Episode: 242
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
with Dr. Laurie Santos, PhD
Learn the 5 science-backed ways to rewire your mind for more joy and meaning.
Get a crash course on living a happier, more fulfilling life.
Dr. Santos is the professor behind Yale’s most popular course of all time “Psychology and the Good Life.” This course was also taught as an online course called “The Science of Well-Being.”
5 million students have taken her semester-long course, but you don’t need to. Listen to her now!
Listen on:
Happiness isn’t something you find—it’s something you build.
Dr. Laurie Santos
Featured Clips
Transcript
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:00:00):
What does the science really say practically that you can do to kind of feel better right now? You can actually become happier. Somewhere between five to 15% happier. If I said all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10. Wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, you can kind of pop up a little bit. You're not going to go from zero to a hundred. Everyone wants to go from zero to a hundred. I think one of the disappointing things about happiness is that it takes constant work, like all good things in life, right? These are lasting effects where you really go up a small but significant amount, and I think things are getting worse. What
Mel Robbins (00:00:34):
Do you mean things are getting worse?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:00:36):
Rates of loneliness have nearly doubled since we've been measuring these things, like rates of depression and anxiety and the adult population are going up
Mel Robbins (00:00:44):
Is happiness, the anecdote? Hey, it's your friend Mel. Welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so excited that you're here. I'm so happy you hit play on the conversation today. First of all, it's always such an honor to be able to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're brand new, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family, and you have picked one amazing episode to hit play on and it tells me something about you. It tells me that you are the type of person who not only values your time, but you're also interested in learning about ways that you can be happier. And I am really fired up for today's episode because I've brought in the best of the best, someone who's going to guide you toward a happier life using the exact steps and research that will boost your happiness to day.
(00:01:34):
Dr. Lori Santos is in our Boston Studios. She's a cognitive scientist and professor at Yale who teaches the single most popular course that has been taught at Yale in 300 years. It's a course she created called The Psychology of a Good Life. It's so popular that 1200 students signed up within three days of it being announced. Now, Dr. Santos has spent her entire career researching what truly makes you happy, and she has one of the most popular podcasts on the topic. It's called The Happiness Lab. And I personally, I love her research. I have used it, I've cited it. I've written about it. I've even taught it in online courses that I teach, and in the work that I do with some of the world's leading global brands, that's how powerful her work is. And you're going to feel that power today, and that's why you can hear your friend Mel just bubbling over. That's why I can't wait for you and for the people that you love and for me to learn absolutely everything that she has to share with us today. So please help me welcome Dr. Laurie Santos to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:02:39):
Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Mel Robbins (00:02:42):
Oh, I'm thrilled that we've got you here in our studios,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:02:46):
And I'm just looking around the studio being like, this is Mel Studio. So cool. And you're in it. I'm in right now.
Mel Robbins (00:02:52):
Well, you're so busy. So thank you, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to be with us and we're going to cover a lot. And I just want to tell you as you are listening and you've invited Dr. Santos and I in the car with you or on your walk with you, that there is so much that she's going to unpack for you about happiness from the things that we get wrong about it to the ways our brains are working against us to most importantly, I don't know how you're going to do this woman, but you're going to condense the most popular course, literally ever taught unhappiness into this conversation with key takeaways. And I understand you also have homework for us.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:03:30):
Yeah, sorry, you can't invite the professor on the show or not Have your listeners get homework. Sorry, listeners. I didn't mean it.
Mel Robbins (00:03:36):
That's okay. I would love for you to speak directly to the person that is with us right now and listening and share with them what they might experience that could be different about their life if they take everything that you're about to share to heart and they apply it.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:03:53):
Well, this is something we've seen in our students, which is that if you listen to what I'm about to say, if you follow the homework, you can actually become happier somewhere between five to 15% happier, five to 15% more positive emotions, five to 15% more satisfied with your life. That's actually what the science tells you. And in our short version of the course today, that's what you're going to get.
Mel Robbins (00:04:14):
Wow. What does five to 15% feel like?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:04:17):
Well, I think it feels like if you were six out of 10 on positive emotion, if I said all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10, you go up to almost seven out of 10. And that matters wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, how much joy, much laughter you have. You can kind of pop up a little bit. You're not going to go from zero to a hundred, but these are lasting effects where you really go up a small but significant amount in terms of how you feel.
Mel Robbins (00:04:45):
Can I share something please? So when you said five to 15%, my brain was like, well, that's not enough. And I think that's probably relevant to our conversation about happiness. I mean, does that surprise you that I was like 5% me?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:05:01):
Not at all. I mean, I think when we talk about these strategies, especially to my very type a Yale students, everyone wants to go from zero to a hundred. Everyone wants to do the extreme thing. And I think one of the lessons we get from the happiness research is that this works better in baby steps, and it's not the kind of thing that you're just going to do one thing and happiness lasts forever. I think one of the disappointing things about happiness is that it takes constant work, all good things in life. If you want to learn to play the violin, if I want to learn French, if I want to get really good at Guitar Hero, which is the last thing I've invested myself in, is really I'm trying to move from a medium to heart on Guitar Hero. I know it's a little 2005, but that's what I do. But you can't just practice once and then that's it. You got to kind of keep up with it. And one of the lessons that we get from the science about happiness is that happiness works the same way. It's kind of like a leaky tire. You do these different behaviors, you change your mindset, it fills things up for a little bit, but then you kind of got to do it again and again, it sort of takes constant work. But the good news is that you can change things around a lot.
Mel Robbins (00:06:03):
So if you feel like your life is a leaky tire right now,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:06:07):
Yes. And I think probably listeners out there, my guess is a lot of you are feeling that way.
Mel Robbins (00:06:11):
Yeah, I think so. I would love to have you share a little bit about this course that you teach at Yale University. It is the single most popular course taught in over 300 years. It's called The Psychology of a Good Life. Can you tell us a little bit about this course, why you created it and why the heck is this so popular?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:06:32):
Yeah, so the course started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I've been teaching there for over two decades, but in just the last couple of years, I took on a role of what's called the head of college on campus.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:06:43):
And so Yale's one of these weird schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's Gryffindor Slither, and there's these weird colleges within a college. They're basically dorm communities. And so I became a head of college of one of these, which meant as a faculty member, I was living on campus with students.
