:35):
craving surfing, where you just notice some negative feeling and
you'll notice it gets stronger like an ocean wave over time,
but then that emotion will crest and go away. We
just don't hang out with our emotions long enough to
do that, but with this investigate step you will. You'll
be like, this feels strong, I'm noticing it. I'm sitting
with my brow feeling farrowed. And then whatever happens. You're like,
I have to figure out what I want to eat

(34:56):
for dinner. You're like, oh wait, I've stopped feeling so strong,
Like I just kind of let it take its course,
but you don't end there. There's one last step of
this rain process, which is n which stands for nurture.
That's when you ask yourself, how can you take care
of your What could I take off my plate? A
really good question for nurture, what do I know about
what I need right now? Because sometimes if you ask

(35:16):
what do I need right now? Like I don't know
I need so many things, but like what do I know?
Sometimes you'll get these little inklings when you ask that.
It's like, ugh, I need to ask my husband for
help about this, or I need to really not have
these meetings with this one colleague. I need to minimize that.
Right Often we think of nurture as like i'h have
a bubble bath or like get a massage, And usually
what we know about what we really need isn't that.

(35:38):
Usually it's something harder, more nuanced. That practice falls under
a whole rubrik of practices that are under this heading
of radical acceptance, where you're just like, I'm gonna sit
with what's really going on, Like this is tough right now,
this is really hard. But if you commit to doing that,
there can be lots of benefits. In fact, studies show
that radical acceptance practices can reduce burnout and populations like

(36:00):
palliative care workers and first responders. Right, So it's a
really nice set of practices for dealing with normative negative motions.
We're supposed to feel tough sometimes, but we need these
strategies for being with our emotions and allowing them to
take their course.

Speaker 3 (36:15):
So I definitely have had curios in my life where
I could do rain, like every ten minutes. Right, So,
how often should you sit with your emotions? I mean,
should you be a little proactive with it and not
just always reactive?

Speaker 4 (36:29):
Should you sit down in journal and think.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
About your emotions a little bit to get some insight,
or how often do you kind of recommend practices like this?

Speaker 1 (36:37):
No, journaling is huge, right. Anyway that you can notice
and sit with your emotions and get them down works.
If that's a meditation practice like rain, great. If that's
an expressive writing practice where you kind of write down
what you're feeling, great, Really, what you're trying to do
is first to be mindful. That's that like recognized step.
Like this is hard right now, I am struggling right now,

(36:59):
these are the emotions I'm experiencing right now. All too
often we just don't have the bandwidth to see what
our emotional emergency light is telling us. We don't take
time to notice. So all those practices really let you notice, like, ah,
I've got a lot on my plate, right, and then
you kind of just normalize it, right. You know, this
makes sense. Everybody in midlife is feeling overwhelmed. Everybody goes

(37:20):
through this right now, Just that act of normalizing it
that it's not just you, that you're not screwing up.
It can just be really freeing and then just some
space to really ask what do I need? When you
often realize that what you need is different than what
you expected.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Let's talk about burnout, because overwhelm segues into burnout. You
took a leave of absence for a while, Can you
tell us a little.

Speaker 4 (37:42):
Bit about that.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yeah, So I love the question about burnout because it
gets back to something we were talking about before, which is,
you know, the difference between kind of just feeling like
you're not flourishing in a real mental health crisis. Because
what the study shows that, you know, there's feeling a
little overwhelmed, then there's feeling a little busy and then
there's burnout, which is this different clinical syndrome. Researchers who
study burnout really find that burnout has these three pieces.

(38:05):
One is a sense of emotional exhaustion. What we often
think of is burnout, but this isn't like tired. It's
not physical exhaustion. It's emotional exhaustion, like you couldn't handle
one more thing on your plate. You are just emotionally spent.
That's kind of symptom number one. Symptom number two is
what's often called depersonalization, but it's basically just cynicism. People

(38:26):
are getting on your last nerve. Your interpretation of people's intentions,
whether that's your kids or your parents, or your clients
at work or the folks on your team is just
like I am so annoyed by you, like I hate you,
I'm so pussy right, just everybody is bothering you. That's
the depersonalization. And third symptom is what researchers have called

(38:46):
a sense of personal and effectiveness. But even if you
did your job perfectly, it just like wouldn't be worth
it, It wouldn't fit with your values, or it doesn't matter anymore.
There's just the sense that whatever you're doing, just like
isn't worth it. These are the clinical symptoms. And I
know these clinical symptoms because I teach about them. And
right at the end of COVID and my new role

(39:06):
on campus, I was starting to feel like I was
experiencing a.

