August 5, 2024 • 44 mins
We're bringing you an episode of Immigrantly, where Laurie joined host Saadia Khan to discuss the psychology of happiness education and the expansive realm of happiness. Is happiness a fleeting moment or a sustained state of being? Can it be actively cultivated, or is it an innate aspect of human existence? How do our backgrounds, personalities, and choices influence our perceptions of happiness? Laurie and Saadia openly discuss cultural considerations when exploring happiness, the difference between contentment and happiness, Gen Z’s perception of happiness, and how to achieve zen mode.
Immigrantly is a weekly podcast that celebrates the extraordinariness of immigrant life. They do this by providing their listeners with authentic, unvarnished insights into the immigrant identity in America. Immigrantly has garnered significant recognition and has been featured in renowned media outlets such as the Nieman Storyboard, The Guardian, The Slowdown, and CNN. You can get more information at http://immigrantlypod.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, Hey, doctor Lori Santos. Here. This week, the Happiness
Lab is bringing you a special crossover episode with the
Immigrantly podcast. Immigrantly is hosted by Sadia Khan, a social
entrepreneur and the founder of Immigrantly Media. She and I
had an incredible conversation where we explored the origins of happiness.
(00:36):
We talked about whether happiness is just a fleeting moment
or whether we can sustain it over time. We also
explored how our backgrounds, personalities, and choices shaped our perceptions
of happiness. I really enjoyed the conversation, so I hope
you do too.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hello and welcome to Immigrantly. I am Sadia A. Khan.
This week on Immigrantly, I embark on a jamie into
the fast, vibrant, and our predictable world of happiness. Is
happiness a fleeting moment or a lasting state? Can it
be actively pursued or is it intrinsic to human existence?
(01:21):
How do our backgrounds, personalities and life choices shape our
experiences of happiness? And what is this elusive state everyone
seeks but seems hard to grasp consistently? And lastly, is
happiness a universal language that transcends different lives and cultures,
(01:41):
or is it as divis as the individuals seeking it? Yes,
we will address all those questions and more in our
today's episode. According to my today's guest Lauri Santos, a
cognitive science and psychology professor at Yale, happiness isn't just
an emotion you feel, but something that can be taught,
(02:04):
almost like a muscle that can be worked out. Santos
saw that his two dents were increasingly anxious and depressed
and decided she wanted to give them some tools on
not just how to be happy, but how they can
make themselves happier using science. Her course, Psychology and the
Good Life became the most popular course in Yale's history
(02:28):
when it launched in twenty eighteen, with about one force
of Yale's undergraduates enrolled in it. She's also the host
of the Happiness Lab, which has over ninety million downloads.
I'm honored to interview Laurie today, so let's get started.
(03:11):
How are you doing.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
I'm good, I'm good. Thanks so much for having me
on the show.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
How is your heart today?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
How's my heart today? My good friend from college was
just in town this morning with her daughter. They're on
a college tour, and so I just had breakfast with her,
and so I think my heart isn't a warm place
this morning. It's kind of nice. It's been a good day.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I was at a friend's house yesterday and I told
her about the interview and she was freaking out. She
was like, Oh, my gosh, You're going to interview Laurie Santos.
She was like, I listened to her podcast every single week.
You've become very very popular. How are you handling it?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It's good. I mean, it's really humbling, right to see
the fact that sharing these strategies for improving happiness can
really help people, right. I mean, that's one of the
reasons I get into this. But it's so nice that
it's actually working. I think a challenge of it is,
really there's so many more demands on my time, right
There's requests to give talks and podcasts and these things,
and so I've had to be very careful about what
I say yes to. And it's really a challenge to
(04:10):
say no to things that are great, but to just
say I have to protect my bandwidth. I have to
prejet burnout, you know, And so that can be really tricky,
but overall it's just been an incredible experience.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Before we delve into the science of happiness, let's go
back to your childhood. Can you talk a little bit
about where you grew up and what are some of
the happy memories from your childhood.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, so I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
is a large working class down It used to be
the richest town in America when whaling and those kind
of things were going on, but nowadays they don't really
have whaling as an industry, so it's been a kind
of struggling town when I was growing up. But I had,
you know, an incredibly happy family situation, at least for
the kind of first part of my life. You know.
(04:55):
I remember like we had a house that I would
have a little yard that I could run around in
and things. You know. My brother is four years younger
than me, and he was a kind of constant playmate.
You know. I had fun just kind of being a kid,
being unscheduled, coming up with my own weird activities, whether
that was like making up little games for me and
my brother to play in the basement, to just kind
(05:15):
of like creating and doing things. I feel like I
wrote like lots of fake books, and you know, like
this little kind of camera, so we would, you know,
make little videos and things on it. And so I
remember my childhood as being incredibly fun and incredibly creative.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
What were those fake books about?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, I think they were kind of massively taken from
some of the cartoons I watched. You know. One of
them was called like the Cat and the Mouse, which
I think was a basically plagiarized version of Tom and Jerry.
I didn't never try to publish it, you know, so
the plagiarism wasn't an issue, but it was kind of
you know, drawing the pictures of the cat and the
mouse and kind of coming up with these sort of
fun stories and things and so yeah, so I kind
(05:53):
of enjoyed doing all that stuff creatively.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Very fast, while would do today. You are a professor.
Why did you want to become a professor? What led
you to that bath?
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Well, I've always been interested in psychology and sort of
how people work, and I think growing up, I really
just thought that the way you were a psychologist, as
you were kind of a clinical psychologist, like you'd have
to be a therapist or put people on a couch.
But when I realized there was like this field where
you could try to understand how the mind worked and
how people fought, and that you could do research and publish,
I was like, oh, man, this sounds amazing. And I
(06:25):
really only learned that when I first started college. I
had a great grad student mentor who kind of showed
me the ropes and even honestly explained that like, you know,
and actually, you know, many PhD programs like they don't
even charge you, like you can go for free. You
get your education for free. And I was like, wait,
this is amazing. You know. It was kind of in
that phase that I learned that being a professor was
a possibility. What I really wanted to do was to
find ways to study the mind, and I realized like, oh,
(06:48):
this is a career where you could do that.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
From being a professor to being a professor of the
most sought after class at Yale, tell me about that process.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So I've been teaching at Yale for over two decades now,
which makes me feel very very old. Honestly, the time
goes by very fast, and for most of my time
at Yale, I was, you know, a professor at the
front of the classroom, taught classes about my research, which
focused a lot on animals and what makes the human
mind unique. And I thought college life was a lot
like what college life was like when I was in college,
which was fine and mostly happy. You know, there was
(07:21):
some stresses, obviously, but it wasn't nearly as bad as
the kind of thing we're seeing today. But I was
kind of blind to really what young people are going
through today. And then I took a new role on
campus where I became what's called the head of college.
And so heads of colleges at Yale are faculty who
live on campus with students, and so I lived on
campus with students, I ate with them at the dining
hall and kind of hung out with them. And that
(07:41):
was when I really first started to see the college
student mental health crisis up close and personal. Where right
now nationally, not just at Yale, but nationally, more than
forty percent of college students report being too depressed to
function most days. More than sixty percent say that they're
overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in ten has seriously considered
suicide in the last year. I mean, it's like a
really terrible crisis that our young people are going through
(08:03):
And that was when I realized the need for a
class about strategies that all my students could use to
feel I really wanted to teach them, Okay, what does
the evidence say about how you can behave in different ways,
develop different mindsets, ones that will really make you feel better.
And so that was how the class was born.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
You know what's interesting about your class is you're looking
at happiness through science. And when I think of happiness
when I was growing up or even now, in my
conscious mind, happiness is a very visceral emotion and it
comes when it comes, and I can't really control it
because a lot of times our happiness hinges on external factors,
(08:41):
whether it's relationships, career, and sometimes different types of happiness
almost conflict with one another. Right, So happiness in career
may conflict with happiness at home. How do you teach
balancing all those different aspects of happiness?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Well, I think you know. One of the ways the
scientific approach can be really helpful is that it tries
to just get people to notice what all those factors
feel like.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
It tries to get you to notice, Okay, what are
some of the kinds of things that help you feel happy.
And the way that people take a scientific approach is
really just to ask people, Hey, how are you feeling
right now on a scale of one to ten, how
satisfied are you with your life? You know, let me
give you this list of positive emotions. Have you felt
those today? So, ultimately it's a scientific approach, but it's
a scientific approach that really takes into account people's subjective
(09:28):
experience of how things feel like, how things feel like
in people's lives, so kind of their emotions and things
and how they think their life is going. And it
really just encourages people to maybe do little experiments to
ask like, Okay, did you feel better in your life
when you were hanging out with family or when you
were at work, or when you had a little bit
of free time in your day versus when you were packed, packed,
packed to the brim, right, And so you're kind of
(09:50):
doing these experiments to just notice subjectively what feels good
and what doesn't feel as good as I expected. And
I think when you do that, you get some really
interesting hints about how to balance all those competing factors.
I think the first is that we often put our
kind of like career achievements in the domain of happiness, right,
we think, like to be happy, I need to be successful,
or I need to be rich, or I need to
(10:10):
get this promotion at work. When researchers get people to
start paying attention, what they quickly realize is that those
kind of career accomplishments don't really make us as happy
as we think. Especially money, it really doesn't make us
as happy as we think. You know, with the caveat
that you have to have enough money to put food
on the table and get by, right, if you're living
below the poverty line, that doesn't work. But you know,
for at least many of the people listening right now,
(10:32):
if you can put food on the table and keep
a roof over your head, getting a lot more money
doesn't really make you as happy as as you think.
That's what a lot of the data show. And so
I think that as you start to pay attention to
what this research shows, and again the research is just
you subjectively thinking about, Okay, what really does matter? When
I pay attention, what you find is that the career
stuff maybe needs to get kind of downplayed relative to
(10:53):
the social connection stuff, the kind of true relationship stuff.
Even when we think about what makes us happy at work.