Mel Robbins (00:06:57):
Really? And you're married, so
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:06:59):
Were you there with your spouse? Me and my spouse, husband eating in the dining hall, hanging out in the coffee shop. That's kind of fun. I became this benevolent aunt to 519 year olds, right? And I thought this was going to be fun. I thought college life right now was going to look like what college life looked like back when I went there in the late nineties. And it just didn't, I mean, I was really looking at this college student mental health crisis up close and personal. And this is true at Yale, but it's just true nationally. So right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function right now nationally, more than 60% of college students report feeling very lonely and overwhelmingly anxious, more than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And this was what I was seeing in my community where they were just students who are really struggling.
(00:07:46):
And I just went through this crisis of confidence as a professor. I'm like, we're not teaching them computer science and Shakespeare and all this stuff. If 60% of students are experiencing overwhelming anxiety most days. I was like, we got to do something about this. Being a psychologist, I mean, I'm a trained psychologist, I said, well, my field has strategies. We know simple kinds of ways that you can change your behaviors and your mindset that again, don't take you from zero to a hundred, but work pretty well can make you kind of patch up that leaky happiness tire and feel a little bit better. And so I said, well, why don't I make a class? I'll just make a whole new class and I'll kind of teach students all these strategies. I wanted it to sound cool. That's why I called it Psychology in the Good Life. So it sort of pop out. It sounded like kind of fun, but it was a new class on campus. I thought 30 or so students would show up. And so the first indication that I got that something was amiss was we get these little kind of tickers as students are registering for our class. It's this little webpage where you can kind of see this graph going up and down. And most of the graphs had an axis that was from zero to a hundred, but mine started going from zero to a thousand.
Mel Robbins (00:08:53):
Where were you when that started happening?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:08:54):
It was back and forth in my office. It was happening over time gradually as students were coming in. And I think it was something different because students were sort of voting with their feet. I mean, if you're a 19-year-old right now, you don't like this culture of feeling overwhelmed and anxious and just kind of, so many of your friends are just experiencing panic attacks. That's not a fun way to be. And I think the course was really offering students a solution and even an evidence-based solution. I was saying, look, I'm going to just comb through the science and tell you what does the science really say practically that you can do to feel better right now?
Mel Robbins (00:09:27):
And as you started to observe this about college students, did you see any correlation when you look around at your friends who are your age? My age, all ages as well in terms of these statistics or just people generally being unhappy?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:09:44):
Yeah. Well, this was the striking thing about the course is that the course became viral on campus, but what I really didn't expect was for the course to get viral off campus, about a week into teaching the class, there was a New York Times article about the class that the point of which was basically all these 19 year olds and Ivy League school of their whole life ahead of them are miserable. What about the rest of us? It was kind of like Dr. Santos share these strategies with the rest of us. And I just get emails from all around the world of just people feeling like it's not so much that I'm depressed, I just feel like I'm kind of languishing or just kind of meh or just there's so much going on in the world to feel stressed out about right now. Everybody's kind of going through it right now.
Mel Robbins (00:10:26):
I'm glad that you said that because I think that this conversation is going to be incredibly helpful for understanding not only what the teenagers and 20 somethings and early 30 somethings are facing right now, but also what we're all facing. And so whether you're already starting to think about the person in your life who's in their twenties or in college or high school that you're going to share this conversation with or you're thinking about yourself, all of the takeaways from the research and the science and the studies that you've been doing are relevant to all of us.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:11:01):
That's right. And I think things are getting worse and we'll continue to get worse unless we come up with good strategies to deal with this.
Mel Robbins (00:11:08):
What do you mean things are getting worse?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:11:09):
Well, you look at pretty much any statistic on mental health. And I'm not talking in college students now, I'm talking about in adults, especially in the us, things are just getting worse over time. Rates of loneliness have nearly doubled since we've been measuring these things. Rates of depression and anxiety and the adult population are going up. And I think even if you just look at rates of things like people reporting that they're overwhelmed, burned out, you get not just double digits, but very high double digits of folks saying, yeah, that's me. I'm going through it. And honestly, if it's not you, it's your colleague at work. It's like we're just in a community where so many people just feel like they're not experiencing the kind of joy and positive emotion that they'd really like to be experiencing.
Mel Robbins (00:11:51):
I love what you just said about joy and emotion, because I was about to ask you, well, if you're dealing with anxiety or depression or a lack of purpose or you're feeling very lonely, is happiness the anecdote? Is that why this matters so much for all of us?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:12:07):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it helps to dig in a little bit to what we mean by happiness. We can mean so many things. And in fact, there was a funny study that showed that what laypeople think about happiness is not what the scholars mean when they use the term happiness. So you're
Mel Robbins (00:12:19):
The scholar on the lay person? Yes.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:12:21):
Okay. Lemme
Mel Robbins (00:12:21):
Tell you, I'm the way down now.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:12:22):
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what the scholars mean. So what the scholars mean by happiness is happiness in two forms. Scholars think about happiness in your life and happiness with your life. So what do we mean here?
Mel Robbins (00:12:34):
Oh, hold on.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:12:35):
Hold
Mel Robbins (00:12:35):
On. So you just said you can be happy in your life and you can also be happy with your life. Holy. I can think of a bazillion moments where I've been happy with what's going on, but not happy in it.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:12:56):
Yeah, I mean, the classic case if you have kids is that you have a newborn baby and you're so happy with life. You've brought this new life and you have so much meaning and purpose, but in your life, there's dirty diapers, there's no sleep.