Speaker 4 (39:10):
Lot of these.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
The big one I really experienced was a sense of depersonalization,
and I had it with a student, which makes me
even more embarrassed to admit. But the students in my
role as I head of college would often ask for
help on things. And I got an email from a
student who was actually a student I had dward. He
was one of my favorite students, and it looked like
he needed a root canal and he needed to get
some sort of money so that he could afford it
because he didn't have dental insurance. And I would like

(39:33):
to think that my normal LURI reaction and like normal life,
would have been like, oh my god, this poor student,
like of course I'll help, Compassion, But at this moment
of burnout, my reaction honestly was like God, damn it,
like I have to send another email, And I caught myself.
I was like WHOA, Like that is not the normal
Compassion response I'm supposed to have to a student I
love and like, what is going on now? Is when

(39:55):
I started to realize I was going through so many
of these symptoms of burnout, especially the depersonalization, but also
at the time, this sense of personal and effectiveness. This
was right around the midst of COVID, when I was
teaching students on a college campus run this college community.
When students were taking zoom classes, they couldn't go to
the dining hall. It felt like I was working really
hard to make their experience great, but it kind of

(40:18):
was just crappy, like I was putting all this time
in to do something that felt like it wasn't worth it.
And I saw these signs and realize like, oh man,
burnout doesn't get better if you ignore it, right, these
symptoms only get worse. And really made the hard decision
to not only take some time off, but step away
from this role as ahead of college. So I actually
stepped down in that role. It was hard to admit
I was going through that, but I realized if I

(40:39):
didn't get some space from this, things weren't going to
get better, they were just going to get worse.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
Burnouts increasing in women right now, why do you think
this is?

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah, I think there's lots of reasons. Christina Maslak, who's
the main researcher who's done a lot of great work
on burnout, talks about a bunch of factors that can
lead to burnout. There are things like more work than
you can do at work, so kind of feeling like
you have too much on your plate, which I think
just you know, in twenty twenty five, a lot of
people are going through, especially women in midlife, where they're
doing childcare and dealing with older parents and working really

(41:11):
hard and so on. Burnout also stems from a kind
of lack of personal recognition. Women in midlife are doing
a lot of emotional labor that they're not really getting
you know, financial or emotional credit for, which is a
big one. But a third thing that I think we
see a lot is what maslot called values mismatch, which
is this idea that you're putting lots of effort into something,

(41:31):
but it's not matching what you got into it for.
And I think you know a lot of us at
work are experiencing this values mismatch, where say in the
medical industry, it started with like helping patients. But now
you're just filling out these insurance forms and there's all
this bureaucracy. I think so many of our jobs have
this kind of bureaucratic creep in which can sort of
make us feel like the reason we were doing something

(41:53):
just doesn't match with why we got into this in
the first place. But it's worth noting that, you know,
the studies on whether burnout is happening more in women
are a little bit nuanced. In fact, some of the
recent meta analysis really showed that there's not the gender
differences we often assume. There seems to be an inter
gender difference from some of the data on the parts
of burnout that women experience more of the emotional exhaustion part,

(42:16):
whereas men sometimes experience more of the depersonalization part. The
part that I was talking about. But honestly, these are
really overlapping bell curves and a lot of us are
going through these tough times.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
So what do you tell women who are going through
tough times and who maybe can't step away from their position.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
What is the mechanism to handle that.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
The thing to remember is like, when you're noticing these
negative emotions, they don't go away unless you deal with them, right.
That's true for burnout, it's true for all the negative
emotions we talked about, and it's worth saying that is inconvenient.
Most of us don't have time to like deal with
our overwhelm or deal with our set as, or deal
with our anxiety. That sucks and it's a pain, but
that's just the way negative emotions work. One answer is

(43:00):
to really actually take time away. I think we need
to start thinking of mental health issues where it's like
you really need time away to heal, and so thinking
about potentially getting medical leaves and so on. And I
have colleagues who've sought out medical advice to get time
away from work to do that. So it is very hard.
This is not like reducing how difficult this is. But

(43:21):
sometimes it's possible, if that's not in the cards, for
you to take some real time off. There are other
kinds of solutions. What we know from burnout is that
it's not a personal issue. It's really a work issue,
and I mean workplace broadly. That could be the work
you're doing for dealing with aging parents or childcare. Often
it's like your actual work, your actual job that you're doing.

