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Pam King: Science can change your life. The more we study what makes people develop, grow, learn, and flourish, the more we see how the practical application of scientific findings can help us transform our life and experience into a life of value, meaning, purpose, and true thriving.
Yale psychologist Dr. Laurie Santos has spent her career investigating the human brain and how it thrives. From her popular Yale course to her podcast, The Happiness Lab, she’s communicating actionable and hopeful lessons for how to build lasting habits, cultivate self compassion, manage complex emotions, and realign our lives toward meaningful happiness
Laurie Santos: Some of these factors that we know scientifically do work. From simple behavior changes like being more social, doing nice things for others, just healthy habits like sleeping and moving your body to mindset shifts, to becoming a little bit more present, to becoming more other oriented, to becoming more grateful, more self compassionate, and so on. There are shifts that we can make that can have a huge effect on how we actually interact in the world.
We need to understand that we’re not perfect, we’re just human. and we will mess up a little bit too. But it’s really the journey that matters.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to With & For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance toward spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
Pam King: With me today to discuss the transformative science that can improve our personal and communal well being is Dr. Laurie Santos.
Laurie is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. In addition to her work on the evolutionary origins of human cognition, Laurie is an expert on the science of happiness and the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. Her Yale course, Psychology in the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling.
The class became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of four students enrolled in it. Her course has been featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate, and O Magazine.
The online version of the class, The Science of Well Being, will on Coursera. org has attracted more than 4 million learners from around the world. She was recently voted one of Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10 Young Minds and was named in Time Magazine as a Leading Campus Celebrity.
Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, is a top three Apple podcast, which has attracted A hundred plus million downloads since its launch.
You can find the Happiness Lab, Laurie’s courses, writings, and other resources on our website, drlaurysantos. com, which of course you’ll find linked in our show notes.
In this conversation with Laurie Santos, we discuss
how the mental health crisis affecting young people changed her, and how she teaches psychology,
how our brains lie to us,
the role of positive and negative emotions in a good life,
how feeling good can lead to doing good, The psychological and relational benefits of Faith and Spirituality.
And she offers practical insights, science backed guidance, and powerful exercises for managing misalignment and difficult emotions.
Laurie, welcome to the With For podcast.
Laurie Santos: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Pam King: it’s great to have you here. Um, just such a fan and so excited to have the opportunity to share your immense wisdom.
You have such a substantial track record. You have had impact on so many people directly through your teaching at Yale, through your research and obviously through your happiness lab podcast and courses online.
I’m really curious what your work means for you today.
Laurie Santos: Oh, I think it means so many things. I mean, one of the things I get enormous meaning and purpose from is the fact that I get to communicate the science of psychology and it helps people, right? Especially the sort of research on the science of happiness. I constantly get emails and physical letters, which is so old school, but so touching physical letters from listeners who’ve, put these tips that I talk about on the show into practice and they say it’s changed their lives.
And that is just so incredibly meaningful and just gives me just so much purpose every day. but in addition, being the kind of person who knows about this work, I really feel like I have this like important idea that I have to practice what I preach. Like it’s this very the mission driven approach means that I have to be following the mission too.
And that means I’m constantly doing a little soul searching myself to try to think about if I’m putting these practices into effect in the best way possible, and by really living up to what I’m telling everybody else to live up to too. And that’s meant something different, which meant that, I mean, as you might expect from putting these things into practice, it’s meant that I’ve.
and living a much happier life too, as I sort of think more about the strategies that I’m telling everybody else to use to be happier. When I put those strategies into effect myself, it winds up making me happier. And so, yeah, it’s been this incredible journey, but, but one that’s given me a whole sense of meaning and purpose and has made me a lot happier.
Pam King: Well before the COVID 19 pandemic, Laurie Santos began observing in her students some of the emerging trends in declining mental health among young people. It was happening everywhere, but it was alarming for her to see the disparity between her students brilliance and intellectual potential and their deteriorating sense of personal well being.
Laurie Santos: So I’ve been a practicing, academic psychologist for a long time. I’ve been teaching at Yale for over two decades, which makes me feel very old. I must’ve started when I was like eight or nine years old, but, um, but, uh, but, but, but,But the journey to sort of thinking about the science of happiness took place when I took on this new role at Yale College, when I became what’s called the head of college,
Um, it’s, it’s really a faculty position where you live on campus with students and interact with them. And that was a position that really changed my life because it meant that I was a sort of. Kind of benevolent aunt to this lovely community of amazing undergraduates. But it was in that role where I really saw how much many students were struggling.
I really saw the sort of college student mental health crisis, like much more up close and personal than I was expecting. And. And that was really devastating to see this community that I cared about suffering so much, where so many students were experiencing, panic attacks, suicidality, or even just like the normal levels of stress that an Ivy League student goes through.
And it was like, it was just in that role that I started realizing that. I as a leader and as someone that students looked up to needed to be doing a better job too, that I needed to be prioritizing my own mental health and my own happiness.
And so I think that story is important because I think it just shows that it can be hard to take care of ourselves. And I think when you have a mandate that you’re taking care of yourselves, because when you take care of yourself, that helps other people, it can in some ways make it easier to really focus on your own self improvement and your own development.
Pam King: Absolutely. Do you remember approximately what year that was when you started having that aha that things have to be different?
Laurie Santos: Yeah. So I started the role in 2016 and then had my sort of aha moment, through 2016, 2017, I first taught the course in, in the summer. It’s the fall, spring semester of 2018, when honestly, I think it was sort of prescient to be thinking about mental health. I mean, in spring of 2018, we did not know what was coming for us with the COVID 19 pandemic.
Like we didn’t see how many changes were afoot in so many aspects of society. Right. And so it was great to be thinking about it then, but I think this work has only gotten more relevant over time.
Pam King: Here we are fast forward about Gosh, eight years already since you started that. And would you observe that the trends are the same in your classroom?
Are they worse because of COVID? Gen Z issues? where are you seeing the mental health crisis with young people
Laurie Santos: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, I wish there were better news here, but I think this is a spot where things really have gotten worse. the general trends in terms of students, like mental health, have been going down even long before COVID. Honestly, since, things like 2007, 2008, you just see a kind of precipitous decline.
And that. That slope got worse during covid 19. you know, right now, nationally, more than 40 percent of college students report being too depressed to function most days, over 60 percent say that they’re overwhelmingly anxious. More than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months.
Like that the. The findings are pretty shocking and they are all getting worse and you know that raises an interesting question which is like what’s going on and I wish there was like one causal factor because then we could just fix that causal factor and we’d be done with it but you know I think it’s a little bit of many things.
I think students are, Facing more academic pressures than they ever have been right. I think there’s sort of economic pressures that young people are facing in a different way. I think the world has scary factors that have just gotten worse in terms of things like the climate and political polarization and what have you.
I also think that student anxieties have been provoked by technology, really buy into some of the work of scholars like Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge, who’ve really pointed to the problems of technology and social media. and I think that, students have lost in some ways this idea that they should be, thriving with a sense of purpose, with a sense of spiritual passions, right?
It’s all about their kind of individual success. And I think that means students are missing something. So I think it’s a bunch of factors at once, but yeah, those stats have just been getting worse over time. And even since I taught the class for the first time in 2018.
Pam King: Really people are suffering at all stages of the lifespan.
so. And I so appreciate that you are doing such constructive and positive work, both upstream and so that people can cultivate healthy habits that may prevent them from diving into the deeper waters of depression or more severe mental health issues, and also offering interventions that at least people.