Mel Robbins (00:13:11):
Oh my God, I'm exhausted. My nipples are leaking. I'm not having sex anymore. I feel like I've just shot a cannonball through my legs. What is happening?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:13:19):
Miserable. And you've had enough important people on here to know the opposite, which is you can have a life in your life where there's all these hedonic pleasures. You're flying for a class and eating at the best restaurants and the best wines, but with your life, you feel a little bit empty. Maybe you don't have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. And so what scholars are trying to do is they're trying to find strategies that boost both of these in your life. And specifically, we mean lots of positive emotions, lots of joy and laughter and contentment, these kind of subtle positive emotions. Otherwise, I guess we'll probably talk about we don't want to get rid of negative emotions completely. We want to have some negative emotions.
Mel Robbins (00:13:58):
I just don't want them to run me over. I don't want the negative emotions to feel like that's my whole
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:14:02):
Life. No steam roller from the frustration or the overwhelm and so on, and that's happy in your life with your life. It's the answer to the question all things considered. How satisfied do I feel? Do I feel like I have meaning? Do I feel like I have purpose?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:14:16):
As nerdy professors, we use scales to measure these kinds of things, but you don't need to scale. You could probably answer right now. All things considered how happy are you with your life?
Mel Robbins (00:14:27):
And I take it if you were to just stop and ask yourself, which you really should, am I happy in my life? Yes or no? And then ask yourself, am I happy with my life that we're about to learn? There are kind of different strategies that you can use to bring those numbers up in terms of that five to 15% satisfaction that's available to all of us.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:14:51):
Exactly. And one of the things that's striking is that a lot of the strategies move both at the same time. A lot of the strategies will give you a sense of positive emotion when you're practicing it, but also overall make you kind of just more satisfied in the longterm too.
Mel Robbins (00:15:06):
So your course psychology of a good Life has 26 lectures on happiness.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:15:12):
Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:15:13):
What do you think the big takeaway for your students has been?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:15:17):
Yeah, so one of the biggest ones is just how much we get happiness wrong,
Mel Robbins (00:15:21):
Right? Oh,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:15:22):
Yeah. I mean, I think if you're listening right now, you probably care about happiness. You probably want to feel happier. You're probably pursuing happiness, but you might not be feeling like it's going so great. You're kind of off somehow. And I think this is something that so many of us seem to go through. It's not so much that we're not seeking happiness out. We are, we're probably putting some effort into the choices we're making, the actions we're taking to feel happier, but we're kind of doing it wrong. And this is by and large what the science seems to be telling us. It's not that we're not going for improved wellbeing. We are, we're putting a lot of work in, some of us are putting a lot of money in, but we tend to be picking the things that don't get us there. And this is a big insight into happiness that we have theories about those sorts of things that make us happy, but a lot of research suggests those theories are just wrong. So we have these intuitions that are leading us astray.
Mel Robbins (00:16:13):
I am so excited to learn from you, and I think probably the best place to start. You've talked about happiness with your life and happiness in your life, but what is the definition of happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:16:25):
Yeah. Well, I think the definition of happiness is really boosting both of those. It's kind of finding the way to become happier in your life and with your life. That's kind of what we're going for when we're talking about improving happiness.
Mel Robbins (00:16:38):
I love that definition. I do, because again, I'm going to reveal why I make myself miserable. It's because I immediately went like, oh, okay, so this is something I can do. I can literally figure out how to be happy with my life, and I can figure out how to be happy in my life, and I can get my little checklist out and then I can go, go, go, go. So it felt more like it's doable.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:17:04):
It's like a checklist thing.
Mel Robbins (00:17:05):
Yes. Because I'm starting to really wonder, is it really more of a skill to learn how to be happy with and in your life?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:17:15):
I think it really is. As we talked about before, this idea of happiness is something that you need to build over time. It just kind of takes energy. It's like learning the violin or learning to play guitar here. You kind of just build it over time. I think one of the problems is that we don't spend a lot of time learning ourselves, teaching our kids, setting up educational institutions to build these skills. I think understanding the strategies that we need to engage in to improve our lives, to regulate our emotions, to not get run over by that frustration and overwhelm and so on. These are such important skills. I think a different misconception is we just assume some people are good at it and some people are bad at it.
Mel Robbins (00:17:52):
That's not true.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:17:54):
It's true to a certain extent. I think some people are naturally better at it than others.
Mel Robbins (00:17:58):
And is it because they're doing the things naturally that you're about to teach us?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:18:02):
They're doing the things naturally, and some of these things come to show. I will say I am not naturally a happy person. I've become happier, maybe even about 20 to 30% happier since I'm really digging into some of these homeworks and doing these things. But those strategies absolutely don't come naturally to me. It's just the kind of thing you can learn over time.
Mel Robbins (00:18:20):
Well, one of the things that you teach in your course is that we're not wired for happiness.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:18:27):
What
Mel Robbins (00:18:27):
Does that mean?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:18:28):
One of the reasons we get it wrong is that we're kind of set up not to be so happy. In fact, and I think this makes most sense, if you think back to kind of evolution, we are just these survivors and producers that have to get out there off on the Savannah and not get eaten by a tiger or something. What makes you do that better?
(00:18:46):
It doesn't really matter if you're experiencing a lot of positive emotion, joy and so on, but you definitely want to experience fear. You definitely want to experience anger so you can get access to maybe resources that you didn't get access to before. You're going to be driven to pay attention to the negative stuff, kind of what matters for surviving and reproducing. And that means we have brains that are built with what's called this negativity bias. We kind of constantly notice the bad stuff out there, and our brains are wired for it. These were brains that had to notice the tiger that was hiding in the bush. So when it's scrolling through an Instagram feed, it's going to see the terrible stuff, and that's what's going to get us
Mel Robbins (00:19:21):
Going. Or if you walk into a cafeteria at a college or at work, you're going to notice that everybody already has a friend to sit with, but you.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:19:28):
Yep. We notice all the bad comparisons that make us feel terrible. And so that's just another feature of this. And it makes sense evolutionarily that that's what we're built for. We don't necessarily survive and reproduce better if we notice all the things we're grateful for and the blessings and have contentment. It works better if we live this really volatile life.