What we often find is it's not our achievements professionally,
it's the relationships we develop at work. This new study
that just came out in twenty twenty three, which took
data from this big job site, indeed, they found that
one of the biggest predictors of your happiness at work
isn't your salary or how good your manager is. It's
(11:15):
really whether or not you have a best friend at work.
So even at work, our social relationships seem to matter
for feeling good. Yes, so I think we get some
hints about how to kind of bring balance to all
these different competing factors in our lives when we start
to genuinely pay attention to what feels good.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You know, what you're think makes so much sense. But unfortunately,
especially living in a capitalist society, I still see people
are unable to make that conscious connection. And I can
give you so many examples, even in our house, where
my husband and I have had these arguments about what
makes us happy, and he looks at happiness differently more
in the context of career, in the context of development.
(11:53):
It may be immigrant mentality, but I think it is
very common across the board. I wonder how do we
make that cognitive shift. How do we really teach our
brains and almost reorient ourselves to saying I can be
happy if I am not extremely successful in career or
if I am not making money beyond is it in threshold?
(12:17):
What is the process of achieving that zen mode?
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Well, I think it's really tough, and I think this
is something that I definitely see in my students. You know,
we cover some of the studies like literally showing that
more money doesn't make you happy. You know, I make
my students read these studies, and at the end of
every lecture where I talk about money and happiness, I'll
have a big long line of students who want to like,
you know, well that can't be true, or maybe if
you spend it differently, and so on. And what's interesting is,
you know, yeah, we just have such a diverse range
(12:43):
of students. You might think that pushback would be from
the students who were themselves really wealthy or grew up
in a you know, really privileged background. But the pushback
I often get, interestingly, is from students who haven't had
that sort of privileged background, or they're coming as a
first gen student, or from an immigrant background. I think
for immigrants, there really is this mentality of like push, push, push,
you know, pull your stuff up by your bootstraps, you know,
(13:05):
and maybe even like sacrifice part of your mental health
to get that kind of of typical capitalist success. Right.
So again, those are kind of anecdotal data of just
which students I talk to, But yeah, I mean I
think these kinds of misperceptions are alive and well in
the kind of immigrant mind. You know, there's this idea
that you kind of push for money, push for external success,
push for accolades at work, and that will be the
(13:27):
thing that brings you a sense of this sort of
zen piece. But when you look at the data, what
you find is it just doesn't work that way. And
so your question is really like how do we overcome this, right,
Like how do we fight this bias? And I think
it's really tough, Like it's tricky myself, Like I'll say,
you know, I know all the data about this stuff,
but I still share these intuitions. Right, every time I
say no to a talk that was going to, you know,
(13:49):
give me a nice honorarium, I'm kind of like, oh gosh,
I'm like saying.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
No to money.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
What does that mean? Or every time I turn down
the opportunity to do something more and more and more
at work. I know the research, but it's I kind
of have this twinge of like, oh am I going
to regret this? You know, is this going to be
the last opportunity I get? Right? So I completely get it,
But I think something that's really helped to me is
like no knowing what the science says, right, Like I
can look at the graph and be like, oh, I
see I'm not going to be that much happier if
(14:14):
I double my income, or I've read the studies showing
of what's called the arrival fallacy, where we think I'll
be happy when I'll be happy when I get a promotion,
or I'll be happy when I make this much money,
and study after study shows that we just misperceived, that
we just are wrong about what our predictions about what's
really going to make us happy. And so for me,
hearing the studies can be kind of helpful because you're like, Okay,
(14:37):
I know the research shows that I'm wrong. Like I
can't change my kind of intuition that I have about
this stuff, but I'm going to kind of not follow
my intuition. I'm going to kind of follow what I
think is right. And then often when you do that,
you get new data to be like, oh, actually that
opportunity that I turned down so i'd have more time
with my family, that was actually a good move, right,
Like that actually did make me happy, Or like that, no,
(14:58):
I said in my calendar, that feels great. When I
kind of noticed, like oh that was when I was
supposed to take that trip where I was supposed to
have that meeting, it's like, oh, this feels great to
have a little bit more free time. And so I
think when you start to see the outcomes of doing
things a little differently, you can get your own data like, hey,
this is working better than I expected.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Lottie, you said something so interesting about looking at the
data looking at grafts. Are you ever concerned about over
pathologizing the science of happiness.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
One of the things that's great about this particular form
of science, right, is that it's based on people's subjective reports.
In some ways, these are people who are saying, you know, hey,
at a scale of one to ten, this is how
I feel about happiness and so on. That means it's
kind of taking away some of the experience. Right, If
I had richer narrative reports, obviously we would learn more about,
you know, all the nuances of people's subjective experiences. But
(15:47):
because like what the research is doing is really getting
people's actual opinions of what's going on, I think I
can actually be a powerful way to really understand how
people are feeling. So I'm a little bit less worried
about the kind of pathologizing. I think it definitely is
missing something about people's complete experiences, obviously, but it does
let us get a kind of important glimpse that I
think has been at least for me, really helpful as
(16:10):
I kind of puzzle through what's the right way to
live a healthy and a happy life.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, this is a great segue into bringing culture
and cultural nuances into the idea of happiness. Now. I
grew up in Pakistan, a collectivist society. Happiness is defined
very differently there. It is less materialistic in some ways, right,
So spending time with your parents, with your grandparents, siblings,
having extended relationships is in a way manifestation of happiness.
(16:45):
And then you come to the US, and I felt
very lonely in the beginning. I felt disoriented. I recognized
my depression and anxiety more in the US than in
Pakistan because I was always surrounded by family and friends.
What differences have you seen across different cultures, especially Eastern
versus Western cultures.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I think this is a really great question. It's actually
one are starting to get you a better handle on
right where you're doing the right studies with big enough
samples of people from different cultures. One of the best
research tools that we have to look at this comes
from this report that's known as the World Happiness Report,
where they survey all these things about people's emotion and
happiness across all kinds of different countries. And what they
(17:28):
find in the report is pretty interesting. You know, first
of all, there is great variance and happiness across cultures.
They do things with the World Happiness Report where they
rank the different countries in terms of their happiness, which
I think gets a lot of headlines but misses a
lot of the nuance. But when you do those rankings,
you often find that Scandinavian countries kind of kind of
out happiest, you know, Norway, Denmark, those are the ones
that are happy. But then countries that you might not
(17:50):
expect you know, so countries in South America, places like
Costa Rica and so on, tend to be a little
bit happier and so on, at least relative to the US.
And so often what you get from that is to say, Okay,
what are the happier countries doing a little bit differently?
And what you find is they're prioritizing some of the
same things you noticed about your kind of home life
back in the day, which is that like you're prioritizing
(18:11):
things like social connection. Family is you know, kind of
considered more valuable than work. When those two things come
into conflict, famili is always going to win out. People
are around other people more often, so there's much less loneliness,
much more social connection, and there's cultures that tend to
be happier, tend to be a little bit more on
the collective side, right. You know, you think of Scandinavian
countries and they have things like universal income and like
(18:33):
allowing to kind of help other people. Right. It's not
kind of like you live and die by your own
sort of hard work alone. Right. It takes a village
kind of approach rate, Yes, exactly. And so I think
when we start looking at those cultural differences. One thing
we can say is like, hang on, maybe the values
that we have in the US, this kind of super
individualism and capitalism at all costs, you know, maybe we're
(18:56):
kind of missing something that really does matter for our
actual happiness. And so I think these kinds of comparisons
across countries can be really powerful. I think another thing
we see in these comparisons across countries is that it's
not all about the individual happiness. Like, what's happening politically
obviously matters a lot, you know, So the equality of
a country seems to matter a lot. The trust that
(19:16):
people have in government matters a lot. That's actually one
of the reasons in the United States that we've dropped
a lot in our rankings of happiness is because there's
less and less trust in the political process, trust of
our fellow man, with all the political polarization we see
in the country. And so I think also these kind
of cultural comparisons make us realize, hang on, you know,
A lot of the strategies are about, well, hey, you
you know, you change your personal behaviors and your personal mindsets.
(19:39):
But also we need to think about the structural issues
that people face and the political issues that people face
if we really want everyone to be as happy as
they can.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Be, I want to cycle back to young folks. There's
so much to talk about when we think about gen
zs in terms of their politics. Right, they are looking
more and more towards their friends as being politically aligned
with them, moradly aligned with them, Right, So that's a
(20:10):
measure of how they choose friendships. How do you think
that redefines happiness for them? Because they are putting a
lot of pressure not just on themselves but on their
friends and friends of friends. And also how does social
media play into all of this. They think they are
not lonely because they are on social media and they're scrolling,
but then they're basically doom scrolling, right, It's like enragement
(20:34):
is equal to engagement kind of deal. What are some
of the things you're seeing, Laurie within that realm? And
what is your advice to any young person who's listening
to this podcast right now?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So I'll take the second one first, This idea of
you know, how is social media and our technology in
general honestly kind of affecting our happiness? You know, one
of the biggest predictors of people's happiness is our sense
of social connection, our sense of true social ties, having
people that you can count on, that you really care about,
and just being around other people in real life. You know,
in theory, social media and our technology, our phones in general,
we're supposed to help with that, right, We're supposed to
(21:07):
be able to, you know, even be more social connected.
That's why it's called social media. But I think by
and large, what these tools are doing is more disconnecting people,
at least in real life or especially in real time.
It turns out you don't necessarily need to connect in
real life to get the kind of social connection nutrition
that kind of comes with being with other people, but
you need to do it in real time. You know,
(21:27):
you and I are right now talking, you know, not
we're not in the same room, in the same studio.