Before they get clinically too in deep are able to find agency and take action in their own lives
Laurie Santos: yeah, totally. I mean, one of the, Things I often like to point out is that, over a thousand students took my class the first time I taught it on Yale’s campus. But, that first class was not the first time that students were thinking about what they could do to feel happier, improve, or feel better, or feel less stressed, right?
I think all of us have been pursuing happiness, maybe as long as we’ve been a human being. Species like we’ve cared about pursuing happiness and wanting to feel good. And I think the problem is that many of us are going about it the wrong way. We’re putting in tons of effort, but we’re going after the wrong things.
You don’t take my Yale students who spend a lot of time focused on their own individual accolades, their grades, the kind of what they’re going to do after this sort of focused on the future. It’s not to say that those things are. are bad for happiness, but they’re often pursued at the expense of things that we know the research shows us really do matter for happiness.
So things like a sense of social connection and doing nice things for others, a sense of deeper purpose and meaning that comes from bigger pursuits than yourself, right? These are the kinds of things we know from the research really do map onto our happiness. And so I think it’s not so much that. we don’t have any hypotheses about the kinds of things we should be doing to feel happier.
I think many of us have very strong ideas, but the research shows that those ideas are incorrect. And we wind up pursuing those incorrect ideas about what we can do to flourish at that opportunity cost of the things that will really make us flourish. Now that raises a question of like, how do we fix this?
I think it would be great if there was some hack we could do to change our intuitions. But as someone who’s been studying this now for a while, I can say that, unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to work, right? Like my intuitions are the same as everybody else’s, like, you know, if I hit the lottery tomorrow, I’d be happier if I want my podcast numbers to go up, whatever accolade you want to pick, it’s oh, if I got that, I would feel happier, but I know.
from the research at a meta level that’s just like simply not true. And so I think that’s important because I’m not sure it’s fully easy to change our intuitions. I feel like my first response is always Oh, that’ll work. But Oh, I can sort of update that once I know the research and that gets to what the strategy is to do better.
It’s to, I think, to really understand, you know, some of these factors that we know scientifically do work from simple behavior changes that I think we’ll talk about things like being more social, doing nice things for others, just healthy habits like sleeping and moving your body to mindset shifts, to becoming a little bit more present, to becoming more other oriented, to becoming more grateful, right?
More self compassionate and so on. So I think that there are shifts that we can make that don’t necessarily change the underlying intuitions, but that can have a huge effect on how we actually interact in the world. In Laurie’s teaching at Yale, her online courses, speaking, and especially her podcast, it’s all marked by one very clear message that resonates so deeply with me. Science can change your life, or at least the application of it can. well, I feel like I’ve always been nerdy. I’ve always liked science, you know, even in high school and so on. But,you know, when I, when it comes to human behavior, I feel like, this is the path that really helps us. I think we can get a lot of insight from looking to spiritual traditions or looking for research and so on.
And sometimes those traditions are spot on, maybe they were faster and earlier spot on than even some of the scientific research that came out later. but sometimes those traditions are wrong. And I really think that the empirical research can help us make sure that what we’re saying we should practice actually works, that we’re not just dealing in platitudes, that we really are looking at factors that, that work.
Pam King: As a professor of psychology in the Good Life and the host of the Happiness Lab, I was eager to hear how Laurie defines happiness. The fact is, happiness is hard to define. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that happiness,
or he would have said. Eudaimonia.
Literally, good spirit or well being.
is what everyone wants, but no one can define. Or at least no one agrees exactly what it is.
That’s still true today, but I love exposing myself. To the collective wisdom of scientists and sages. So I asked Laurie what she means when she talks about happiness, thriving, and the good life.
From your perspective, cause I know you have a very rich and thick understanding of happiness.
What is happiness to you from a conceptual perspective?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, we could spend a very long time in this podcast talking through those definitions. I mean, so I nerdily use the social scientist definition, which I think of as happiness is sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. Or it’s what, subjective wellbeing researchers call the affective and the cognitive part of subjective wellbeing.
So being happy in your life is the sort of affective part. It’s how you feel your life is right. it’s. perhaps you could best think of it as the ratio between your positive and negative emotions. You want to have a decent ratio. It’s not, no negative emotions. And we might talk about this, that good life and flourishing really involves some negative emotions, but hopefully you have a decent ratio of the positive stuff, the joy and the contentment and the laughter to the negative stuff, the anxiety and the frustration and so on.
that’s being happy in your life, this affect that you have. But I also think happiness has a cognitive component. Which is sort of how you think your life is going. It’s the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? And I think the best case scenario is you make people feel good in their life and with their life.
And it’s worth remembering that they don’t always go together, right? We can think of times when we’ve been doing a project that gives us a lot of meaning and makes us think our life is going well, but it’s really frustrating and there’s failure involved or, it’s just not going well in terms of things in our lives.
And I think we all, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves, know of people who Maybe have every hedonic pleasure in life. lots of positive emotions, but maybe feel their life is empty or they don’t think their life is going well. And so best case scenario is you bump both of those two traits up, the affective part and the cognitive part.
Pam King: a psychologist’s perspective, why is this important to be happy?
Laurie Santos: I think, I think for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, obviously it feels good, right? It’s just better to live a life where you’re experiencing lots of positive emotion and feel like your life is going well, then the contrary. I think we also know from lots of work that feeling good helps us to Do more good.
This is what researchers have referred to as the feel good, do good effect. the more you’re in a good mood, the more you’re feeling like life is going well, the easier it is for you to contribute positively in the world. and I think this one is particularly important. I sometimes meet with students who will.
ask this hard question of yeah, I look out in the world and I feel like there’s lots of stuff that’s going really badly. like the, there’s wars in the world and now climate’s all messed up. And like, how dare I experience happiness in the face of these things? Isn’t it normative to be upset and anxious and angry at what’s going on in the world?
and my answer to that is if your goal is to sort of change some of those systemic problems, you could ask the question, what psychological states allow you to do that best? And researchers have looked at this. In fact, there’s some lovely work coming out of Constantine Kushleff’s lab on this, where he just asked the question, who’s out there doing the stuff to fix all the problems, right?
take the work in climate, who’s out there engaging in climate solutions, putting solar panels on your house or going to a march or donating money. And what he finds is that. It tends to be the people who self report having the strongest levels of mental health, right?
The folks that are self reporting being depressed and anxious, they don’t have the bandwidth to be making changes in the world. And that’s true, whether it’s for a climate action or social justice, name your cause, like you’re just not going to be able to really participate in it. If. You just don’t have the bandwidth to get out of bed because you’re feeling too depressed and anxious.
And so one of my replies to why happiness is so important is that our individual happiness winds up being very relevant. I think more than we expect to societal happiness, it gives us the bandwidth to do the good work that we need to be doing in the world.
Pam King: Laurie’s commitment to her students and developing a community centered around happiness in the good life reveals something interesting to me about how psychological science can be leveraged to help people. But not just helping in the sense of utility and efficiency and enabling people to get whatever they want. In identifying a conception of happiness, flourishing, and thriving as the standard or goal or purpose of what I believe are created for, this offers a beautiful vision for personal growth A question that I ask all of my guests is what is thriving mean to you?
Laurie Santos: Yeah. So I think thriving is engaging in the behavior and mindset changes that you need to experience flourishing in your life, and ideally doing that in a way that’s nonjudgmental and has some self compassion for the times when you fail at doing that really well.