Mel Robbins (00:19:48):
Well, it kind of makes sense. If we were to time travel back several thousand years and we're sitting out there on the Savannah or wherever, if you and I are sitting there playing cards all day long, having fun, cracking jokes, we're not going to eat
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:19:59):
Right. Or worse, imagine the contented Buddha, the perfect zen happiness who's just meditating under a tree. He's going to starve and get perfect or get eaten
Mel Robbins (00:20:08):
While he is meditating. So it sounds like because our brains are wired to keep us alive, that mandate has kind of spiraled out of control in modern life. And especially when you think about things like social media or you think about just how much information is out there about what other people are doing, you're probably now defaulting to paying attention to that instead of just paying attention to what's right in front of your face in terms of how to be happy with and in your life.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:20:40):
Yeah, I think the modern world has found many more things for us to feel negative about, and many more things to activate our negativity bias.
Mel Robbins (00:20:48):
So if you were to speak directly to the person that's with us right now listening, what is it that they probably have wrong about happiness or the misconceptions that they have that are leaving them feeling unhappy? It's almost like when you understand this thing, it's actually going to help you when you realize that there's this thing you have wrong about happiness.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:21:10):
That's right. And I think it's worth being a little bit self-compassionate, right? If you're listening to this feeling like, oh, I'm maybe not flourishing. I'm maybe not experiencing as much positive emotion as I could. First of all, you are in the majority, right? You're not alone when you're dealing with this. Second, you're just allowing your brain to play out and the way your brain was built to play out, it makes sense that you're going through this, right? You're not doing anything wrong in some sense, but with a little tweaking of the way you engage in different actions and different mindsets, you can feel a lot better. Understanding where we go wrong, I think is really the path to making things better.
Mel Robbins (00:21:43):
Amazing. I mean, I'd rather stop doing things. It feels easier than have to start doing a whole lot of things. You know what I'm saying?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:21:50):
Yeah. Well, that is the bad news about happiness. But
Mel Robbins (00:21:54):
Now I'm unhappy.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:21:55):
I don't want to hear this. Okay, Dr. Sam does come on the look, all good things in life take a little bit of work, and happiness is like that too. But the good news is that if you put that work in, you can change. And I think that's another thing that we get wrong about happiness. We assume not just that some people are good at it, some people are bad, but that it's built in. If you're a kind of Debbie Downer sort of person or a real optimist, you're just always going to be that way. We assume that there's nothing you can change about it. And study after study shows that you can change. Again. You don't necessarily go from zero to a hundred, but with time, you can build habits in that allow you to make important significant progress.
Mel Robbins (00:22:34):
That's great. I was just sitting there when you were talking about Debbie Downer, and I was thinking about my husband, Chris. Now his name is Chris Christie
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:22:40):
Downer.
Mel Robbins (00:22:41):
Well, his name's Christopher Robbins from Winnie the Pooh. So in a not so nice way, he's always kind of been the re of our family just kind of, oh, but it's quiet. And I'm the Tigger bouncing all over the place. But I think he has probably had a higher level of happiness with and in his life. He's just not outwardly expressing it, whereas I'm all over the place.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:23:08):
One of the big things we get wrong when it comes to happiness is that we assume happiness is about our circumstances. We look out at people's lives and think, oh, well, if I could just be rich, I would be happy. Or if I could just get that promotion at work from my college students, if I could just get the perfect grade or into the perfect internship
Mel Robbins (00:23:25):
Or the be in the different friend group,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:23:28):
Be in a different friend in relationship, a different relationship, be in a relationship if you're not get in a different relationship, but by that new house even, I think just buy that new thing, whether that's the new dress or the new shoes at a local level. I think we're buying things often to make ourselves happier. We think it's going to work, but really it doesn't work as well as we think. It seems like circumstances aren't the key to happiness that we expect. Now, that has a caveat.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:23:53):
If you were listening to this right now and you're in a refugee camp or you don't have enough money to put food on your table, yes, changing your circumstances is going to matter, really a lot for your material happiness going up. But my guess is you're listening to this and you're not necessarily in a refugee camp that maybe you're not having the perfect finances, but you got food on the table and a roof over your head. If you're in that situation, then drastically changing your circumstances probably isn't going to affect your happiness in the way that you think. That's what study after study shows.
Mel Robbins (00:24:24):
Well, and I think more empowering is to know that you don't have to change your circumstances.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:24:32):
That's right.
Mel Robbins (00:24:33):
To boost your ability to feel happier.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:24:37):
And that's huge, right? Because changing your circumstances is a pain in the butt, right? Going from your current salary to 300 million a year, that's a big change. It's going to take a lot of work, finding a new relationship, getting a big promotion at work. These are hard things, and they're often things that most of us don't really have that much control over. But all the strategies we're going to start talking about soon are ones that you have complete control over. They're just things that you can engage in yourself.
Mel Robbins (00:25:04):
Let's talk about money though, because you have some foundational and very interesting research about money, at least in the United States, and I would love for you to share a little bit about that.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:25:16):
So the most famous study on money and happiness was one that the late Nobel Prize winner, Danny Kahneman, ran back in, I think 2009, and he asked this kind of interesting question, does increases in your amount of money wind up corresponding with increases in happiness? Which he measured in a couple of ways. First kind of positive emotion. Do you get more positive emotion? Do you get less negative emotion and you feel less stressed? And so he had this huge data set where he could plot this out across different incomes. And what he finds is that if you're in the
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:25:46):
Low, low end of the income spectrum, if you're earning $10,000 a year, $30,000 a year, yeah, increasing your salary over time is going to boost your positive emotion. You're going to feel less stress, less negative emotions, but that kind of increasing curve where more money is more happiness, more money is more happiness, it levels off.