We're talking across with the podcast software, and research shows
that's pretty good, right, because we're kind of you can
see each other's facial expressions, we're kind of talking in
real time. Doesn't work as much if you're just like
texting or posting, you know, a comment on someone's Instagram feed,
or you know, scrolling through TikTok videos or something that's
not as nutritious in terms of our psychology of what
(21:49):
we need for social connection. And so I think that
one of the biggest hits that people get from social
media is that it's just an opportunity cost on hanging
out with each other in real life. You know, how
often have you seen a group of young people are
honestly a group of adults for that matter, like sitting
around to dinner table and everybody's get there for you know,
they're with each other in real life, but they're not
connecting in real life because they're looking at their phones, right,
(22:10):
And so that's a big hit. I think social media
is also a big hit we know for young people
just in terms of their sleep. Making sure you're getting
the appropriate amount of good sleep is super important for
our mental health. And these days, what you find, as
many students claim when young people claim not to be
sleeping as much because like they're on their phones and
they're staying up late at night watching TikTok videos and
other kind of screen time things. So I think there's
(22:30):
lots of reasons our social media is hurting happiness generally,
and that hit on happiness is especially bad for young people.
But I think the loneliness hit that young people are
going through kind of gets to your first question about
kind of, you know, what's happening with young people kind
of feeling like it's harder to kind of connect with
people across the political divide. I think that's a generation
that's heading the most hit of the political polarization we're experiencing.
(22:54):
And I think that that winds up being really tricky
because it means that we're not kind of getting the
usual social connection we get. I think that people feel
really limited in the number of friends they can make
and who understands them and so on, and I think
that just contributes to the loneliness crisis that we're seeing
among young people today.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
You've talked about third spaces for younger people. How important
are those third spaces and whose responsibility is it to
build those government societies individuals.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So third spaces is a term that political scientists and
sociologists us to talk about places that are not your
home and not your work if you're an adult, that
you can be around people you know and hang out
with one another a lot, right, So I think of
in my youth, there were third spaces like the mall
we were in the nineties, you just go to the
mall and people would be at the mall and everyone
would see each other. It wasn't work. It wasn't you know,
(23:46):
a home or a school, but it was like a
place that I could go that I knew. I would
run into people that I knew who were my age
and similar like my did things. I think even when
I grew up in the nineties, there were less third
places than there were in the heyday of third places,
which is kind of in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
where you had lots of churches and lions clubs and
barbershops and just places where people got together all the time.
(24:08):
The joke is from that nineties TV show Cheers of like,
you know, the place where everybody knows your name, right,
that's kind of what you're going for with a good
third place. And the evidence really suggests that third places
have been going away from the nineteen fifties to now.
If you just plot the number of churches or bowling
leagues or barber shops, right, those things have gone down
over time to the point that our young people say,
you know, one of the reasons I don't get together
(24:29):
with other people is like, I have nowhere to go,
right We have to go somewhere where you spend money, right, Like,
It's kind of there's not these kind of free places
you can go to just be around other people as
often right now. And I think that, you know, the
evidence really suggests that that's a bummer. It's a bummer
for our loneliness. It's a bummer for our ability to
like connect across different kinds of people. If you're going
to your church, your barbershop, you're likely to see somebody
(24:50):
who like, maybe has a different background than you, or
maybe a different political belief than you, and so on.
I think we just get that less and less often.
We have less third places to kind of connect in
these you know, kind of comfortable, leisurely ways where we're
not really talking about politics, but it kind of comes
up in this sort of subtle way. And so without
those third places, I think we're becoming more lonely, more
politically polarized, and so on. In terms of who should
(25:12):
fix that, I think everybody should fix that. There's a
role that we have as individuals to create these spaces,
and I think we can do more than we often expect.
I have a friend here where I live in Massachusetts.
Who a while ago now it's kind of two decades
running started this thing that he calls Monday Movie Night,
and every Monday Movie Night, like he just invites a
bunch of people to come over and watch movies and
(25:32):
people make a kind of collective you know, kind of
healthy meal, like a big chili or something, and everybody
gets together. And it's really been so nice to be
part of this because it's just like every Monday, I
know there'll be people there, and you know, you can
kind of connect with these kind of interesting folks who
are doing stuff. And so I think there's there's a
way that we as individuals can set up our own
third places and really kind of put time into doing that,
(25:54):
making these spaces that. But there's also lots of sociological
research suggesting the power of governments being really involved and
creating third places right and just organizations kind of doing that.
Many of the most famous third places aren't ones that
are necessarily created by an individual, for like, you know,
a social group around their neighborhood, but by institutions, you know,
so things like the Lions Club or the NAACP or
(26:17):
the kind of communal barbershop or something like that.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Is there any such thing as a good argument anymore,
one with sharp perspectives, fair and tough questions that leaves
you free to come to your own conclusions. Thoughtful discussion
is missing almost everywhere in our lives, but you'll find
it on hear Me Out, Slate's new podcast. I'm your host,
Celeste Headley.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Each week, we'll.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Talk, we'll listen, and we'll ask the hard questions on
issues that matter. Every Tuesday on Slate's hear Me Out
with Celeste Heedley, Join us.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Lari, I want to talk a little bit about your
own relationship with happiness. You've talked about how people should
find happiness and little things. Do seek happiness or does
happiness come to you through activities that you're just generally doing?
Like is it a conscious mind seeking happiness or it
just comes organically to you?
Speaker 1 (27:21):
You know, if I've been having a rough week, one
thing that I often do is to say, Okay, how
can I get a little bit more social connection in,
Like which friend do I need to call this week?
Who do I need to see to kind of get
that social connection in? And so in some ways it's
both organic to certain activities that we engage in that
they feel good and boost our positive emotion and increase
our satisfaction with life. But if we're not getting those
kind of behaviors in naturally, we can really intentionally decide, hey,
(27:44):
I'm going to do this more often, and the consequence
usually is a boosted sense of well being.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
So recently, what is one thing that made you happy?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
At this lovely breakfast with this friend of mine from college?
And I had a really good like bagel sandwich, and
I took a moment to like savor like this is great,
like that bagel's really crunchy, Like just the act of
that paying attention, being a little bit more mindful in presence,
it can kind of boost your positive emotion and make
you experience things like gratitude, this sort of thankfulness for
having this interesting experience. And that's just a sort of
(28:14):
small retuning of our attention to pay attention to stuff
that feels nice, and then all of a sudden you
start feeling better.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Do you differentiate between being content and being happy? And
is happiness really a need or is it a want?
Speaker 1 (28:37):
When I think of happiness, I think of it as
kind of being almost like happiness with a capital age.
It's kind of equivalent to sort of living a good life,
living a happy life. And it has these kind of
two components. One is sort of an emotional component, where
it's kind of how you feel in your life, and
the second part is sort of a like thinking component,
like how you think your life is going. If you
kind of feel good in your life and think your
(28:57):
life is going well, you're living a happy life. This
term is sort of this kind of big capital age
term happiness is often equivalent to what like the old Ancients,
like Aristotle thought about when they thought about things like
you die minia, like the idea of a good life generally, right.
So that's kind of what I think about when I
use the term happiness. When I think of something like contentment,
I almost see that as like one of the positive
(29:19):
emotions that makes up happiness. Contentment is just the sense
that you're kind of at peace in life. It's a
kind of like low arousal, but really high positive state
like joy or surprise or sort of laughter might be
a kind of higher arousal, a high positive state, whereas
contentment's like low arousal. You're just chilling and everything's fine,
but things feel good when you sort of reflect on
(29:39):
how they feel. And so the way I think of
the connection between the two is contentment is an important
but one of many important emotions that you want to
get in to sort of have a happy life, to
have you diamondia or a good life.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Laurie, I wonder if other emotions, like grief and loss
inform people's happiness differently. People who've experienced, say, grief or
loss look at happiness differently than people who haven't. Have
you seen that in your studies?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Definitely. There's a lot of work on a topic that
researchers called post traumatic growth. You know, so many of
us have heard this term post traumatic stress. You go
through some terrible, stressful period and you have these consequences,
you know, high arousal, high anxiety, and things later on.
But post traumatic growth are cases where you go through
something terrible, you go through loss, and you go through grief,
but on the other side, you experience like a sense
(30:29):
of growth, right, Like it's not something that you choose
and you know it sucked, and it's like worth recognizing
the bad part of it. But like on the other side,
people self report feeling a deeper sense of connection, a
deeper sense of spirituality, you know what is meaningful in life,
you're a deeper sense of purpose and kind of a
deeper sense that you can sort of go through things.
I think this term resilience, as I know you've talked
(30:51):
about in your podcast, is a really really complicated one.
But people who've gone through to the other side often say,
I know what I'm capable of now again, I wouldn't
have chosen that. You know, it's awful, but like, I
feel like I've grown and I'm stronger on the other side.
This is what post traumatic growth is. And I think
one of the cool things about the research on post
traumatic growth is it shows that that kind of like
(31:12):
positive thing that you get at the end had to
come through the struggle. It had to come through the
dark times and so on. And I think this gets
to a misconception that we have about positive emotions. I think,
you know, one big misconception I see when people come
to my work and happiness is they kind of embrace
this sort of toxic positivity approach that you know, a
good life, this happy life is positive emotion all the time.
(31:32):
But when you look at the science, what you find
is like that's not true. A good life involves some anxiety,
involves some loss, It involves some grief, It involves some frustration,
some justified anger. Right. The way you get to a
good life is to not just have these negative emotions,
but really learn from them and push through them to
see like how they're teachers and so. I think this
is another misconception we have, just like oh, money and
(31:54):
successes matters for happiness. I think people think a happy
life has none of the bad stuff, But a happy
life includes the bad stuff. The bad stuff is really
important for getting us to kind of grow and become,
you know, the people we really want to become someday.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You're absolutely right, and bad stuff is part of human existence, right.
We experienced so many different emotions throughout our lives. How
can we disregard the bad the ugly stuff, because that
makes up who we are. Do you think being attention
to the present also matches because a lot of times
we look at the past and then we look at
(32:28):
the future. Yesterday I had an argument with my husband.
I went to bed a little angry. I woke up
in the morning. I wasn't thinking about it, but it
was part of my subconscious self, and then my husband
and I talked and we were like, okay, now we're fine,
and it changed my mood. How do I start thinking
about today in this moment?