Pam King: That’s really profound. I’d love you to say a little bit more about that for our listeners who may not be is it’s familiar with like mindset and mindfulness and not judgmental. Like how is that? Why can’t I be judgmental and self critical and try and make myself better?
Laurie Santos: yeah. the mindset shifts I’m thinking about are things like, finding ways to be a little bit more present in the world. You’re noticing and sensing the world around you attitude shifts, like engaging in a bit more gratitude, right? So that you really are appreciating the good things in life, noticing the blessings that you have.
These are the kinds of attitude and sort of mindset shifts that I think researchers talk about as being relevant for happiness, but. Sometimes when we strive to feel happier, it can be challenging to do that, right? We’re all walking around as we’ve talked about with these misconceptions about the kinds of things we think are going to make us happy, but don’t.
So inevitably, when you embark on some self improvement project, you’re probably not going to get it right. You’re probably going to mess some things up. And often our instinct, because our instincts are really bad, is to kind ofbeat ourselves up. When we’re going through that, right? We kind of, you know, self flagellate for not being the perfect self improvement specimen, and that’s why I think that we need to engage in these kind of practices of trying to behave better and develop better mindsets with what I’m calling non judgment, right?
You’re just allowing the process to go as it’s going to go. and with some self compassion. So you treat yourself like a friend. If your friend were engaged in some self improvement practice, This and messed up a little bit. Hopefully you wouldn’t scream at your friend or talk to them like a drill instructor.
You’d probably get curious and try to problem solve with them and figure out how they could do it better. And this is basically the mindset that I think we need to take to our own self-improvement. We need to understand that we’re not perfect, we’re just human. and we will mess up a little bit too.
But it’s really the journey that matters.
Pam King: No, so, so appreciate that. one of the things that piqued my curiosity when you talked about, thriving enables us to flourish, and in your comments previously about when people attend to their own happiness, that has so much impact on social. being as well. that my understanding of thriving is not just about our individual change and growth, but it enables us to contribute, and give back to the common good.
So just so very aligned with that. And I think people often overlook the fact that their personal well being and happiness is part of their journey of contributing and making a difference and that does not need to exclude each other.
Laurie Santos: Yeah. And I think that, we get confused about, is it our happiness? Is it other people’s happiness? But, all the studies really suggest what we’re doing when we invest in our wellbeing, because it’s, as we’ve just talked about affecting other people’s wellbeing positively to affecting our ability to contribute to the community.
Like ultimately what we’re doing is we’re, growing the pie, so it’s hard to talk about, it’s flourishing for everybody and at all levels when we’re doing it right, uh, which is great. I mean, there are lots of things about the mind as we’ve talked about that, I don’t it’s stupid that we have these misconceptions, but it didn’t need to be the case that our own personal moments of thriving came with structural thriving for everyone and societal thriving and community thriving.
It’s so awesome that it did. It’s so awesome that me focusing on my own gratitude and getting my own sleep and my own social connection and self care is going to wind up having positive consequences for the people around me. You could imagine that there was like a zero sum game in terms of our happiness, that me investing in my own happiness was inadvertently or unintentionally screwing over the other people around me.
I don’t know. That’s just not how the mind works. That’s just not how wellbeing works. It, when we invest in ourselves, we wind up investing more broadly in the people we care about too. Yeah.
Pam King: say. being starts with we, not I. And I think in my own life, one of the first times that rubber really hit the road when I was a mom of an infant. And like my sleep, you lose sleep because you have a newborn baby. Obviously it makes sleep challenging. But the rub is you’re a lot less of an effective parent when you have less sleep.
And so you’re trying to weigh the I need to tend to you, but I also need to get to sleep
Laurie Santos: I think, we have to be reminded, even on a plane in an emergency when the plane’s going down to put our own oxygen mask on first. And I think it’s sort of in some ways beautiful and telling that, they have to officially put this in the FAA policy to tell us, Hey, just take care of yourself before taking care of other people.
But, you know, that’s because if we can’t breathe, we can’t,help others in a dangerous emergency. And I think that’s just generally true in our mental health more broadly.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Pam King: The effort to improve and be productive, transform your life, pursue excellence, and success. There’s an unhealthy mindset that lurks behind a facade of health, wellness, and thriving. The fact is, burnout is real. And Laurie’s own experience with burnout and her
response of rest, reinvestment in her personal health,
. And the self awareness and humility that required offers an important example for what it means to pursue change in a healthy way
Pam King: I was just so impressed to read that a couple years ago, you were like, Hey, I’m recognizing signs of burnout in my own life. you’re working above and beyond and have enough knowledge and commitment to self care to say, I’m going to need to take a bit of a break from some of these activities.
Could you share a bit about that decision making process and how that worked out for you? Sure.
Laurie Santos: Yeah. Yeah. this was, you know,midway through the beginning of the pandemic, think September, October of 2020 when, I think a lot of us were feeling it, but especially with boots on the ground, running a residential college, at Yale, I was really feeling it.
Right. we had just unceremoniously kicked out this community that I’d spent years building up and trying to make great. I was getting so much meaning and purpose out of building this community that I was proud of. And it was like, Nope, go home. It’s like too dangerous. then we brought them back to a much reduced college experience where there was no, Sports games or acapella or parties or anything really there wasn’t even classes.
You just sort of watch on zoom screens you know your favorite lecture there wasn’t even a dining hall You just sort of show up and get a little box to go back to your room to eat by yourself And in this role where i’d really created so much of my identity around giving students a great experience It was really very little I could do to give them the kind of experience that I wanted to be able to give them.
And that kind of mismatch between your values and what you’re able to accomplish is one of the main early seeds of burnout. that plus things like a high workload, which was happening, I was running the college, doing my podcast, teaching my class, going on speaking gigs. it was just a lot at once.
And as you mentioned, just started to see the classic clinical signs of burnout, which if you don’t know them are the thing we often associate with burnout, which is a sense of like emotional exhaustion. Again, not physical exhaustion, but just like emotionally, you can’t even, you know, you take a break and 901 on Monday morning, you’re already feeling like too overwhelmed to get back to work.
Right. there’s also a sense of what, Researchers like Christina Maslach have called a sense of personal ineffectiveness. This idea that even if you were doing your job perfectly, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t really match your values. I was experiencing this as in my head of college role, as I mentioned, but this is a kind of classic thing you see, for example, in the medical profession where people burn out, where it’s like, You got into the medical profession to help people’s, help people live healthier lives and help people heal.
But like you’re signing off on insurance for doing all this stuff that feels like, ah, even if I did this part, it wouldn’t be what my core mission is. That’s a sense of personal ineffectiveness. But the most insidious symptom for me was what researchers like Maslach call a sense of depersonalization, which is functionally cynicism.
Like the people that are in your care are just. Getting on your every last nerve, to the point that you’re interpreting all their behaviors with the worst possible intentions. And, you know, I recognize all these classic signs of burnout and. and decided that like the only way to fix this is really to take some time off. You know, Maslach and others have talked about burnout as being not just an individual problem, but really an interaction between your workplace and your expectations about the workplace.
And so the real way to fix burnout is to take a break. And so as Absolutely inconvenient as it was for me to towards the end of this pandemic when things were finally getting back to normal to say, Hey, I need to walk away from this role that I care about so much and take a break. I realized it was essential I realized it just wasn’t going to get better until I, I stepped away.