(00:26:04):
And in 2009 ish dollars in the United States, it leveled off at around $75,000. What does that mean? That means that if in $2,009 you hit a salary of $75,000, even if you doubled your salary, tripled quintupled your salary, you wouldn't get any corresponding increase in positive emotions. You wouldn't decrease your negative emotions, and you wouldn't feel less stressed. Now, that is not what you probably believe if you're listening right now, if Mel's got her mouth hang open, it's like, yeah, no one thinks this right? And you might be like, well, that's $2,009. The equivalent right now would maybe be like a hundred, a hundred, $10,000, something like that. We just don't think that. We think if suddenly I could triple my salary, I would be way happier. But these research, this just shows that we're kind of wrong. And so that raises a different question, which is like, well, why doesn't more money buy happiness? And I think it's for a few reasons. One is that as you get richer, you often tend to get busier. In fact, this is a change that we've seen in the US population. It used to be that rich people lived the lives of leisure. They look like kind of Carrie Grant in the Philadelphia story, just sitting around drinking cognac out of beautiful VAs and things like that. But higher salary now usually means you're working harder,
(00:27:18):
You're putting in more hours at work. And we know that time really matters for happiness and free time sort of matters for happiness. The more you're working, the less you're interacting socially. So wealth doesn't seem to kind of give us the sort of social benefit we used to get before. And I think a bigger thing is that as you get more money, you kind of just get used to that over time. So if you get a little bit more money, maybe you start going to see the trainer and you start flying first class, you start eating at the nice restaurants. But if you do that over and over every day, it just becomes your day-to-day experience. You don't get this kind of additional happiness boost from it, $75,000. I think. It's not a kind of magic bullet number, but I think it's kind of around the amount where a lot of your needs are taken care of. You got food, shelter, maybe a teeny vacation a year or something. The stuff that you can additionally buy with more money is not going to bring you more happiness.
Mel Robbins (00:28:10):
I'm so glad that we're talking about this because I do think this is one of the major mistakes I've made in my life, totally. That I think that if I can buy something or if I make more money, or if I just have this much in savings, that somehow it's going to just automatically boost happiness. And it's true it. And I will also say though, that when I think about the times in my life where I have been struggling profoundly financially, really struggling to get groceries on the table, having my bank card bounce at the gas station, trying to fill out, we've
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:28:50):
All been there
Mel Robbins (00:28:51):
That there is a certain kind of cruel and relentless stress that you feel when you can't take care of your basic needs that does interfere with your ability to be happy with where you are in your life. And because I was constantly worried about it, which meant I had no time, which meant I didn't enjoy where I was at, which meant I was focused on survival. And so is that the reason why the monetary figure really, if you can take care of things so that you can get through your day-to-day life and take care of yourself, it lowers stress and that's why it makes happiness available to you?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:29:36):
Yeah. I mean, I think when we ask this question, does money buy happiness? Part of our intuition is right. It's like, well, money can get me stuff that would lead me to be happy. Money can put me on a vacation that I can spend time with my family can allow me to decrease these negative emotions. Like fear of is the rent collector going to come get kicked out of my house or overwhelm I have to take on more hours at work just to make ends meet? I think when you get to a certain wealth level, you shut off those basic need problems that come up that very much do affect our happiness. And so from that perspective, does money matter for happiness? Yes, for sure. But it only matters up to a certain level, and that's the spot that we get wrong. And I think it's not just like you and I and the listener getting this wrong. I think this is the kind of thing that even people of extreme wealth get wrong. One of my favorite guests that I've ever had on my podcast, the Happiness Lab, was this guy Clay Cockrell, and he is a mental health professional that works only with the 0.0001%.
(00:30:34):
So I think most of his clients are earning over $50 million. And the first thing that should be striking is that this dude has clients. These are people who have $50 million who apparently aren't happy enough that they need to see some mental health professional to help them get through. And a lot of their problems, amazingly, are financial. So one of those stories Clay told was that there was a guy who he worked with who just bought this new yacht. A wife really wanted a yacht and they couldn't figure out where to park it, and it was causing all this marital strife of dah, dah, dah. And you can look at that and you're probably thinking, poor expletive baby. Kind of like can't park his yacht. Wow.
Mel Robbins (00:31:11):
Well, I was going to say Dr. Santos, it's very petty of me to say this, but I'm like, good, I'm glad you're unhappy. I'm good. Literally, I hate that I had that reaction, but I'm like, I'm glad you're fricking unhappy if you have a yacht like screw you. And now that I'm like, I'm a terrible person. Oh my God.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:31:28):
But the flip side is I think we've, many of us, way less wealth levels than $50 million have seen some of the problems that our material possessions come up with.
Mel Robbins (00:31:37):
Of course, I'm mad that my husband is making me get up and move my 1987 Toyota Corolla to the other side of the street so that the street sweeper is coming through and we don't get
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:31:51):
Towed. And to somebody who's trying to have an existence without No, I was going to say the opposite way. Somebody who has an existence where they would kill for that 1987 Toyota, they can't get to work and they're taking the bus two hours a day.
(00:32:03):
That feels like how could you ever complain about that? And so this is the problem is that we don't, these material goods come with some costs that we don't expect, and they just kind of don't continue to give us the happiness. If you were that person who has taking the bus today, every day they would worship your 1987, your car. I love my car. I know I have a really crappy Nissan too, so I get it. It's very beat up. But it's like they're somebody out there who would worship that. And this is the problem is that you've had it so long since 1987, you kind of stopped worshiping. You stop getting the kind of utility out of it.
(00:32:37):
I mean, tomorrow if you walked home and the car was gone and you're like, wait, where did I park it? Did somebody steal my car? What's going on? And it took you out and you're like, oh no, a husband moved it or something for that five minutes where you didn't know where it was, where it had gone. Now you'd see the value in it. Like, oh my gosh, I don't know. I left my CDs in there. Oh my gosh, I have to get a new car. When you get it back, you're like, oh, thank goodness that little break is breaking up what you are used to. It's kind of a break in what psychologists call your hedonic adaptation. You just got,
Mel Robbins (00:33:06):
That's a big word. I don't know what
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:33:07):
That means. It's a, the fast definition is you just got used to something hedonic adaptation is you get adapted to your hedonic value.