(43:42):
But it means you need to develop a different relationship
with your job. That burnout is really about an interaction
between you and your job and your values, and so
one solution is to really think about those values at work.
Is there a way you can reframe what your job
description is to get back to your real values? And
here I love the work of Amy Risininski, who's a

(44:02):
professor at Wharton Business School. She talks about this practice
of job crafting, which is really trying to like look
dead in the eye at your job description and figure
out ways that you can build in more of what
you really value. And that could be social connection, that
could be leadership, that could be humor, that could be
finding ways to learn more and find adventure. You think

(44:24):
through what your values are and then try to find
ways to squeeze more of that in. But really what
you need to do is kind of fix that values mismatch,
or if it's really tricky to do that, finding ways
that you're putting your energy into something that's not the workplace,
even if it's just kind of where you're shifting your
energy and your values. That can be helpful for dealing
with some of these issues too. But I think the

(44:46):
real message is like, if you're feeling this, it sadly
is not going away, and that sucks, but it's just
the reality of the situation. You probably just need to
take some time to deal with it.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
I think coming back to your core values, especially with burnout,
it makes you define what your core values are. When
there's dissonance with your core values, that's when problems occur.
But then that's stream over to other areas of happiness.
Just defining your values of who you are might lead
you to happiness in other spots.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah. In fact, there's lots of works on sort of
using and finding what are often called your signature strengths.
Research really shows we have these individual differences and the
things we enjoy about our work, like the strengths that
we bring to our work, the values that we bring.
If you want to learn more about this, you can
google signature strengths tests and you could do one of
these formal tests to figure out, like what are yours

(45:38):
particular strengths. Often if you just take some time to
journal or brainstorm, you can sort of sort out what
those are. But studies show that we perform better, we
wind up feeling happier, we wind up feeling what we're
doing as a calling, if we're bringing in these strengths
and these core values, no matter what that work really is.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
I love that concept of signature strengths because again, as physicians, right,
especially in the longevity world, we'll say, you know, one
of the common themes and prevention of cognitive decline, right
is that sense purpose. But then you're like, find a
sense of purpose. But that signature strength can lead you
into your purpose, right, in terms of finding that sense

(46:17):
of purpose to enhance your happiness in your life.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah, that's exactly right. I think when we think of
a sense of purpose, like in our brain, that word
is like capital P like purpose. You know, it's like
figure out the meaning of life. But in practice meaning making,
we should often think of it as almost like moment making.
When I help a student as a head of college,
when I get a good joke in like in my podcast,

(46:40):
or when I'm teaching, those things feel really tiny, but
actually they're the things that build up to be something
bigger if we're doing things that really fit with our
broader values and our strength. So I think when you
think of purpose it can feel really overwhelming. It's helpful
to remember that you can build those tiny moments of
purpose in to the little things in life. Midlife can

(47:04):
be hard.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
We know that through psychology physiology, and that's basic common sense.
But that doesn't mean that you can't also feel happy
both in your.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
Life and with your life.

Speaker 5 (47:17):
The key is.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
Remembering our minds lie to us about how to get there.
In the long run, it's not money, big promotions are
even flying first class that makes.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Us truly happy.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Happiness takes intention, the right mindset, and the right habits.
I love what doctor Santos shared about scruffy hospitality. There's
this pressure for so many of us to host and
for everything to be perfect, but really, what the science
says makes us happier than being the perfect host is.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Just connecting with friends.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
I was also really taken with doctor Santos's suggestion to
schedule free time for yourself, because we're learning more about
this concept of time affluence, feeling wealthy in time and
how it can impact your happiness in a meaningful way.
And if you have the means spending money to actually
buy back time and framing it that way for yourself,

(48:14):
it's all about investment in your well being. Negative emotions, however,
inconvenient are actually very important evolutionary signals.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
And they won't go away on their own.

Speaker 3 (48:26):
When you're feeling frustrated, stop for a second, identify your emotion,
sit with it and allow it to crest. Then get
curious about what is trying to tell you. And lastly,
burnout is real. If you're experiencing the telltale signs of burnout,
consider taking a signature strength test online to help hone

(48:49):
in on your values and your purpose. Coming up on
the next episode of Decoding Women's Health, you're in for
a real treat. I'll be joined by an expert in
midlife women's fitness who is all so my personal trainer,

(49:11):
Robert Brace.

Speaker 5 (49:12):
Building your muscle has solutions for so many things. Lee
mussel mass gives you the seratonin, gives you the endorphins
to deal with some of the anxiety and stress, and
also it helps regulate your sarcadian rhythm so you're able
to sleep more.

Speaker 3 (49:29):
Decoding Women's Health is a production of Pushkin Industries and
the Atria Health and Research Institute. This episode was produced
by Rebecca Lee Douglas. It was edited by Amy Gaines McQuaid,
mastering by Sarah Burguire. Our Associate producer is Sonya Gerwit.
Our executive producer is Alexandra Garreton. Our theme song was

(49:49):
composed by Hannes Brown, Concept creative development and fact checking
by Shavon O'Connor. A special thanks to Alan Tish, David Saltzman,
Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Morgan Rattner, Amy Hagdorn, Owen Miller,
Jordan McMillan, and Gretek.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
If you have a.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Question about women's health and midlife, leave us a voicemail
at four FI five two O one three three eight five,
or send us a message at Decoding Women's Health at
Pushkin dot FM. I'm doctor Elizabeth Pointer and thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Until next time.