I think it’s important for people to recognize, look, anyone, no matter your background, you’re going to go through. stressors, right? And those stressors naturally have certain consequences on our psychology.
The question is how you handle it, how you devote resources to fix it. And the resource I needed at that point was, time off and hard as it was, I was able to take it. Now, the one thing I often add to that story is I was incredibly privileged to be able to do that. there’s a lot of people who are burning out terribly and don’t have the privilege I did to like, Oh, I’ll just step away from my job for a year and come back when I’m feeling better.
and I think that’s, something we need to think about structural changes that we might need in workplaces to allow people to do that more easily.
and, you know, so much of the recent research on this stuff suggests that You wind up getting employees that perform better when you take into account their need for rest. If you can, for example, reduce everyone’s workload, make these values better match what people got into things for, ultimately you’ll get workers who work much better, you know?
And so
We often think about, well, you know, forget people, sabbaticals or a four day work week or give people time to rest that, we’d lose out on the bottom line and more and more. I think we’re seeing just study after study suggesting no, these things are actually much more in harmony than we think.
Like we can give people time off and actually increase the bottom line by making folks happier at work. And so, yeah. I think more and more of the business world is going to come around to this idea that these things are not in conflict. You actually have to pay attention to people’s happiness at work to get folks being productive at work too.
Pam King: From early on in Laurie’s podcast, The Happiness Lab, she was exploring ancient wisdom through the lens of contemporary science.
That meant looking at very old spiritual practices such as forgiveness, gratitude, Fasting, Sabbath, awe and wonder, and communal gathering, and holding them up to the light of empirical psychology.
The results suggest that religion and spirituality significantly connect with an increased sense of personal well being and evidence of widespread social and communal benefits
I’m a developmental psychologist and much of my research has been looked at what is thriving from different cultural perspectives, what are these positive outcomes, but also what is the role of spirituality and religion in promoting positive resources, psychological resources for people.
And I know that’s something that you’ve written on, but I’d love to hear from your perspective, like what is healthy spirituality or potentially healthy religion. You made a comment earlier, which I absolutely appreciate, doesn’t always go well for people, but what are the potential resources for spiritual health
Laurie Santos: well, I think it’s worth looking at the data, right? Which often in positive psychology involves asking the question, you know, what are very happy people doing? You find people who self report being very happy and you can look at their characteristics. And one of the things you often find when you do this work is that people who self report being happy are often very religious.
or put differently people who self report being very religious are often statistically happier than folks who don’t necessarily identify as being very religious. and that raises an interesting question, which is okay, what is it about religiosity that sort of predicting happiness? And in my view, the research is that.
It winds up being that many religions end up embracing a lot of these behaviors and mindset shifts that we know empirically can improve people’s happiness, right? So, so take a big one that I talk about a lot in my work, social connection, right? Many religious practices involve practicing with other people.
or, belief systems that involve doing nice things for other people, charity and so on, right? So you get religious individuals who are doing this more and they wind up feeling a little bit happier. many religious traditions also involve the kinds of mindset shifts that we know matter for happiness.
So practices that increase your presence, whether that’s, through meditation or prayer. practices that allow you some rest, whether that’s sort of taking a Sabbath or, going on to sort of a spiritual pursuit and things like that. these are kind of these practices that are embedded in religious traditions that really allow people to sort of practice these behaviors and mindsets that work a lot.
My read, interestingly, is that if you look at people’s actual belief systems, That doesn’t seem to map onto happiness as much. And so, so what do I mean by that? let’s take, I grew up Catholic, so that’s the sort of faith I, go back to when I go to my examples, right?
imagine a person who has really rich Catholic beliefs, but they never get to church. They never go to spaghetti suppers. They never volunteer for the charity drives and so on. Don’t take time to pray because they’re too busy. that individual is likely to be less happy than a kind of lapsed Catholic on the beliefs who’s I don’t know about the Trinity thing, or like maybe somebody who’s really questioning, but goes to church, engages in charity, takes time for prayer because they think it’s important.
A person who may not have the belief system, but is engaging in the behaviors and the mindsets that go along with religious tenets winds up being happier. And so it seems less about your religious beliefs and more about your religious practices. what does that mean for non religious individuals?
Well, I think it points to a path where you might be able to find some of the kinds of benefits of religion and spirituality, maybe outside the typical traditions or the typical world religions that we often think about. And this has been some of the lovely work of Caspar Turquille, who is a fellow at Harvard Divinity School.
he often talks about these sort of community traditions that have a lot of the same benefits of religious practice, but don’t have religion in them at all. in his book, he talks a lot about, for example, CrossFit, which is this community where people engage in these, high intensity workouts together.
But they’re ones where, People have community, they have a whole set of rituals, they get together, they often engage in sort of charity outcomes for each other and for their community, it’s very community minded. there’s a lot of focus on being present as part of these activities. Like it functions a lot like a religious community, even though it lacks the kind of spiritual traditions that go along with it.
And so I think for folks that aren’t religious, I think we can learn from the findings with individuals that are religious to say, if you don’t have a religious community that you’re naturally part of, say you’re atheist or agnostic, or you just lapsed in your faith, there are ways that you can get back to that.
That, that don’t necessarily require religious beliefs, but allow you to engage in the sort of practices that we know seem to matter.
Pam King: The irony, too, is we’re watching, the shift in, religious attendance, and affiliation, a lot of these things that have been so helpful, belonging, connection, ritual, uh, practices, sense of purpose and meaning, that we know people need from psychological vantage, that traditional congregations may not be as effective at offering them, or people because of COVID are stopped going to spaghetti suppers and, or less engaged.
So they’re not reaping those benefits and experiencing those meaningful aspects of religious or spiritual community. and other organizations like CrossFit or SoulCycle or otherwise are picking those up.
So I wrapped up, a grant on a Templeton grant on cosmic gratitude.
So who do people think when they receive a gift that is not attributable to humans? So a beautiful day, life, et cetera. and I was looking at these across belief systems and it’s really interesting to see like much easier for a theistic person who names God, Allah, or someone to think, than it is if it’s a less anthropomorphized person.
cosmic source, like nature, et cetera. But people have really extraordinary ways of working out who they’re thinking and their response to that. and again, like religious traditions might prescribe what you should do when you feel grateful and less prescribed traditions, may not have as much coherent guidance, but people come up with I pass it forward.
So, but one of the things that I have noticed, in my studies of spirituality in particular people’s beliefs and experiences of transcendence, they’re not always good,so a really easy, uh, target would be like Hitler and Nazism, lots of an experience of transcendence of being a part of something bigger than oneself, but it’s really destructive.
And so as much as their psychology that points to even like for hope, like if you believe in a sovereign God or a loving God or a loving higher power, or karma that you can trust in, that can be very helpful for people in terms of conjuring up hope or trust. but if that source is not loving, then that is a little bit problematic for people psychologically.
Laurie Santos: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, these transcendent emotions are fascinating you know, we often think of these emotions as good or bad, like joy, laughter, good, like anxiety, frustration, bad. Right. But transcendent emotions are complicated, one of the transcendent emotions that I know folks like Dacher, Keltner and others have studied a lot, this emotion of awe, right?
Awe often comes when you feel a little bit like out of sorts with your beliefs about the world and your place in it, right? You know, you look at a beautiful vista, like a beautiful natural vista and you feel incredibly small. right? you have a religious experience, whether you feel like you’re connecting with the divine and so on, and you feel powerless and like you feel you’re kind of insignificance, right?even when you get this, sense of beauty and all from music, right? It can make you feel, a little tiny break a little like your place in the world is like less sure of itself than before. And so In some ways, it’s a really wonderful, positive emotion, but in other ways, it’s kind of likenot great, you know?