Mel Robbins (00:33:14):
Just got used to feel. I feel that in our marriages, in our relationships too.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:33:17):
Oh my God, actually there are curves of ponic adaptation in marriages, and they're
Mel Robbins (00:33:20):
Quite funny. My waistline,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:33:23):
No, the moment you get married, basically five months in, you're already getting used to your partner and it kind of goes down. Or
Mel Robbins (00:33:31):
You said something earlier though that gave me this epiphany because you were talking about how when you're really struggling and you think, okay, money's going to make me happier because money is going to help me pay my bills. So yes, that's true because we're lowering stress. But then you said something interesting, you said, and maybe I'll be able to take a little vacation with my family. And what occurred to me is that...
Mel Robbins (00:34:01):
The thing that a vacation does with your family is it gives you time with them.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:34:05):
Correct. Yep.
Mel Robbins (00:34:06):
And so I think maybe one of the mistakes that we're making is that we think money gives us the thing that actually makes us happy, which is more time with people we care about or more time to feel less stressed. And is that kind of where this is going?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:34:27):
Yeah. There's really lovely work by the psychologist Ashley Willens at Harvard Business School that talks about a concept that social sciences are getting really excited about lately called time affluence, which is not wealth. Affluence is not the amount of money you have, but it's the amount of free time you have. And if you're listening right now and you hear that term time affluence and you're like, that is not me at all. Again, don't feel too bad. You are part of the general majority of humans on the planet right now, especially Americans right now. Most of us are experiencing the opposite of time affluence, which is time famine, where we literally almost feel like you're starving for time. And Ashley Willans research shows that if you experience time famine, that has a huge hit on your wellbeing. In fact, one of her studies show that if you self-report being time famished a lot, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.
Mel Robbins (00:35:17):
Really?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:35:18):
So those of you listening right now who are lucky enough to have jobs, something else we can get hedon adapted to. If you're lucky enough to have a job, imagine you lost that job in the next 10 minutes. How you'd feel just not having a lot of free time can make you feel that bad. And so Mel, you're really onto something, which is that one of the best ways we can spend our money to our happiness is to actually use money to buy back time.
(00:35:42):
And Ashley Williams does some really cool work on this. She finds no matter what your discretionary income is, you can say, okay, yeah, that guy with the 50 million in the yacht, he can spend money to, I dunno, hire somebody to clean his house or take these unwanted tasks off his desk. He can go to the restaurant instead of cooking meals for himself. But many of us have a little bit of discretionary income, and Ashley finds that no matter what level of discretionary income you have, if you spend that to get time back and you commit to spending it to get time back, you can kind of be happier. Whether that's hiring the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn or watch your kid, watch your kid walk
Mel Robbins (00:36:16):
The dog.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:36:17):
Exactly. Or just
Mel Robbins (00:36:18):
Dropping off some laundry at a local laundromat to wash and fold it for you. And I think if you can shop on Amazon and you're hitting the Shop now button on Instagram or social media, that's discretionary income.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:36:31):
Exactly, exactly. And the stuff arrives, and one of the extra hacks you can do to make this an even more effective strategy is whenever you do that, reframe the amount of time you saved. We are here in Boston, before I came to the studio, I stopped at this local coffee shop that was right near there, and I just got breakfast. I got this nice little egg sandwich, was a little egg souffle. It was delicious.
Mel Robbins (00:36:52):
Oh, it is my favorite egg sandwich on the planet with that mustardy aioli and the rub. Yes, love, love. And that bacon girl, I'm with you on that. Let's
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:37:02):
Go. But if I had to make that myself, I would have to souffle the egg, which would, I don't know, what's that 20 minutes to get the nice pop of the egg. I'd have to have gone to the grocery store to get this stuff. I'd have to chop up the tomato because a nice sliced tomato. I probably saved at least 45 minutes buying that egg sandwich at the shop. What did I do with that? 45 minutes. Now I have some of that 45 minutes to talk to you. Maybe I take a nice walk. That framing technique matters.
(00:37:29):
So every time you get takeout, go to a restaurant. Every time you drop your clothes off at the laundromat, if you again have enough discretionary income to maybe hire somebody to mow the lawn or clean or something like that, reframe it and say, oh my gosh, by spending that money I saved X amount of time. And literally give it, it's an hour and a half, hour 20, whatever, and then ask yourself, what did I do at that time? You're making the face that a lot of my students make when they experience this Mel, which is kind of like you have this breath of, I have an hour, an extra hour. You know what else I
Mel Robbins (00:37:59):
Also love about this is that you just did something really important, which is you put value on your time. And what we've been doing wrong is we've been putting all the value on the thing
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:38:15):
Or the money that we can use the time for, right?
Mel Robbins (00:38:18):
Right.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:38:18):
We're used to switching our time into money of like, well, if I work an extra hour, if I take overtime, or we don't realize that what that money is supposed to be for is to make our lives better. And often what makes our lives better is free time individuals who being more time affluent so they feel wealthy in time, they're more social. There's these funny studies where you just kind of convince people they're a little wealthier in time. You have people do like a little scramble.
Mel Robbins (00:38:45):
How do you convince me that I'm wealthier in time?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:38:47):
Well, psychologists have these very funny hacks. So one funny hack is I give you a little word scramble to do. So there's scrambled upwards and you have to unscramble them, but then I make those words be affluent in time. Things like vacation or time off holidays, you have words where you're like, oh yeah, I'm sort of wealthy in time. And then all of a sudden I give you the opportunity. They have subjects in a coffee shop and you can have the opportunity to just chat with somebody. And I just sit back and watch, do you chat with people more when you have that moment of feeling a little bit more wealthy in time and you do,
Mel Robbins (00:39:22):
And then you also feel happier, you've just connected with somebody.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:39:24):
Exactly. There's also studies showing that people who are wealthy in time do nice stuff for other people. Actually, the most terrible one was a study that was done kind of back in the day, and this is back in the day when the ethics of studies maybe weren't so great. It was in the seventies, but there was a group of researchers who were studying Princeton Seminary students. So these are people who are studying to be a priest.