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Well, it takes some work, right, I mean, I think
we have brains that are just built to kind of
mind wander. Can I think about the past, think about
the future, we're anywhere about the present. But there are
techniques and you can use to get better about being
more present. One is a technique that's just called savoring,
which is just what it sounds like. That was kind
of what I was doing with my big old this morning.
We're just like what does this taste like? What does
(33:10):
this feel like? How would I describe this? You just
like become force yourself to become curious about whatever is
going on in the moment. And interestingly, that includes when
things are bad. One way that we can get through
bad emotions like grief or anxiety is to really pay attention, like, Okay,
how does this feel like? My chest is heavy?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Like?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You know, my phase feels tight? Right? Like I feel
like I have pressure like pushing on me.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
When you really kind of get to know and be
present with those negative emotions, that can actually help you
feel better, So.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Being super aware of negative emotions or positive emotions for
that matter.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean I think we
just kind of don't notice our experience right kind of,
and that means we don't really get to learn from
it or get to really feel it.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
In some ways, that's really kind of sad, right, that
we're sort of fast forwarding our life or rewinding our
life and never kind of just playing it right there.
So I think, yeah, so savoring and just kind of
being part of the present moment is powerful. But but
then a second technique we know works from the researchers.
You know, so many spiritual techniques for kind of being
a little bit more present. So practices like meditation or prayer,
all these practices where you really kind of pay attention,
(34:14):
you know, to a particular mantra or you know a
particular set of words and so on. Like those rituals
the research shows can really build up your presence over time,
particularly practices like meditation where the practice is really all
about intentionally noticing the present moment without judgment. Those kinds
of practices over time like literally change your brain. You
literally change the amount of gray matter in your brain,
(34:35):
even if you just start meditating as a novice.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
I'm glad you mentioned spirituality. I feel like spirituality is
almost frowned upon. When I'm feeling lolow or when I'm
feeling anxious, I do pray and it calms me down.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
There's actually lots of research, you know, studying kind of
happiness in people of different religious faiths and religious backgrounds,
and one of the clear patterns suggests that religious individuals
tend to be happier. It seems like that happiness, though,
comes a lot from religious practices. So it comes from
the not the belief part, but the prayer part, the rituals.
The rituals exactly go to services, right, you know, taking
(35:11):
time off, whether it's a sabbath or whatever. Right. And
what's interesting is it kind of doesn't matter which religion
it is. You see booths of happiness in people of
Muslim faith or Buddhist faith, or Catholic or you know,
Jewish faith all over the board. It kind of doesn't
matter what rituals you're doing. It's just that you have
rituals that give you a sense of connection to something
bigger than you that seem to matter. And so you know,
I think as we you know, become a more secular society,
(35:33):
at least especially here in the US, in some ways
we do that at our peril, right, we're missing out
on a real path to happiness. That doesn't necessarily mean
that you have to become religious, but it means that
if you're not getting your sense of purpose and connection
from religious faith, you might in those rituals, you might
need to find other rituals and other ways to get
a sense of purpose.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
What are some of the other rituals that you've seen
people follow to the place religion.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
There's a great kind of religious scholar, Casper Turkyle. He
also has a fabulous podcast who's actually been doing work
on these kind of other traditions that look a lot
like faith traditions. For example, Well, he writes a lot
about CrossFit, which sounds kind of funny, but it's like,
you know, people go every week and it becomes a
third place, and it becomes something that you know, you
have a whole set of values and meaning. It becomes
(36:20):
a spot where people wind up doing things for each other.
You know. He talks about these cases of you know,
somebody in your CrossFit group gets sick and everybody rallies
and you know, makes food for them and things like that.
And so what he finds is that you can sometimes
get these other organizations that work a lot, like faith traditions,
that have a lot of the same obviously not all
of the same benefits, but some of the same benefits.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
That's so fascinating.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
As humans get creative, we can come up with lots
of versions that work that way.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
On a scale of zero to ten, how happy are
you in the all life?
Speaker 1 (36:56):
And why, Well, I'm usually around like a seven or eight,
And I think I wasn't that way before. I think
I'm at a seven or an eight, in part because
I do engage in all these practices a lot. My
instinct is not to in the age in as much
social connection. I'm really not a present person. I'm much
more RUMINATIV and stuff like. But I think as I've
studied this more and more, I've recognized how important it
(37:17):
is to act this stuff like happiness is possible, but
it takes work. It's just like having a fit body, right, Like,
you know, like it's possible to eat healthy and go
to the gym all the time and move your body,
but you got to put some work in. My analogy
is that happiness works just like that, like you can
do it, but it takes kind of constant work and
constant practice. And that's the thing I think too, is
that it's just like my colleague Nick Eppley is fond
(37:39):
of saying that happiness is like a leaky tire. You know,
It's like you're happy, but then it kind of goes
down and you have to do something to pump it up.
And so remembering that your mental health is something that
takes kind of constant work has been helpful for me
because it's really allowed me to put that work in
and the act of doing that has made me happier.
So I'd say, yeah, I'm like a seven and a
half eight out of on a ten point happiness scale.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Give me one habit that people should make part of
their lives to feel happier.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Another great one that I think we haven't talked about
yet is the act of feeling a little bit grateful.
This is a mindset shift that this science shows because
really powerful we're real complainers, and I think we become
complaining socially. Like I use the analogy you know last time,
you you know, hung out with a friend, like the asked,
how's it going. Did you immediately list all the blessings
in life, like if you're in this s us probably no,
(38:36):
you listed, like you know, all the things that are
going wrong. You didn't talk about any of your coworkers
that you adore. You talked about the one coworker that
like gets on your last nerve and like you know,
and in general, we have this bias, I think universally
of us, even more so in the United States, towards
what you might call undersociality, Like we just don't realize
the happiness benefits of being social, whether that's expressing our
(38:57):
gratitude to other people, complimenting other people, trying to help
other people. We just don't realize how much these kind
of little social mindset shifts matter so much for making
us feel better.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
When you mentioned grateful, my mind just went to what
my mother says. My parents live in Pakistan and I
talk to them very often. And every time I talk
to my mom and if I'm feeling low, obviously she
knows and she always says this to me. She's like,
be grateful for what you have. Just say it verbally,
how grateful you are for all that you have, and
(39:30):
I always brush it off, Laurie, I don't pay attention.
And I'm like, yeah, how will that make a difference
in my life? Just saying I am grateful for X
y Z things. And now when you mentioned it, maybe
that's a mantra, that's a ritual that I should probably
incorporate in my daily life, right, just getting up in
the morning and saying I am grateful for X y
(39:53):
Z and then starting my day.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like your mom's reading the studies,
because like literally there's literally a study where you have
people scribble down three to five things are grateful for
every day in the morning or in the evening. And
what you find is it within two weeks, people statistically
report higher subject well being a high level of happiness
after that. So, like it's just this simple act. And
it's because one of the problems is like we have
(40:15):
this mind that's built to be very negative. You know,
it made sense in our back in the day to
like notice the bad stuff so we could kind of
fix it. But that means that there's good stuff in
our lives that we've kind of just gotten used to.
We're not getting the kind of happiness benefit from all
those good things because we don't take time to notice it.
And yeah, the studies show that just the act of
what your mom is saying, just take time to notice
it every morning. Now, all of a sudden, you're kind
(40:37):
of paying attention and you can kind of get the
emotional rewards that come from the good stuff in your
life that you otherwise would have just taken for granted.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
So do you think our brain is conditioned to look
at the negative only, or at least for the most part,
so we are almost fighting against it to achieve happiness.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Definitely. I mean, I think there's lots of evidence for
a negativity bias. There's even evidence that like three month
old and five month old babies are more likely to
pay attention if you show them a scene of something negative.
They kind of lock onto the negative stuff. So it
seems like we have this bias, and it seems like
it emerges really early. The good news is that you
can train your brain away from that. Right, This is
what I think think is what the gratitude practice that
(41:17):
your mother was talking about can be so powerful. Right,
you just force yourself to notice the good stuff, so
you kind of push against this natural tendency, and I
think that's the case in so many aspects of our lives.
You know, I think we use the fitness analogy before,
but I think it's similar, right, Like, I don't know
about your general take, but my general take would be
to like eat unhealthy stuff. I'm not like a kind
of physically minded person. My instinct would be to stay
(41:38):
on the couch and not push myself. Right, those are
our natural instincts. But of course we can push past
those natural instincts, and we need to if we want
to be a little healthier. And I think the same
is true for our happiness. We have this natural negativity
bias that might even be innate, but with a little practice,
we can move past it.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
In the end, Laurie, if you were to describe the
United States of America in the context of happiness, how
would you do that?
Speaker 1 (42:07):
I think I would describe it Unfortunately, is going down
right now. And that's really what these recent data from
the World Happiness Report show is that overall the happiness
in the United States has been going down. We've dropped
out of the top twenty in the world for the
first time ever since the World Happiness Report has started,
and sadly a lot of that increased unhappiness is because
(42:28):
of young people, is because young people are feeling so
depressed and so anxious, and so I think the way
I would describe it is the United States isn't doing
very well. But in that challenge, we really have an opportunity.
This is a real opportunity. We have to kind of
follow what the science show is and our behaviors in
our mindsets to feel happier.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Lottie, thank you so much for coming on immigrantly. As
I said, you are a superstar. A lot of people
love you, and I am so glad that you're doing
what you're doing because we all need the Happiness Lab
podcast in our lives to feel happier. But thank you
so much. This was wonderful, such.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
A great time. Thanks so much for having me on
the show.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
I'm so glad I got to talk to Laurie. I've
been listening to the Happiness Lab for I don't know
how long. This was such an important, fun, introspective conversation.
And here's what I want all of you to do.
On a scale of zero to ten ate your happiness.
How happy are you in life and what makes you happy.