And so I think that’s one of the things that makes these transcendent emotions so fascinating is that they have these kind of not so great components. but in some ways, a lot of those not so great components feel good for us, right? The act of sort of feeling small in the midst of, some big, beautiful natural Vista or looking up at space or, what have you, it winds up making you feel.
oddly calm and good. in, in work by Decker Keltner and others finds that oddly it makes you feel more connected to other people. he does these very funny studies where he brings people or he goes and finds tourists at Yosemite and these kind of big natural vistas compared to a control condition where he’s in San Francisco at like Fisherman’s Wharf, which is like great tourist place, but not like awe inspiring in the same way.
and he just has people, but draw themselves in these scenes. gives you a piece of paper with a big natural scene and just draw yourself. And the stick figure that you draw in Yosemite is way tinier than the stick figure that you draw at Fisherman’s Wharf. You feel tiny.
But in a different condition, I’ll ask you to say, how connected do you feel to other people? if this was a circle that was you drawing a circle on the page, represent the other circle in this sort of Venn diagram that would be the connection you feel with other people. And what he finds is that even though people feel tinier, they feel more connected to other people.
Again, just staring at this vista where there are no people in it at all. and so in some ways it’s an emotion that allows us to feel a little disoriented. But it’s also one that makes us feel connected. And I just think that’s so powerful. You know, it’s so kind offoreign to the way we’d normally think about how psychology works, but I think that’s the beauty of transcendent emotions is that they’re complicated and give us this sense of connection, which is great for our happiness while at the same time, disorienting us in some ways too.
Pam King: Yeah, it’s like there’s a disruptive quality taking us out of the daily life and disrupting that and often a sense of humility of like, I am smaller. There is something more.
Laurie Santos: Yes. I’m part of everything, but I am nothing. And how do I deal with that?
Pam King: Given the burgeoning interest in neuroscience and new appreciation for our amazing brains, how powerful they are, how we can care for them and actually change them, it’s easy to forget that our brains are ancient.
Our Stone Age minds were built for survival and there’s a shadow side to that. Laurie’s work on the evolutionary origin of human minds sheds some light on some of the darker, more negative experiences of our brains, and how they lie to us, send us awful judgmental messages, us toward negativity, and how they do anything to secure our survival.
Pam King: back in somewhat of the origins of your
research and thinking about evolution in the human mind and how our brains are helpful. or perhaps not helpful for thriving.
As human beings, our brains, we have this great equipment, but it doesn’t always work for us so well.
Laurie Santos: Yeah. Well, it’s worth thinking about what the equipment is for. You know, the equipment is really for survival and getting our genes into the next generation. It’s not for, feeling great. And sometimes feeling great might come at a cost to surviving and getting your genes in the next generation. consider something I talked to my students about this bias called the negativity bias, right?
Which is just that, we notice all the bad stuff in the world, the scary things, the hassles. Very good strategy if your main goal is not to get attacked by some tiger that might be lurking around the corner. An awful strategy if you want to be the kind of creature that experiences cosmic gratitude and like notices all the good things and the blessings in life, right?
and so, that’s just one example. I think, there, there are other examples too, that are even more insidious. One of my favorite ones,is a kind of more neuroscience y than psychological example. it’s the fact that we, The systems that we have in our brain that code for liking, the parts of our brains that really have a positive experience, if you eat a delicious ice cream cone, the part of your brain that would sort of fire and say, Ooh, this tastes really good.
Um, first of all, those parts of the brain are few and far between. Researchers like Kent Barrage and others who’ve gone looking for these so called liking areas find There’s not a lot of them in the brain, which is sad. It means we don’t have a lot of real estate for hedonic pleasure. But we do have lots of real estate, interestingly, different real estate for what somebody like Kent Berridge would call not liking, but wanting the craving, the going after the I want this stuff.
Turns out there’s tons of real estate all over the reward system for wanting. But the systems that code wanting are different than those that code liking. And what consequences does that have? It means you can have lots of things that you crave, that you go after, that you feel like you got to put work into, that you throw yourself at, that when you finally get that thing, you don’t even really like it very much in the, once you finally actually get access to it.
the canonical example of this are, drugs of abuse, right? take a person who’s, addicted to heroin, that person really craves this drug. they’ll commit crimes to get access to the drug, ruin their lives with this craving to go after the drug. But then when they get it, especially an active user is habituated to it, they’re probably not going to get the drug.
that great a high, definitely not as good as a high as they got the first time they used heroin, right? that’s these extreme cases, but I feel like in our normal daily lives, we have so many of these cases, right? Like I get active liking from like a hard workout. But I, at least my body definitely doesn’t crave it.
If anything, I avoid it. I’m like, Ooh, cupcake. That’s a thing I really, have craving for. But then I eat it. I’m like, okay, I feel kind of sugar high and gross. what was that all about? Right. And so I feel like we have these active cravings for things that we feel like are going to be great, but don’t feel so good, doom scrolling, like, you know, spending time on social media, vegging out on Netflix, these are things that maybe feel a little relaxing, but the liking isn’t as strong as calling a friend and checking in, volunteering, doing nice things for other people, a hard workout, finding these transcendent moments, finding moments for contemplation, right?
Ultimately, these things affect our positive liking so much more, but we just don’t have mechanisms to seek them out. And so. If I was going to fix one thing about the human brain, I would make the wanting go with the liking so that I always go after the stuff and crave the stuff that’s really going to feel good in my brain.
Pam King: so many humans want to change.
They might realize like, Oh, I do have a negativity bias,or I am prone towards wanting to indulge the wanting parts of my brain and not the working out or the desiring healthy things for me. so I’d love to hear how does change happen for people?
Laurie Santos: Yeah. I think first you need to believe it’s possible, right? And that, that I think is important because some people are really shocked that we’re able to change. A lot of people have the lay hypothesis about happiness of it’s built in, it’s part of your genes. You’re either born optimistic or you’re the kind of person who’s sort of a downer and that’s just the way it is.
Or people have the theory, you could change, but the way you do that is through your circumstances, right? I have to hit the lottery. I have to get a new job or get a new spouse or just radically change my circumstances to feel happier. And I think research by lots of people, especially folks like Sonja Lubomirsky and others have found that Yeah, it’s true.
there, there are some heritable components to happiness, but it’s tiny, right? It’s less than the heritability effect of things like your weight, which we know is of course so, like subject to the fact that you’re eating a certain way you’re exercising or not. Right. yeah. There’s a heritable component, but there’s lots you could do to change it.
same thing, maybe even worse with circumstances or circumstances actually affect our happiness much less than we think again, especially for sort of listeners of this show, right? if you’re really experiencing terrible traumatic situations or, not having money to put food on your table or those things like yes, changing your circumstances would matter.
But. By and large, for most of us who aren’t going through really desperate circumstances, getting a little bit more money, changing your job, these kinds of things, it’s not actually going to make you as happy as you think. You’d be much better off changing your behaviors and your mindsets. And so I think the first thing we need to recognize is like change is possible and the way to do it is not through changing our circumstances, but really changing our habits.
and the question is, how do we do that? And the answer is like,It’s hard, unfortunately. It’s like really going after anything in life, right? I might want to learn a new language. I might want to learn how to play an instrument. I might want to get super fit or be able to do crow pose in my yoga practice.