(00:39:48):
And the study is that you have to go and give a surprise lecture about the story of the Good Samaritan, which for if you don't know, is Jesus was walking around and saw somebody doing nice stuff. It's about doing nice things for people in need. But these different seminary students...
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:40:08):
Were put under different time pressures. So some were told, you got a couple hours, you get across town and go give this, but you got some time or really high time pressure actually you got to go right now. You just don't have time. You got to get over there. And what the researchers did was they staged someone on route to this lecture that was in need. So it was kind of set up to look like an unhoused person who'd maybe been hurt. And so the seminary student has to literally walk over this person to get to the lecture, and the question was just, do you stop to help?
Mel Robbins (00:40:37):
Okay. And this is somebody who is studying to be a priest. Correct. So we would think you would
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:40:41):
Be. And he's about to give a story about why Jesus values doing nice things for people in new, he's in his head thinking, how do I think about how to tell people to do nice things for people in,
Mel Robbins (00:40:51):
Let's just be honest, if you fail this, you should get kicked out of seminary school. That's basically what I'm going to say there.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:40:58):
And basically, the people who are in a rush pretty much never stop to help someone, which is really sad,
Mel Robbins (00:41:07):
Which explains the state of society today,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:41:09):
Which actually explains the state of society today, right? We're rushing around. We all feel so busy. I think time, famine has felt like it's going up around, we just don't have the bandwidth to help other people. We don't have the bandwidth to help the planet. There's lots of evidence that if you're feeling under more time pressure, you don't recycle. I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm guilty of this myself, where it's like I got to wash the thing, and
Mel Robbins (00:41:32):
I'm literally like, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm like, wait, landfill
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:41:37):
Recycled. You just opt out. But imagine it was like that Sunday morning feeling where you got nothing to do and you're like, yeah, I could wash the glass a little extra to put it in the we're hurting ourselves, each other, the planet, just because we don't have any time.
Mel Robbins (00:41:53):
Okay, now I'm depressed. So there is good news, but the good news is the tire is flat. Now I'm leaky Dr. Santos, how
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:41:59):
Do I be happy? But the beauty is that you can, first of all, you can prioritize your free time. You can spend money to get back more. But these little hacks of just remembering what free time you do have, I bought my egg sandwich and that saved me 45 minutes. That alone can kind of put me in the head space to have a bit more free time. Another one of my favorite hacks is to find ways to use the free time. You do have the journalist, Bridget Schultz coined this term that I absolutely adore, which is called time confetti, by which she means the little five minutes you have here and there, we don't think it's that much. So we usually just blow it. If
Mel Robbins (00:42:34):
You're, you pick up our phone.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:42:35):
Yeah, you pick up your phone, you scroll Instagram, check your email. But those five minutes add up. In fact, Ashley Willens and her colleagues estimate that we actually have more free time now than we did 10, 20 years ago. What? I know, it feels shocking. No way. That's true. But the difference is it's broken up in stupid ways. It's these little five. We don't have these big chunks anymore. We got five minutes of time, confetti, 10 minutes of time, confetti here and there, so it doesn't feel like a lot. So we just blow it. But those are perfect moments to engage in all these strategies to fill up our leaky tire. And I think we'll start talking about some
Mel Robbins (00:43:07):
Of this. Let's do that. Okay, so let's fill up the leaky tire. We're going to take our time, confetti five minutes at a time, and we are going to start rewiring our brain for happiness. In the course. You teach five ways to rewire yourself for happiness and fill up this tire. So what's the first way that you can rewire your mind for happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:43:30):
The first step is to engage in more social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggest happy people are more social people who self-report being happier, physically spend more time around other people, less time alone. And they also spend more time with their friends and family members. So they prioritize time, not just with any old human bodies floating around there. They pick time with people they care about. And this seems to be true both for introverts and extroverts, really? Yeah. So the key that other people matter for introverts and extroverts, this is some work by Nick Epley and his colleagues. He does these studies where he just basically...
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:06):
Forces people to be a little bit more social than they normally would. So he walks up to people. He's at the University of Chicago, so he does this on the L train.
Mel Robbins (00:44:13):
Well, I know this study where he forces people to talk to
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:15):
Strangers
Mel Robbins (00:44:16):
On the train and to
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:17):
Work and just for a $5 Starbucks gift card. Everybody's willing to do this.
Mel Robbins (00:44:21):
People sign up for that to talk to a stranger.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:23):
People will do anything for a $5 Starbucks gift card. It's really the engine of all social science research. People are like, I don't want to do that. It's like $5 Starbucks gift card. People like, okay, fine. I'll talk to someone.
Mel Robbins (00:44:34):
And now notice my reaction.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:36):
And
Mel Robbins (00:44:36):
As you are with Dr. Santos and I, you probably had the same reaction as you're listening to us. I wouldn't do that for a $5 Starbucks gift
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:44):
Card. There's no way you would talk to, I mean, you just got to talk to some rando person
Mel Robbins (00:44:48):
On your YouTube. But I think the important thing here is that our reaction
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:44:53):
Is
Mel Robbins (00:44:53):
That this is not going to be fun, and our reaction is so much. So I don't want a gift card to do that. And so we all would go into that situation and say, but what did the research find?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:45:10):
Well, Nick actually did that comparison. He asked people, Hey, if you were in these two conditions, first of all, would you do it? And how would it feel? And people said exactly what you're saying, Melanie, and what I'm sure if you're the person listening, right? I was thinking, right. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. It would feel terrible, not just, it would feel neutral, but it would feel actively awkward or yucky or whatever. And what he finds is that it's just the opposite. People who spend their train ride talking to a stranger experience positive emotion, they feel more energized, they feel less lonely. And in fact, enjoying your solitude on the train kind of makes you feel a little anxious, yucky. I mean, we can kind of simulate. You're like, oh yeah, if I tell you, yeah, just don't talk to anyone. Enjoy your solitude. What happens? We start ruminating. We get in our head. And so just this simple act of talking to a stranger makes us feel good. But the reason I love in Nicks research is he tested this extrovert introvert question, and what he finds is that there's no difference in the happiness boost that extroverts and introverts get. Where there's a difference is on that prediction question. If I ask you, Hey, how bad is it going to be to talk to someone on the train? Extroverts think pretty bad. But introverts think like bad death, bad, the most horrible thing. But what's striking is they're wrong.