(43:35):
I really think doing these exercises, being intentional about how
happy we are, how grateful we are, probably makes us happier,
and if not, it at least gives us a pathway
to work towards happiness. This podcast was produced by Me
Sally Ahhn, written by Ramier Harris and Me. The editorial
(43:59):
review is done by Shay yu Are, sound designer and
editor is Haik and Mudfarid. The music for Immigrantly is
done by Simon Hutchinson. Come back next week when I
have another incredible guest, and try to be happy
Pushkin, Hey, doctor Lori Santos. Here. This week, the Happiness
Lab is bringing you a special crossover episode with the
Immigrantly podcast. Immigrantly is hosted by Sadia Khan, a social
entrepreneur and the founder of Immigrantly Media. She and I
had an incredible conversation where we explored the origins of happiness.
(00:36):
We talked about whether happiness is just a fleeting moment
or whether we can sustain it over time. We also
explored how our backgrounds, personalities, and choices shaped our perceptions
of happiness. I really enjoyed the conversation, so I hope
you do too.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hello and welcome to Immigrantly. I am Sadia A. Khan.
This week on Immigrantly, I embark on a jamie into
the fast, vibrant, and our predictable world of happiness. Is
happiness a fleeting moment or a lasting state? Can it
be actively pursued or is it intrinsic to human existence?
(01:21):
How do our backgrounds, personalities and life choices shape our
experiences of happiness? And what is this elusive state everyone
seeks but seems hard to grasp consistently? And lastly, is
happiness a universal language that transcends different lives and cultures,
(01:41):
or is it as divis as the individuals seeking it? Yes,
we will address all those questions and more in our
today's episode. According to my today's guest Lauri Santos, a
cognitive science and psychology professor at Yale, happiness isn't just
an emotion you feel, but something that can be taught,
(02:04):
almost like a muscle that can be worked out. Santos
saw that his two dents were increasingly anxious and depressed
and decided she wanted to give them some tools on
not just how to be happy, but how they can
make themselves happier using science. Her course, Psychology and the
Good Life became the most popular course in Yale's history
(02:28):
when it launched in twenty eighteen, with about one force
of Yale's undergraduates enrolled in it. She's also the host
of the Happiness Lab, which has over ninety million downloads.
I'm honored to interview Laurie today, so let's get started.
(03:11):
How are you doing.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
I'm good, I'm good. Thanks so much for having me
on the show.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
How is your heart today?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
How's my heart today? My good friend from college was
just in town this morning with her daughter. They're on
a college tour, and so I just had breakfast with her,
and so I think my heart isn't a warm place
this morning. It's kind of nice. It's been a good day.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I was at a friend's house yesterday and I told
her about the interview and she was freaking out. She
was like, Oh, my gosh, You're going to interview Laurie Santos.
She was like, I listened to her podcast every single week.
You've become very very popular. How are you handling it?
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It's good. I mean, it's really humbling, right to see
the fact that sharing these strategies for improving happiness can
really help people, right. I mean, that's one of the
reasons I get into this. But it's so nice that
it's actually working. I think a challenge of it is,
really there's so many more demands on my time, right
There's requests to give talks and podcasts and these things,
and so I've had to be very careful about what
I say yes to. And it's really a challenge to
(04:10):
say no to things that are great, but to just
say I have to protect my bandwidth. I have to
prejet burnout, you know, And so that can be really tricky,
but overall it's just been an incredible experience.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Before we delve into the science of happiness, let's go
back to your childhood. Can you talk a little bit
about where you grew up and what are some of
the happy memories from your childhood.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, so I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
is a large working class down It used to be
the richest town in America when whaling and those kind
of things were going on, but nowadays they don't really
have whaling as an industry, so it's been a kind
of struggling town when I was growing up. But I had,
you know, an incredibly happy family situation, at least for
the kind of first part of my life. You know.
(04:55):
I remember like we had a house that I would
have a little yard that I could run around in
and things. You know. My brother is four years younger
than me, and he was a kind of constant playmate.
You know. I had fun just kind of being a kid,
being unscheduled, coming up with my own weird activities, whether
that was like making up little games for me and
my brother to play in the basement, to just kind
(05:15):
of like creating and doing things. I feel like I
wrote like lots of fake books, and you know, like
this little kind of camera, so we would, you know,
make little videos and things on it. And so I
remember my childhood as being incredibly fun and incredibly creative.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
What were those fake books about?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, I think they were kind of massively taken from
some of the cartoons I watched. You know. One of
them was called like the Cat and the Mouse, which
I think was a basically plagiarized version of Tom and Jerry.
I didn't never try to publish it, you know, so
the plagiarism wasn't an issue, but it was kind of
you know, drawing the pictures of the cat and the
mouse and kind of coming up with these sort of
fun stories and things and so yeah, so I kind
(05:53):
of enjoyed doing all that stuff creatively.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Very fast, while would do today. You are a professor.
Why did you want to become a professor? What led
you to that bath?
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Well, I've always been interested in psychology and sort of
how people work, and I think growing up, I really
just thought that the way you were a psychologist, as
you were kind of a clinical psychologist, like you'd have
to be a therapist or put people on a couch.
But when I realized there was like this field where
you could try to understand how the mind worked and
how people fought, and that you could do research and publish,
I was like, oh, man, this sounds amazing. And I
(06:25):
really only learned that when I first started college. I
had a great grad student mentor who kind of showed
me the ropes and even honestly explained that like, you know,
and actually, you know, many PhD programs like they don't
even charge you, like you can go for free. You
get your education for free. And I was like, wait,
this is amazing. You know. It was kind of in
that phase that I learned that being a professor was
a possibility. What I really wanted to do was to
find ways to study the mind, and I realized like, oh,
(06:48):
this is a career where you could do that.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
From being a professor to being a professor of the
most sought after class at Yale, tell me about that process.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So I've been teaching at Yale for over two decades now,
which makes me feel very very old. Honestly, the time
goes by very fast, and for most of my time
at Yale, I was, you know, a professor at the
front of the classroom, taught classes about my research, which
focused a lot on animals and what makes the human
mind unique. And I thought college life was a lot
like what college life was like when I was in college,
which was fine and mostly happy. You know, there was
(07:21):
some stresses, obviously, but it wasn't nearly as bad as
the kind of thing we're seeing today. But I was
kind of blind to really what young people are going
through today. And then I took a new role on
campus where I became what's called the head of college.
And so heads of colleges at Yale are faculty who
live on campus with students, and so I lived on
campus with students, I ate with them at the dining
hall and kind of hung out with them. And that
(07:41):
was when I really first started to see the college
student mental health crisis up close and personal. Where right
now nationally, not just at Yale, but nationally, more than
forty percent of college students report being too depressed to
function most days. More than sixty percent say that they're
overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in ten has seriously considered
suicide in the last year. I mean, it's like a
really terrible crisis that our young people are going through
(08:03):
And that was when I realized the need for a
class about strategies that all my students could use to
feel I really wanted to teach them, Okay, what does
the evidence say about how you can behave in different ways,
develop different mindsets, ones that will really make you feel better.
And so that was how the class was born.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
You know what's interesting about your class is you're looking
at happiness through science. And when I think of happiness
when I was growing up or even now, in my
conscious mind, happiness is a very visceral emotion and it
comes when it comes, and I can't really control it
because a lot of times our happiness hinges on external factors,
(08:41):
whether it's relationships, career, and sometimes different types of happiness
almost conflict with one another. Right, So happiness in career
may conflict with happiness at home. How do you teach
balancing all those different aspects of happiness?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Well, I think you know. One of the ways the
scientific approach can be really helpful is that it tries
to just get people to notice what all those factors
feel like.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
It tries to get you to notice, Okay, what are
some of the kinds of things that help you feel happy.
And the way that people take a scientific approach is
really just to ask people, Hey, how are you feeling
right now on a scale of one to ten, how
satisfied are you with your life? You know, let me
give you this list of positive emotions. Have you felt
those today? So, ultimately it's a scientific approach, but it's
a scientific approach that really takes into account people's subjective
(09:28):
experience of how things feel like, how things feel like
in people's lives, so kind of their emotions and things
and how they think their life is going. And it
really just encourages people to maybe do little experiments to
ask like, Okay, did you feel better in your life
when you were hanging out with family or when you
were at work, or when you had a little bit
of free time in your day versus when you were packed, packed,
packed to the brim, right, And so you're kind of
(09:50):
doing these experiments to just notice subjectively what feels good
and what doesn't feel as good as I expected. And
I think when you do that, you get some really
interesting hints about how to balance all those competing factors.
I think the first is that we often put our
kind of like career achievements in the domain of happiness, right,
we think, like to be happy, I need to be successful,
or I need to be rich, or I need to
(10:10):
get this promotion at work. When researchers get people to
start paying attention, what they quickly realize is that those
kind of career accomplishments don't really make us as happy
as we think. Especially money, it really doesn't make us
as happy as we think. You know, with the caveat
that you have to have enough money to put food
on the table and get by, right, if you're living
below the poverty line, that doesn't work. But you know,
for at least many of the people listening right now,
(10:32):
if you can put food on the table and keep
a roof over your head, getting a lot more money
doesn't really make you as happy as as you think.
That's what a lot of the data show. And so
I think that as you start to pay attention to
what this research shows, and again the research is just
you subjectively thinking about, Okay, what really does matter? When
I pay attention, what you find is that the career
stuff maybe needs to get kind of downplayed relative to
(10:53):
the social connection stuff, the kind of true relationship stuff.
Even when we think about what makes us happy at work.
What we often find is it's not our achievements professionally,
it's the relationships we develop at work. This new study
that just came out in twenty twenty three, which took
data from this big job site, indeed, they found that
one of the biggest predictors of your happiness at work
isn't your salary or how good your manager is. It's
(11:15):
really whether or not you have a best friend at work.