And the way you do it is that you just have to practice every day and you make a little bit of progress and you kind of mess up over time, butyou intentionally invested it and things change over time. And I think that. going after all good things like that is the same way you go after happiness, right?
You need to learn the behaviors and the mindsets that really matter. And you need to put those into practice, even in cases where they disagree with your intuition, even in cases where my wanting system might be like, Netflix and a glass of wine. That’s what I’m going to do in this tough night.
That’s the night where I’m like,this is the time I should call a friend or maybe, go to that, volunteering class that I heard about, or maybe engage in a meditation practice so I could get, a little present. Those aren’t the things that I naturally want to do, but putting work in requires embracing those kinds of new habits over time.
Pam King: So, would you share with us a practice that is maybe happiness 101,
Laurie Santos: yeah, one of my favorite ones is a hard one. I’ll just dive into the deep end of happiness. None of this easy stuff. We’ll just go for the hard one. is a meditation practice, a practice for cultivating presence, but presence when things are feeling really crappy, really anxiety provoking or frustrating or overwhelming or what have you.
It’s a practice for when you’re experiencing a negative emotion.
So what do I do, right? One move is to suppress that feeling, right? I’ll just dive into work. I’ll pretend that I’m not anxious right? but lots of studies show that even though it sounds like a good idea, It’s not actually that effective.
Like really cool research by James Gross at Stanford, uh, has shown that when we try to suppress our emotions, we affect ourselves cognitively. So we do worse on a memory test afterwards. We do worse on a decision making test, but more when we’re suppressing our emotions, we’re hurting our bodies. he does these little laboratory tasks where he has folks watch like a sad, short, sad video and pretend they’re not sad.
And he finds that folks really experience evidence of cardiac stress, even in that short laboratory task. So. not awesome to be doing this chronically, but what do you do instead? that’s where this hard meditation practice comes in. it’s a practice that’s been popularized by the meditation teacher, Tara Brach, who has many good different meditation strategies for what she calls radical acceptance.
and I like this practice cause it has a little handy acronym. it goes by the acronym of rain, like rain falling down, R A I N. and that acronym is for recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. So let’s try it out. So let’s say you’re experiencing a negative emotion. You’re looking at something scary on the news.
You just had a frustrating conversation with your spouse or your teammate at work or your kid. you’re just looking at your calendar, feeling overwhelmed, whatever it is. You remember, Oh, feeling negative. I can do that RAIN practice. And you’ve already done kind of step number one, which is our recognize you recognize that you’re experiencing a negative emotion, but this is a moment to go a little deeper.
Take a deep breath in. And then try to really describe what the emotion is, not just, oh, it’s a yucky feeling, but is it overwhelmed? Maybe with a little loneliness in there. Is it anxiety with a side of kind of frustration? Maybe it’s just like you’re feeling ineffective. Maybe you’re feeling sad, right?
Like what is the particular emotion? And get very creative about saying what it is. That’s the first step to recognize. Then you say okay, I’m gonna go on to step two of RAIN, which is allow.
Deep breath You say just gonna sit here and allow this emotion to be there just as it is. You don’t have to love it You don’t have to be psyched about hanging out with it. You’re just committing to looking at it really deeply But the cool thing is that you give your brain something to do while you’re allowing.
And that’s the beauty of the third step, I, investigate. You say, okay, I’m gonna sit with this emotion, but I’m gonna look really carefully at how it feels in my body, So think about it now. Maybe your chest is feeling tight or your brow is furrowed. You’re sitting hunched. Your body is in a particular shape.
How is it manifesting in your body? Probably also comes with some other Maybe emotional feelings or things you want to do. Maybe you want to check your email or take a drink or eat something. Notice what cravings are coming up. Don’t act on those, just notice. And we won’t sit with this in the podcast.
The proper RAIN practice, this investigate step can take, three to five minutes where you just watch this emotion over time. and the beauty is you’ll probably experience in this practice, what many folks experience, which is that, Emotions are like a wave, clinicians often talk about urge surfing, right?
when you look at that emotion, you’re going to feel like, wow, my brow is really hunched when I’m feeling overwhelmed and I’m angry. And you notice it really closely, but if you just sit with it and pay attention to its course over time, even though it goes up a little bit, it will go down over time, like in, three minutes or so, it’ll be hard to focus on that emotion again, because your mind is wandering off and you’ll notice like, Hi.
Rau’s not as hunched as it was before. I’m not having that craving in the same way. That’s the investigate step. You sit with it and you get through your emotions. But the beauty of the RAIN practice is it doesn’t end there. You also have the final step, which is N, which stands for And that asks the question, How can I take care of myself right now?
What do I need? What can I take off my plate? What would a good friend say to me? How can I talk to myself like I’d talk to a friend? Kind of what do you need right now? And so that’s the kind of very short version of a RAIN practice. It might take you a little longer if you sat in the moment to do it, but I love this practice because it really allows you.
to let your negative emotions take their course. And often when you sit through a RAIN practice, you wind up learning something from your negative emotions, right? Like I thought I was, pissed off at the news, but when I sat there, I was really feeling a little overwhelmed in the house and, I don’t know, wishing my husband would empty the dishwasher.
I was I thought it was really a sense of sadness, but when I looked at it, it was really more about loneliness. Like I, I got to check in with some friends or, you start to realize what you need. my analogy for a practice like RAIN is it can often be like the way to look at your emotional dashboard.
Like it’s a dashboard in your car. When these like negative emotions come up, it’s Oh, that’s the tire light. that’s the engine light. I probably need to get this looked at pretty soon. It can give you a sense of what you need, even if you can’t sort of solve it right then. Just like our tire light, sometimes it comes on and you’re like, I got a tire light.
get back and forth to work, but then tomorrow I’m going to, get to the dealership and try to, check this thing out. And so RAINN can going to be a practice that works like that. And there’s evidence that practices like RAINN can reduce burnout in groups like first responders, palliative care workers.
it’s just a practice that if you’re dealing with negative emotions, a lot can be really helpful.
Pam King: Staying present with difficult emotions is something we all struggle with. And the effort to change and improve and create new healthy habits can easily fall off the rails when we don’t deal with the emotions that come along with struggle and difficult life circumstances.
So the more we can cultivate the ability to accept and simply hold with us the full spectrum of our emotional experience, the closer we’ll get to the transformation and change we long for
Laurie Santos: true for all negative emotions, right? like usually it’s telling us about an unmet need right like your Sense of overwhelm means you got to take something off your plate as inconvenient as it is right that moment of cynicism right that I was experiencing with my burnout was like you need to re evaluate this relationship and what you’re doing because you need Some space here, right?
Our moments of anxiety might need to be That we need to seek out social support for sure. Moments of frustration, anger. They often suggest that there’s some perception of injustice, right? Even if it’s like a kind of tiny one. And if we let that sort of thing fester without addressing it, then that’s going to.
Lead to more anger and contempt and so on. And so it’s a lot more like a tire light than we think. Just like a tire light. It’s inconvenient. Like I don’t like when the overwhelm creeps up or the loneliness is there. Just be much easier if it wasn’t there. But if I ignore it and just pretend it’s not happening, worse stuff is coming down the road.
Pam King: Laurie graciously offered one of the many ways she’s working on herself. But it definitely resonated with me, and I know it will resonate with many of you. It’s about building a healthy relationship of kindness with ourselves, Learning the science backed spiritual practice of self compassion. And Laurie gave both very comforting and very practical advice for how to pursue this essential form of loving ourselves
What is your encouragement on building good habits? What should people expect? what kind of effort do they have to put into rebuilding habits?
Laurie Santos: Yeah, this is a spot where I think, well intentioned people can sometimes motivate themselves quite poorly through the sort of self flagellation, right? and I’m hearing that in some of your comments, oh, like, I’m trying to do this gratitude letter, like in there is Frustration, what’s wrong with me?
Like, why do I suck at this so badly? Right. And that’s like what many of us use, right? this is a really common strategy of criticizing ourselves, like treating ourselves, like, you know, we’re some drill instructortrying to motivate these positive self transforming behaviors, but a much better strategy, according to the research of folks like Kristen Neff and others is to engage these habits with a little bit more self compassion.
Chris. Dinef and her colleagues define self compassion as having these sort of three components. One is a sense of what she calls mindfulness, but it just means recognizing what’s going on. I’m struggling with this. This feels like this should be easy for me, but it’s not. And that feels really frustrating, right?
That’s mindfulness. But then you take a second step, which is what she calls common humanity, where you say, yeah, and it’s human. It’s just hard to form new habits. Like I messed up, but that’s just, everybody messes up. It’s makes sense. It’s a common human experience that I’m going through. The third step is what she calls self kindness, where you really advise yourself, like you’re a good friend.
And you say, what do I need to take off my plate to do this, right? what do I need to do this better, right? how can I help you get curious and problem solving as opposed to mean drill instructor y when you’re sort of trying to do these habits. And I love Kristin Neff’s approach because this is especially true in some of my very type A driven Yale students, right?
Which is they think Oh,I can’t be self compassionate because that’s self indulgent, right? That’s letting myself off the hook for not doing these habits that I really know I should be doing. Right. and what the response to that is no. talking to yourself like a friend isn’t being self indulgent.
Like if your friend was really messing up, you know, say they had a health condition and they were just like banging back sugar all the time, or they were really screwing up their habits. You wouldn’t be self indulgent with them. You’d be like, oh, it’s fine. You do you or whatever. You’d be concerned.
You’d check in, but you wouldn’t be mean like a drill instructor. You wouldn’t scream at them either. You’d get curious. You’d be like,well, what, what is going on that this is so hard? Okay, let’s kind of problem solve and try to figure out ways that we can do this a little bit better. And that’s ultimately what you’re doing with self compassion, right?
You’re asking the question, What do I need to do this better? Maybe I need to take something off my plate. Maybe I need to give myself a little grace. Maybe I need to celebrate the wins, even if those wins are small, right? You allow yourself the compassion and the bandwidth to move forward with habits.
and Neff’s work really shows that this is, powerful, right? Powerful for forming new habits. She finds that especially like in some of these self regulation domains, like saving for retirement, eating healthier, getting to the gym, self compassion is so much better for that than self criticism. she even finds that self compassion can protect you from experiences of trauma.
So when things go really bad, and you need some work to help you, uh, self compassion can really protect you. And so That’s my kind of go to advice whenever you’re experiencing like, what is wrong with me? Like, why can’t I do this? That’s a moment to step back and be like, but everybody goes through this.
How can I treat myself with kindness?
Pam King: And I think what you’re saying is so profound. That we are in a sense so much the gatekeepers of kindness or love. And that if we can’t love ourselves and nurture ourselves in that way, it’s hard for us to accept that from others.
And it’s hard for us to offer that to others. If we can’t extend that kindness to ourselves, then. We’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re interacting with others in non judgmental ways.
Laurie Santos: and this is borne out in Kristen’s work where she finds that training self compassion is one of the best ways to experience compassion for other people, right? People who are more self compassion or train in self compassion when they were having a hard time with it, treat their spouses better.
They have better relationships with their kids and their teammates at work, right? You can just recognize common humanity in other people if you get good at recognizing it in yourself too.
And so that’s one that I’ve been truly working on is, Uh, trying to talk to myself like I talk to a friend and kind of recognizing the common humanity too, right? It’s hard as a happiness expert to be like, but I may be an expert and I may have studied this, but I am also a human. I am also going to screw up.
That is normative. those are hard practices for me, but ones that I’m working on a lot.
Pam King: there a specific self compassion, practice or is it a just attuning to negative self talk and extending your self grace in that moment or?
Laurie Santos: Another practice I use, and this might be a fun one for listeners to try out, is sometimes if self, talk that self compassionate is hard.
You can actually start with self compassionate touch. This comes out of Kristen Neff’s work too, where you literally, you know, you and I are watching each other over this sort of video conferencing. You literally take your hands and, give your shoulders a little rub, maybe give yourself a like self hug, like do what you as a, you’re a mom, like what you would do to your kids when they were having a tough day, just this kind, compassionate touch.
And the beauty of this compassionate self touch is that your brain’s stupid. It doesn’t know who’s touching you. it’s a common, interesting feature of our Stone Age minds. We just feel it, assume it’s somebody else touching us. You can think of other contexts, obviously, where this plays out. But for the context of compassion, it’s great.
You feel that. Compassionate self touch and you assume, oh, this is a benevolent parent or coach or mentor or spouse or someone who cares about me, right? And it just puts your brain in that mindset of being ready to hear it’s okay, everybody goes through this. What do you need? Like a fast hack. So not one I often do in the presence of other people, but when I’m alone in my bedroom and I need to get out of the self critical talk, a little self hug is actually quite helpful. what are indicators that these practices are moving you in the right direction?
Pam King: in the right direction.
Laurie Santos: you know,
One thing to remember is that these are practices that require daily effort, right? Like any good thing in life, learning a language, right? Getting fitter, right? it’s not like I go to the gym one time and I’m like, done, that was awesome, like fit for the rest of my life.
You gotta do it, every day, a couple of times a week or whatever, right? These happiness practices work the same way. And so, Yes, if you do, a meditation practice, a self compassion practice, RAIN, whatever, it will offer you short term benefit. But to get that long term benefit, you need to remember to do RAIN again tomorrow when you looked at some negative news or when you’re feeling really overwhelmed on the job or when you have a tough conversation that you need to have with your child, right?
Like,you need to remember to use this practice over and over again. So I think you can get to these long term benefits, but you need to put in the work every single time. and that’s, it’s the flip side of what we were talking about before. About you can change and oh my gosh, that’s such good news.
We can all change, but womp womp to do that change, you got to put in the constant effort. And so I think it’s for sure the case that people can have long term individual benefits from happiness, but You gotta put in the work. the way we get to broader structural benefits, it gets back to the idea of this sort of feel good, do good effect, right?
That I think when we’ve given ourselves the bandwidth, when we’ve given ourselves some positive emotion, we wind up just naturally more inclined to do the bigger things, right? We put the we back in well being, even if we’re focused on the I, just because these practices wind up getting us to these sort of activities that, wind up being for the broader society being more for our community too.
So I do think we can get to some of the long term benefits. but to do that, I think we need to pay attention to these indicators, and that means a lot of mindfulness, of when things are going right and when things are going wrong. Um, you know, I’m a, data nerd, right? I give my students these happiness surveys and I pretty regularly take them myself, about once a month I’ll go back to, all things considered scale of one to seven, how happy are you with your life?
When have you experienced these positive and negative emotions recently? Like I kind of keep track of my own data and that’s helpful for me because I nerd out on this stuff, but I think there are lots of different ways to do it. I mean, one is just to, give yourself space to mindfully notice, we’re so busy and we just barrel through life.