So even at work, our social relationships seem to matter
for feeling good. Yes, so I think we get some
hints about how to kind of bring balance to all
these different competing factors in our lives when we start
to genuinely pay attention to what feels good.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You know, what you're think makes so much sense. But unfortunately,
especially living in a capitalist society, I still see people
are unable to make that conscious connection. And I can
give you so many examples, even in our house, where
my husband and I have had these arguments about what
makes us happy, and he looks at happiness differently more
in the context of career, in the context of development.
(11:53):
It may be immigrant mentality, but I think it is
very common across the board. I wonder how do we
make that cognitive shift. How do we really teach our
brains and almost reorient ourselves to saying I can be
happy if I am not extremely successful in career or
if I am not making money beyond is it in threshold?
(12:17):
What is the process of achieving that zen mode?
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Well, I think it's really tough, and I think this
is something that I definitely see in my students. You know,
we cover some of the studies like literally showing that
more money doesn't make you happy. You know, I make
my students read these studies, and at the end of
every lecture where I talk about money and happiness, I'll
have a big long line of students who want to like,
you know, well that can't be true, or maybe if
you spend it differently, and so on. And what's interesting is,
you know, yeah, we just have such a diverse range
(12:43):
of students. You might think that pushback would be from
the students who were themselves really wealthy or grew up
in a you know, really privileged background. But the pushback
I often get, interestingly, is from students who haven't had
that sort of privileged background, or they're coming as a
first gen student, or from an immigrant background. I think
for immigrants, there really is this mentality of like push, push, push,
you know, pull your stuff up by your bootstraps, you know,
(13:05):
and maybe even like sacrifice part of your mental health
to get that kind of of typical capitalist success. Right.
So again, those are kind of anecdotal data of just
which students I talk to, But yeah, I mean I
think these kinds of misperceptions are alive and well in
the kind of immigrant mind. You know, there's this idea
that you kind of push for money, push for external success,
push for accolades at work, and that will be the
(13:27):
thing that brings you a sense of this sort of
zen piece. But when you look at the data, what
you find is it just doesn't work that way. And
so your question is really like how do we overcome this, right,
Like how do we fight this bias? And I think
it's really tough, Like it's tricky myself, Like I'll say,
you know, I know all the data about this stuff,
but I still share these intuitions. Right, every time I
say no to a talk that was going to, you know,
(13:49):
give me a nice honorarium, I'm kind of like, oh gosh,
I'm like saying.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
No to money.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
What does that mean? Or every time I turn down
the opportunity to do something more and more and more
at work. I know the research, but it's I kind
of have this twinge of like, oh am I going
to regret this? You know, is this going to be
the last opportunity I get? Right? So I completely get it,
But I think something that's really helped to me is
like no knowing what the science says, right, Like I
can look at the graph and be like, oh, I
see I'm not going to be that much happier if
(14:14):
I double my income, or I've read the studies showing
of what's called the arrival fallacy, where we think I'll
be happy when I'll be happy when I get a promotion,
or I'll be happy when I make this much money,
and study after study shows that we just misperceived, that
we just are wrong about what our predictions about what's
really going to make us happy. And so for me,
hearing the studies can be kind of helpful because you're like, Okay,
(14:37):
I know the research shows that I'm wrong. Like I
can't change my kind of intuition that I have about
this stuff, but I'm going to kind of not follow
my intuition. I'm going to kind of follow what I
think is right. And then often when you do that,
you get new data to be like, oh, actually that
opportunity that I turned down so i'd have more time
with my family, that was actually a good move, right,
Like that actually did make me happy, Or like that, no,
(14:58):
I said in my calendar, that feels great. When I
kind of noticed, like oh that was when I was
supposed to take that trip where I was supposed to
have that meeting, it's like, oh, this feels great to
have a little bit more free time. And so I
think when you start to see the outcomes of doing
things a little differently, you can get your own data like, hey,
this is working better than I expected.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Lottie, you said something so interesting about looking at the
data looking at grafts. Are you ever concerned about over
pathologizing the science of happiness.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
One of the things that's great about this particular form
of science, right, is that it's based on people's subjective reports.
In some ways, these are people who are saying, you know, hey,
at a scale of one to ten, this is how
I feel about happiness and so on. That means it's
kind of taking away some of the experience. Right, If
I had richer narrative reports, obviously we would learn more about,
you know, all the nuances of people's subjective experiences. But
(15:47):
because like what the research is doing is really getting
people's actual opinions of what's going on, I think I
can actually be a powerful way to really understand how
people are feeling. So I'm a little bit less worried
about the kind of pathologizing. I think it definitely is
missing something about people's complete experiences, obviously, but it does
let us get a kind of important glimpse that I
think has been at least for me, really helpful as
(16:10):
I kind of puzzle through what's the right way to
live a healthy and a happy life.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, this is a great segue into bringing culture
and cultural nuances into the idea of happiness. Now. I
grew up in Pakistan, a collectivist society. Happiness is defined
very differently there. It is less materialistic in some ways, right,
So spending time with your parents, with your grandparents, siblings,
having extended relationships is in a way manifestation of happiness.
(16:45):
And then you come to the US, and I felt
very lonely in the beginning. I felt disoriented. I recognized
my depression and anxiety more in the US than in
Pakistan because I was always surrounded by family and friends.
What differences have you seen across different cultures, especially Eastern
versus Western cultures.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
I think this is a really great question. It's actually
one are starting to get you a better handle on
right where you're doing the right studies with big enough
samples of people from different cultures. One of the best
research tools that we have to look at this comes
from this report that's known as the World Happiness Report,
where they survey all these things about people's emotion and
happiness across all kinds of different countries. And what they
(17:28):
find in the report is pretty interesting. You know, first
of all, there is great variance and happiness across cultures.
They do things with the World Happiness Report where they
rank the different countries in terms of their happiness, which
I think gets a lot of headlines but misses a
lot of the nuance. But when you do those rankings,
you often find that Scandinavian countries kind of kind of
out happiest, you know, Norway, Denmark, those are the ones
that are happy. But then countries that you might not
(17:50):
expect you know, so countries in South America, places like
Costa Rica and so on, tend to be a little
bit happier and so on, at least relative to the US.
And so often what you get from that is to say, Okay,
what are the happier countries doing a little bit differently?
And what you find is they're prioritizing some of the
same things you noticed about your kind of home life
back in the day, which is that like you're prioritizing
(18:11):
things like social connection. Family is you know, kind of
considered more valuable than work. When those two things come
into conflict, famili is always going to win out. People
are around other people more often, so there's much less loneliness,
much more social connection, and there's cultures that tend to
be happier, tend to be a little bit more on
the collective side, right. You know, you think of Scandinavian
countries and they have things like universal income and like
(18:33):
allowing to kind of help other people. Right. It's not
kind of like you live and die by your own
sort of hard work alone. Right. It takes a village
kind of approach rate, Yes, exactly. And so I think
when we start looking at those cultural differences. One thing
we can say is like, hang on, maybe the values
that we have in the US, this kind of super
individualism and capitalism at all costs, you know, maybe we're
(18:56):
kind of missing something that really does matter for our
actual happiness. And so I think these kinds of comparisons
across countries can be really powerful. I think another thing
we see in these comparisons across countries is that it's
not all about the individual happiness. Like, what's happening politically
obviously matters a lot, you know, So the equality of
a country seems to matter a lot. The trust that
(19:16):
people have in government matters a lot. That's actually one
of the reasons in the United States that we've dropped
a lot in our rankings of happiness is because there's
less and less trust in the political process, trust of
our fellow man, with all the political polarization we see
in the country. And so I think also these kind
of cultural comparisons make us realize, hang on, you know,
A lot of the strategies are about, well, hey, you
you know, you change your personal behaviors and your personal mindsets.
(19:39):
But also we need to think about the structural issues
that people face and the political issues that people face
if we really want everyone to be as happy as
they can.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Be, I want to cycle back to young folks. There's
so much to talk about when we think about gen
zs in terms of their politics. Right, they are looking
more and more towards their friends as being politically aligned
with them, moradly aligned with them, Right, So that's a
(20:10):
measure of how they choose friendships. How do you think
that redefines happiness for them? Because they are putting a
lot of pressure not just on themselves but on their
friends and friends of friends. And also how does social
media play into all of this. They think they are
not lonely because they are on social media and they're scrolling,
but then they're basically doom scrolling, right, It's like enragement
(20:34):
is equal to engagement kind of deal. What are some
of the things you're seeing, Laurie within that realm? And
what is your advice to any young person who's listening
to this podcast right now?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So I'll take the second one first, This idea of
you know, how is social media and our technology in
general honestly kind of affecting our happiness? You know, one
of the biggest predictors of people's happiness is our sense
of social connection, our sense of true social ties, having
people that you can count on, that you really care about,
and just being around other people in real life. You know,
in theory, social media and our technology, our phones in general,
we're supposed to help with that, right, We're supposed to
(21:07):
be able to, you know, even be more social connected.
That's why it's called social media. But I think by
and large, what these tools are doing is more disconnecting people,
at least in real life or especially in real time.
It turns out you don't necessarily need to connect in
real life to get the kind of social connection nutrition
that kind of comes with being with other people, but
you need to do it in real time. You know,
(21:27):
you and I are right now talking, you know, not
we're not in the same room, in the same studio.
We're talking across with the podcast software, and research shows
that's pretty good, right, because we're kind of you can
see each other's facial expressions, we're kind of talking in
real time. Doesn't work as much if you're just like
texting or posting, you know, a comment on someone's Instagram feed,
or you know, scrolling through TikTok videos or something that's
not as nutritious in terms of our psychology of what
(21:49):
we need for social connection. And so I think that
one of the biggest hits that people get from social
media is that it's just an opportunity cost on hanging
out with each other in real life. You know, how
often have you seen a group of young people are
honestly a group of adults for that matter, like sitting
around to dinner table and everybody's get there for you know,
they're with each other in real life, but they're not
connecting in real life because they're looking at their phones, right,
(22:10):
And so that's a big hit. I think social media
is also a big hit we know for young people
just in terms of their sleep. Making sure you're getting
the appropriate amount of good sleep is super important for
our mental health. And these days, what you find, as
many students claim when young people claim not to be
sleeping as much because like they're on their phones and
they're staying up late at night watching TikTok videos and
other kind of screen time things. So I think there's
(22:30):
lots of reasons our social media is hurting happiness generally,
and that hit on happiness is especially bad for young people.
But I think the loneliness hit that young people are
going through kind of gets to your first question about
kind of, you know, what's happening with young people kind
of feeling like it's harder to kind of connect with
people across the political divide. I think that's a generation
that's heading the most hit of the political polarization we're experiencing.
(22:54):
And I think that that winds up being really tricky
because it means that we're not kind of getting the
usual social connection we get. I think that people feel
really limited in the number of friends they can make
and who understands them and so on, and I think
that just contributes to the loneliness crisis that we're seeing
among young people today.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
You've talked about third spaces for younger people. How important
are those third spaces and whose responsibility is it to
build those government societies individuals.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So third spaces is a term that political scientists and
sociologists us to talk about places that are not your
home and not your work if you're an adult, that
you can be around people you know and hang out
with one another a lot, right, So I think of
in my youth, there were third spaces like the mall
we were in the nineties, you just go to the
mall and people would be at the mall and everyone
would see each other. It wasn't work. It wasn't you know,
(23:46):
a home or a school, but it was like a
place that I could go that I knew. I would
run into people that I knew who were my age
and similar like my did things. I think even when
I grew up in the nineties, there were less third
places than there were in the heyday of third places,
which is kind of in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
where you had lots of churches and lions clubs and
barbershops and just places where people got together all the time.
(24:08):
The joke is from that nineties TV show Cheers of like,
you know, the place where everybody knows your name, right,
that's kind of what you're going for with a good
third place. And the evidence really suggests that third places
have been going away from the nineteen fifties to now.
If you just plot the number of churches or bowling
leagues or barber shops, right, those things have gone down
over time to the point that our young people say,
you know, one of the reasons I don't get together
(24:29):
with other people is like, I have nowhere to go,
right We have to go somewhere where you spend money, right, Like,
It's kind of there's not these kind of free places
you can go to just be around other people as
often right now. And I think that, you know, the
evidence really suggests that that's a bummer. It's a bummer
for our loneliness. It's a bummer for our ability to
like connect across different kinds of people. If you're going
to your church, your barbershop, you're likely to see somebody
(24:50):
who like, maybe has a different background than you, or
maybe a different political belief than you, and so on.
I think we just get that less and less often.
We have less third places to kind of connect in
these you know, kind of comfortable, leisurely ways where we're
not really talking about politics, but it kind of comes
up in this sort of subtle way. And so without
those third places, I think we're becoming more lonely, more
politically polarized, and so on. In terms of who should
(25:12):
fix that, I think everybody should fix that. There's a
role that we have as individuals to create these spaces,
and I think we can do more than we often expect.
I have a friend here where I live in Massachusetts.
Who a while ago now it's kind of two decades
running started this thing that he calls Monday Movie Night,
and every Monday Movie Night, like he just invites a
bunch of people to come over and watch movies and
(25:32):
people make a kind of collective you know, kind of
healthy meal, like a big chili or something, and everybody
gets together. And it's really been so nice to be
part of this because it's just like every Monday, I
know there'll be people there, and you know, you can
kind of connect with these kind of interesting folks who
are doing stuff. And so I think there's there's a
way that we as individuals can set up our own
third places and really kind of put time into doing that,
(25:54):
making these spaces that. But there's also lots of sociological
research suggesting the power of governments being really involved and
creating third places right and just organizations kind of doing that.
Many of the most famous third places aren't ones that
are necessarily created by an individual, for like, you know,
a social group around their neighborhood, but by institutions, you know,
so things like the Lions Club or the NAACP or
(26:17):
the kind of communal barbershop or something like that.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Is there any such thing as a good argument anymore,
one with sharp perspectives, fair and tough questions that leaves
you free to come to your own conclusions. Thoughtful discussion
is missing almost everywhere in our lives, but you'll find
it on hear Me Out, Slate's new podcast. I'm your host,
Celeste Headley.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Each week, we'll.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Talk, we'll listen, and we'll ask the hard questions on
issues that matter. Every Tuesday on Slate's hear Me Out
with Celeste Heedley, Join us.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Lari, I want to talk a little bit about your
own relationship with happiness. You've talked about how people should
find happiness and little things. Do seek happiness or does
happiness come to you through activities that you're just generally doing?
Like is it a conscious mind seeking happiness or it
just comes organically to you?
Speaker 1 (27:21):
You know, if I've been having a rough week, one
thing that I often do is to say, Okay, how
can I get a little bit more social connection in,
Like which friend do I need to call this week?
Who do I need to see to kind of get
that social connection in? And so in some ways it's
both organic to certain activities that we engage in that
they feel good and boost our positive emotion and increase
our satisfaction with life. But if we're not getting those
kind of behaviors in naturally, we can really intentionally decide, hey,
(27:44):
I'm going to do this more often, and the consequence
usually is a boosted sense of well being.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
So recently, what is one thing that made you happy?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
At this lovely breakfast with this friend of mine from college?
And I had a really good like bagel sandwich, and
I took a moment to like savor like this is great,
like that bagel's really crunchy, Like just the act of
that paying attention, being a little bit more mindful in presence,
it can kind of boost your positive emotion and make
you experience things like gratitude, this sort of thankfulness for
having this interesting experience. And that's just a sort of
(28:14):
small retuning of our attention to pay attention to stuff
that feels nice, and then all of a sudden you
start feeling better.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Do you differentiate between being content and being happy? And
is happiness really a need or is it a want?
Speaker 1 (28:37):
When I think of happiness, I think of it as
kind of being almost like happiness with a capital age.
It's kind of equivalent to sort of living a good life,
living a happy life. And it has these kind of
two components. One is sort of an emotional component, where
it's kind of how you feel in your life, and
the second part is sort of a like thinking component,
like how you think your life is going. If you
kind of feel good in your life and think your
(28:57):
life is going well, you're living a happy life. This
term is sort of this kind of big capital age
term happiness is often equivalent to what like the old Ancients,
like Aristotle thought about when they thought about things like
you die minia, like the idea of a good life generally, right.
So that's kind of what I think about when I
use the term happiness. When I think of something like contentment,
I almost see that as like one of the positive
(29:19):
emotions that makes up happiness. Contentment is just the sense
that you're kind of at peace in life. It's a
kind of like low arousal, but really high positive state
like joy or surprise or sort of laughter might be
a kind of higher arousal, a high positive state, whereas
contentment's like low arousal. You're just chilling and everything's fine,
but things feel good when you sort of reflect on
(29:39):
how they feel. And so the way I think of
the connection between the two is contentment is an important
but one of many important emotions that you want to
get in to sort of have a happy life, to
have you diamondia or a good life.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Laurie, I wonder if other emotions, like grief and loss
inform people's happiness differently. People who've experienced, say, grief or
loss look at happiness differently than people who haven't. Have
you seen that in your studies?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Definitely. There's a lot of work on a topic that
researchers called post traumatic growth. You know, so many of
us have heard this term post traumatic stress. You go
through some terrible, stressful period and you have these consequences,
you know, high arousal, high anxiety, and things later on.
But post traumatic growth are cases where you go through
something terrible, you go through loss, and you go through grief,
but on the other side, you experience like a sense
(30:29):
of growth, right, Like it's not something that you choose
and you know it sucked, and it's like worth recognizing
the bad part of it. But like on the other side,
people self report feeling a deeper sense of connection, a
deeper sense of spirituality, you know what is meaningful in life,
you're a deeper sense of purpose and kind of a
deeper sense that you can sort of go through things.
I think this term resilience, as I know you've talked
(30:51):
about in your podcast, is a really really complicated one.
But people who've gone through to the other side often say,
I know what I'm capable of now again, I wouldn't
have chosen that. You know, it's awful, but like, I
feel like I've grown and I'm stronger on the other side.
This is what post traumatic growth is. And I think
one of the cool things about the research on post
traumatic growth is it shows that that kind of like
(31:12):
positive thing that you get at the end had to
come through the struggle. It had to come through the
dark times and so on. And I think this gets
to a misconception that we have about positive emotions. I think,
you know, one big misconception I see when people come
to my work and happiness is they kind of embrace
this sort of toxic positivity approach that you know, a
good life, this happy life is positive emotion all the time.
(31:32):
But when you look at the science, what you find
is like that's not true. A good life involves some anxiety,
involves some loss, It involves some grief, It involves some frustration,
some justified anger. Right. The way you get to a
good life is to not just have these negative emotions,
but really learn from them and push through them to
see like how they're teachers and so. I think this
is another misconception we have, just like oh, money and
(31:54):
successes matters for happiness. I think people think a happy
life has none of the bad stuff, But a happy
life includes the bad stuff. The bad stuff is really
important for getting us to kind of grow and become,
you know, the people we really want to become someday.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
You're absolutely right, and bad stuff is part of human existence, right.
We experienced so many different emotions throughout our lives. How
can we disregard the bad the ugly stuff, because that
makes up who we are. Do you think being attention
to the present also matches because a lot of times
we look at the past and then we look at
(32:28):
the future. Yesterday I had an argument with my husband.
I went to bed a little angry. I woke up
in the morning. I wasn't thinking about it, but it
was part of my subconscious self, and then my husband
and I talked and we were like, okay, now we're fine,
and it changed my mood. How do I start thinking
about today in this moment?
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Well, it takes some work, right, I mean, I think
we have brains that are just built to kind of
mind wander. Can I think about the past, think about
the future, we're anywhere about the present. But there are
techniques and you can use to get better about being
more present. One is a technique that's just called savoring,
which is just what it sounds like. That was kind
of what I was doing with my big old this morning.