It can be hard to take stock of things are okay. Like I’m feeling pretty connected. I’m feeling like the things that I’m intentionally pursuing I’ve had time for things are okay. Versus I’m out of sorts. I’m feeling totally overwhelmed. I, all the things that matter, I haven’t put time into this week.
That’s something we need to be mindful of and take stock too. And so. I think that this idea of taking stock, even if the answer is going to be, uh, things aren’t going well, is really important. We need to be paying attention to our own emotional dashboards, even if it’s something that’s not our natural inclination. Given that it’s the New Year, what are suggestions you have for people, or what hopes do you have in this moment?
Yeah, I think the new year is a time when we really all need to remember self compassion. I think the good thing about the new year is As folks like Katie Milkman at the Wharton School of Business have found, it can be a real moment of fresh start when it’s easier to start new habits. We’re really motivated to start new habits.
but that can also cause us to want to start those habits, like a bit of a drill instructor, like this is the year when I will be self compassionate, And so I think, yeah, and so I think whenever you commit to, I think the new year, I think. Commit to doing it non judgmentally. It’s kindof less which habits you want to bring along to transform yourself and more how you engage with those habits, with intent, but also with non judgment and a little self compassion.
Pam King: love that. That’s so powerful. It’s not just which you do, but it is how you do it. Thank you so much, Laurie. This was great. Yeah, this is great.
I resonate with Laurie Santos’s inspiring mission to help people transform their lives through science. Her expansive knowledge, her generosity and compassion for others, and her clarity as a public advocate for mental health. is a gift to the world.
The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
We need to take seriously the mental health struggles all people face, exploring hopeful, concrete pathways and new possibilities to help everyone thrive.
Change is more than possible. Life is all about development, growth, and process. But we can intentionally shape who we become with effort and with accountability.
Our amazing, but sometimes quite pesky, brains can sometimes lie to us. And relying on empirically backed spiritual wisdom can lead us closer to the truth of who we are.
In my journey of growth, I want to keep learning how to speak to myself as a friend, non judgmentally, compassionately, and full of curiosity.
And finally, even when unchangeable life circumstances throw us into misalignment, we can still change our relationship to those circumstances at any moment. and take another step toward happiness And
With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.
For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our Senior Director and Producer. Lauren Kim is our Operations Manager. Wren Juergensen is our Social Media Graphic Designer. Evan Rosa is our Consulting Producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr. Laurie Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. Dr. Santos is an expert on the science of happiness. Her Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. Her course recently became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one of our four students at Yale enrolled. Her course has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine. A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds, and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has over 100 million downloads.
Episode Summary
Science can change your life. The more we study what makes people develop, grow, learn, and flourish—the more we see how the practical application of scientific findings can help us transform our life and experience—into a life of value, meaning, purpose and true thriving.
Yale psychologist Laurie Santos has spent her career investigating the human brain and how it thrives. From her popular Yale course to her podcast, The Happiness Lab, she’s communicating actionable and hopeful lessons for how to build lasting habits, cultivate self-compassion, manage complex emotions, and realign our lives toward meaningful happiness.
In this conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos, we discuss:
– How the mental health crisis affecting young people changed her, and how she teaches psychology
– How our brains lie to us
– The role of positive and negative emotions in a good life
– How feeling good can lead to doing good
– The psychological and relational benefits of faith and spirituality
– And she offers practical insights, science-backed guidance, and powerful exercises for managing misalignment and difficult emotions.
Laurie Santos on how to activate psychological science for more happiness and meaning (from the episode):
“Some of these factors that we know scientifically do work. From simple behavior changes like being more social, doing nice things for others, just healthy habits like sleeping and moving your body, to mindset shifts, to becoming a little bit more present, to becoming more other oriented, to becoming more grateful, more self-compassionate, and so on.
There are shifts that we can make that can have a huge effect on how we actually interact in the world.
We need to understand that we’re not perfect, we’re just human. And we will mess up a little bit too. But it’s really the journey that matters.”
Show Notes
- Listen to The Happiness Lab podcast
- Visit her website drlauriesantos.com
- How Laurie got up close with the mental health crisis affecting young people
- Self-care
- The history of The Happiness Course at Yale University
- The impact of COVID-19
- “Things have gotten worse.”
- Statistics: More than 40% of college students report they are too depressed to function
- Anxieties provoked by technology (Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge)
- Stress levels across the developmental lifespan
- How our brains lie to us
- Behavioral changes and healthy habits
- Mindset shifts and dispositional transformations
- The importance of science for validating spiritual beliefs, values, and practices
- Sometimes spiritual traditions get some things right, but can also be wrong, and need empirical study
- Manifestation
- Imagining the positive outcome isn’t as good as planning out the if-then strategy.
- “The science can help us with the nuance so we can really get things right.”
- Laurie Santos defines happiness
- Psychological approach to happiness: “subjective well-being”
- Positive vs Negative Emotions and the role they play in a good life
- Why is happiness helpful to us? Is happiness really the goal?
- The “feel-good, do-good effect”
- Any cause-based activism requires
- Laurie Santos answers: What is thriving?
- Mindset and behavioral change
- Non-judgmental response
- Self-compassion and curiosity
- “It’s really the journey that matters.”
- Helping others
- Burnout and Self-care
- Stressors that lead to burnout
- The impact of rest on productivity
- Religion and Happiness: Are religious people happier than non-religious?
- Social connection
- Growing up Catholic
- Comparing Beliefs vs Behaviors and Mindsets
- It’s less about religious beliefs and more about religious practices
- Communal Practices
- Transcendent Emotions
- Oversimplifying transcendent emotions
- Awe and Wonder often come along with a disturbance, such as feeling very small, feeling out of control, feeling disoriented, feeling overwhelmed, etc.
- Dacher Keltner’s tourist studies “Draw yourself in your scene”
- Feeling tinier, and yet more connected
- “I’m part of everything, but I am nothing. How do I deal with that?”
- Evolution and the human mind
- What is our brain for? It’s for survival. It’s not for feeling great.
- Negativity Bias
- Kent Barrage: Neuroscience of Hedonic Pleasure
- Liking vs Wanting
- Drugs of Abuse
- “If there was one thing I could change about the brain it would be …”
- Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin
- David Yaden (Johns Hopkins) on psychedelic drugs
- We can change (and a lot of people are shocked by that)
- Can’t change vs. Changing circumstances
- Sonya Libermursky
- “Yes, you can change, not by changing circumstances, but by changing your habits.”
- Netflix and a glass of wine? Or something healthier?
- Introducing new habits over time
- Meditation Practice: Cultivating Presence When Things are Feeling Bad
- “Nauseously Optimistic”
- Tara Brach and Radical Acceptance
- R.A.I.N. (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture)
- Fundamental needs
- Natural selection and cravings
- Craving doomscrolling on Reddit
- *Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing* (Justin Barrett and Pam King)
- Self-flagellation, frustration, and criticizing ourselves
- Kristin Neff on Self-Compassion
- Self-Compassion: Mindfulness, Common Humanity, and Self-Kindness
- How to talk to yourself
- Self-compassion is helpful for cultivating new habits
- Practice: Self-Compassionate Touch
- “The beauty of self-touch is that your brain is stupid. It doesn’t know who’s touching you.”
- Taking stock and paying attention to our own emotional dashboards
- New Year’s Advice: A moment of fresh starts and new beginnings
About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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