We're just like what does this taste like? What does
(33:10):
this feel like? How would I describe this? You just
like become force yourself to become curious about whatever is
going on in the moment. And interestingly, that includes when
things are bad. One way that we can get through
bad emotions like grief or anxiety is to really pay attention, like, Okay,
how does this feel like? My chest is heavy?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Like?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You know, my phase feels tight? Right? Like I feel
like I have pressure like pushing on me.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
When you really kind of get to know and be
present with those negative emotions, that can actually help you
feel better, So.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Being super aware of negative emotions or positive emotions for
that matter.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean I think we
just kind of don't notice our experience right kind of,
and that means we don't really get to learn from
it or get to really feel it.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
In some ways, that's really kind of sad, right, that
we're sort of fast forwarding our life or rewinding our
life and never kind of just playing it right there.
So I think, yeah, so savoring and just kind of
being part of the present moment is powerful. But but
then a second technique we know works from the researchers.
You know, so many spiritual techniques for kind of being
a little bit more present. So practices like meditation or prayer,
all these practices where you really kind of pay attention,
(34:14):
you know, to a particular mantra or you know a
particular set of words and so on. Like those rituals
the research shows can really build up your presence over time,
particularly practices like meditation where the practice is really all
about intentionally noticing the present moment without judgment. Those kinds
of practices over time like literally change your brain. You
literally change the amount of gray matter in your brain,
(34:35):
even if you just start meditating as a novice.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
I'm glad you mentioned spirituality. I feel like spirituality is
almost frowned upon. When I'm feeling lolow or when I'm
feeling anxious, I do pray and it calms me down.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
There's actually lots of research, you know, studying kind of
happiness in people of different religious faiths and religious backgrounds,
and one of the clear patterns suggests that religious individuals
tend to be happier. It seems like that happiness, though,
comes a lot from religious practices. So it comes from
the not the belief part, but the prayer part, the rituals.
The rituals exactly go to services, right, you know, taking
(35:11):
time off, whether it's a sabbath or whatever. Right. And
what's interesting is it kind of doesn't matter which religion
it is. You see booths of happiness in people of
Muslim faith or Buddhist faith, or Catholic or you know,
Jewish faith all over the board. It kind of doesn't
matter what rituals you're doing. It's just that you have
rituals that give you a sense of connection to something
bigger than you that seem to matter. And so you know,
I think as we you know, become a more secular society,
(35:33):
at least especially here in the US, in some ways
we do that at our peril, right, we're missing out
on a real path to happiness. That doesn't necessarily mean
that you have to become religious, but it means that
if you're not getting your sense of purpose and connection
from religious faith, you might in those rituals, you might
need to find other rituals and other ways to get
a sense of purpose.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
What are some of the other rituals that you've seen
people follow to the place religion.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
There's a great kind of religious scholar, Casper Turkyle. He
also has a fabulous podcast who's actually been doing work
on these kind of other traditions that look a lot
like faith traditions. For example, Well, he writes a lot
about CrossFit, which sounds kind of funny, but it's like,
you know, people go every week and it becomes a
third place, and it becomes something that you know, you
have a whole set of values and meaning. It becomes
(36:20):
a spot where people wind up doing things for each other.
You know. He talks about these cases of you know,
somebody in your CrossFit group gets sick and everybody rallies
and you know, makes food for them and things like that.
And so what he finds is that you can sometimes
get these other organizations that work a lot, like faith traditions,
that have a lot of the same obviously not all
of the same benefits, but some of the same benefits.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
That's so fascinating.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
As humans get creative, we can come up with lots
of versions that work that way.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
On a scale of zero to ten, how happy are
you in the all life?
Speaker 1 (36:56):
And why, Well, I'm usually around like a seven or eight,
And I think I wasn't that way before. I think
I'm at a seven or an eight, in part because
I do engage in all these practices a lot. My
instinct is not to in the age in as much
social connection. I'm really not a present person. I'm much
more RUMINATIV and stuff like. But I think as I've
studied this more and more, I've recognized how important it
(37:17):
is to act this stuff like happiness is possible, but
it takes work. It's just like having a fit body, right, Like,
you know, like it's possible to eat healthy and go
to the gym all the time and move your body,
but you got to put some work in. My analogy
is that happiness works just like that, like you can
do it, but it takes kind of constant work and
constant practice. And that's the thing I think too, is
that it's just like my colleague Nick Eppley is fond
(37:39):
of saying that happiness is like a leaky tire. You know,
It's like you're happy, but then it kind of goes
down and you have to do something to pump it up.
And so remembering that your mental health is something that
takes kind of constant work has been helpful for me
because it's really allowed me to put that work in
and the act of doing that has made me happier.
So I'd say, yeah, I'm like a seven and a
half eight out of on a ten point happiness scale.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Give me one habit that people should make part of
their lives to feel happier.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Another great one that I think we haven't talked about
yet is the act of feeling a little bit grateful.
This is a mindset shift that this science shows because
really powerful we're real complainers, and I think we become
complaining socially. Like I use the analogy you know last time,
you you know, hung out with a friend, like the asked,
how's it going. Did you immediately list all the blessings
in life, like if you're in this s us probably no,
(38:36):
you listed, like you know, all the things that are
going wrong. You didn't talk about any of your coworkers
that you adore. You talked about the one coworker that
like gets on your last nerve and like you know,
and in general, we have this bias, I think universally
of us, even more so in the United States, towards
what you might call undersociality, Like we just don't realize
the happiness benefits of being social, whether that's expressing our
(38:57):
gratitude to other people, complimenting other people, trying to help
other people. We just don't realize how much these kind
of little social mindset shifts matter so much for making
us feel better.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
When you mentioned grateful, my mind just went to what
my mother says. My parents live in Pakistan and I
talk to them very often. And every time I talk
to my mom and if I'm feeling low, obviously she
knows and she always says this to me. She's like,
be grateful for what you have. Just say it verbally,
how grateful you are for all that you have, and
(39:30):
I always brush it off, Laurie, I don't pay attention.
And I'm like, yeah, how will that make a difference
in my life? Just saying I am grateful for X
y Z things. And now when you mentioned it, maybe
that's a mantra, that's a ritual that I should probably
incorporate in my daily life, right, just getting up in
the morning and saying I am grateful for X y
(39:53):
Z and then starting my day.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like your mom's reading the studies,
because like literally there's literally a study where you have
people scribble down three to five things are grateful for
every day in the morning or in the evening. And
what you find is it within two weeks, people statistically
report higher subject well being a high level of happiness
after that. So, like it's just this simple act. And
it's because one of the problems is like we have
(40:15):
this mind that's built to be very negative. You know,
it made sense in our back in the day to
like notice the bad stuff so we could kind of
fix it. But that means that there's good stuff in
our lives that we've kind of just gotten used to.
We're not getting the kind of happiness benefit from all
those good things because we don't take time to notice it.
And yeah, the studies show that just the act of
what your mom is saying, just take time to notice
it every morning. Now, all of a sudden, you're kind
(40:37):
of paying attention and you can kind of get the
emotional rewards that come from the good stuff in your
life that you otherwise would have just taken for granted.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
So do you think our brain is conditioned to look
at the negative only, or at least for the most part,
so we are almost fighting against it to achieve happiness.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Definitely. I mean, I think there's lots of evidence for
a negativity bias. There's even evidence that like three month
old and five month old babies are more likely to
pay attention if you show them a scene of something negative.
They kind of lock onto the negative stuff. So it
seems like we have this bias, and it seems like
it emerges really early. The good news is that you
can train your brain away from that. Right, This is
what I think think is what the gratitude practice that
(41:17):
your mother was talking about can be so powerful. Right,
you just force yourself to notice the good stuff, so
you kind of push against this natural tendency, and I
think that's the case in so many aspects of our lives.
You know, I think we use the fitness analogy before,
but I think it's similar, right, Like, I don't know
about your general take, but my general take would be
to like eat unhealthy stuff. I'm not like a kind
of physically minded person. My instinct would be to stay
(41:38):
on the couch and not push myself. Right, those are
our natural instincts. But of course we can push past
those natural instincts, and we need to if we want
to be a little healthier. And I think the same
is true for our happiness. We have this natural negativity
bias that might even be innate, but with a little practice,
we can move past it.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
In the end, Laurie, if you were to describe the
United States of America in the context of happiness, how
would you do that?
Speaker 1 (42:07):
I think I would describe it Unfortunately, is going down
right now. And that's really what these recent data from
the World Happiness Report show is that overall the happiness
in the United States has been going down. We've dropped
out of the top twenty in the world for the
first time ever since the World Happiness Report has started,
and sadly a lot of that increased unhappiness is because
(42:28):
of young people, is because young people are feeling so
depressed and so anxious, and so I think the way
I would describe it is the United States isn't doing
very well. But in that challenge, we really have an opportunity.
This is a real opportunity. We have to kind of
follow what the science show is and our behaviors in
our mindsets to feel happier.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Lottie, thank you so much for coming on immigrantly. As
I said, you are a superstar. A lot of people
love you, and I am so glad that you're doing
what you're doing because we all need the Happiness Lab
podcast in our lives to feel happier. But thank you
so much. This was wonderful, such.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
A great time. Thanks so much for having me on
the show.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
I'm so glad I got to talk to Laurie. I've
been listening to the Happiness Lab for I don't know
how long. This was such an important, fun, introspective conversation.
And here's what I want all of you to do.
On a scale of zero to ten ate your happiness.
How happy are you in life and what makes you happy.
(43:35):
I really think doing these exercises, being intentional about how
happy we are, how grateful we are, probably makes us happier,
and if not, it at least gives us a pathway
to work towards happiness. This podcast was produced by Me
Sally Ahhn, written by Ramier Harris and Me. The editorial
(43:59):
review is done by Shay yu Are, sound designer and
editor is Haik and Mudfarid. The music for Immigrantly is
done by Simon Hutchinson. Come back next week when I
have another incredible guest, and try to be happy
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