Mel Robbins (00:46:24):
I do think it's a skill to just learn how to talk to people. And the fastest way that I've taught myself how to do it, and again, I've been doing this now for decades because I get very anxious when I say,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:46:37):
You're good at, you do this for a living, right?
Mel Robbins (00:46:39):
Well, yeah. And I also do this to make my life better. So saying hello, like, Hey, good morning to the person who I am. Let's say we're ordering an egg sandwich as a person's ringing me, I'm like, Hey, how you doing? And most people look at you like, oh, hi. And then I'm like, oh my gosh, I love your nails. And oh, well, thank you. And a compliment.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:47:06):
Yes, huge
Mel Robbins (00:47:07):
And a smile. What I find is it's almost like popcorn. If I walk in and I'm a popcorn kernel and I'm warm, there's something about complimenting somebody's socks or complimenting their nails or being like, even if they serve you the cup of coffee, you're like, oh my gosh, that's so beautiful. Thank you. Oh, I really needed this. There's something about your warmth that always gets returned, and then I feel lifted by that interaction and it helps me.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:47:38):
Yeah. And this was something that Nick Epley said on my podcast. He said, look, Lori, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. If somebody waves at you, you're going to wave back. And then that just kind of gets the social connection off the ground. And for both individuals, it winds up feeling better. And I bet same thing true of you at the coffee shop, when you say, oh my gosh, this latte looks so pretty, or nice nails, that person might not have predicted that they wanted to talk to you, but afterwards, they're happiness. Leaky tires a little bit more filled
Mel Robbins (00:48:06):
Up. Absolutely. So the first takeaway I absolutely love, and the tool for me, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. So always be the person who waves. I love that. What is the second way we can rewire our brains for happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:48:22):
Well, it's related to the first. It's another way to exploit social connection, but it's becoming a little bit more other oriented.
Mel Robbins (00:48:28):
What does that mean?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:48:29):
It means instead of doing stuff for yourself self-oriented, you get a little other oriented. You spend your money and your time. Other people, and this is a spot where I think our intuitions are in overdrive in the wrong direction and our culture takes us in the wrong direction.
Mel Robbins (00:48:46):
Well, I had a little bit of a moment when you said spend your money and time on other people. I'm like, but Dr. Santos, I don't have any time for myself, so why the hell am I going to give my money and my time to somebody else? My kids are draining me dry my,
Mel Robbins (00:49:06):
I've given my time to my work, so now you're telling me I got to be other oriented. Give me a break. My gas is leaking here out of this tire. What do I do?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:49:10):
So one of the surprising things, again, spot where intuitions are wrong, I'm going to say this and you're listening right now, and you'll be like, that's not true. But what the research shows is that the act of doing something nice for somebody else makes you feel like you have more time. It's one of these hacks that gives us more time affluence. Think about it. You're at work and somebody's going through something tough. You say, well, what can I take off your plate? Can I help you with something just like out of the goodness of your heart? What does that tell you? You're kind like, well, I must have more openness on my plate if I'm going to help this other person do something.
Mel Robbins (00:49:43):
That's true. And if you're the one that holds open the
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:49:45):
Door, that means you have more
Mel Robbins (00:49:47):
Time. You got some time on your hand because you're not rushing through.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:49:49):
Exactly.
Mel Robbins (00:49:50):
Oh, that's sneaky.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:49:51):
It's sneaky, but it's a funny hack to make yourself feel like you have more time is to opt to do something voluntarily for others. And I think that's the keyword though. Voluntarily
(00:50:02):
Too often we feel overwhelmed when we feel the have tos in life, the shoulds of life. I'm supposed to do this for other people. If you're doing lots of stuff for other people and you don't have a choice, maybe you're caretaking for an adult in your life or helping someone out or kind of stuck in childcare. If you feel like you have no choice, then that doesn't count. But if you willingly are like, oh yeah, yeah, I got time to do that. I'm going to choose to do that with my time or my money now, that's when the benefits start to kick in.
Mel Robbins (00:50:32):
Wow. So the second thing that rewires your brain is this sort of real focus on other people. And when I think about some of the research that you mentioned earlier, especially around loneliness and it doubling and just how it's true, everybody seems to feel very lonely right now.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:50:52):
Totally. I mean, the rates of loneliness are like at 60% and every demographic group levels of loneliness are going up.
Mel Robbins (00:50:58):
So does your focus on these small social interactions and these small ways to be more outwardly focused and kinder to other people, which is going to boost your happiness, it's also going to deceive you into thinking you have more time because you're really taking the time to do this. Does it also have an impact on your feelings of loneliness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:51:20):
For sure. I mean, that might be one of the hugest impacts it has in part because when you reach out to other people, chat with the barista at the coffee shop, talk to someone else, reach out to an old friend, another good one, those just kind of arc actions that make you feel less lonely. One of the fastest hacks to reduce loneliness, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking I'm feeling a little lonely, is to try to help the loneliness of somebody else. Literally take out your phone, scroll through the contacts, pick the name that you think might be feeling the most lonely, having the toughest time, and just send them a text that says, Hey, just thinking about you was listening to this cool Mel Robbins podcast. We're talking about friendships and just made me think about you. It'd be great to connect
Mel Robbins (00:52:02):
And better yet, share 'em this episode and let's talk about it. It's something that you can talk about. Well, I think a lot about this because I think about the rise in loneliness and I look what's happening in the world and there's absolutely zero doubt that every single human being that has a smartphone is addicted to it,
(00:52:20):
And everybody has way more time than they think, but they're pouring it into social media and they're pouring it into just being online and doom scrolling. I get really scared because what I see happening down on the street in our day-to-day lives and in my life and in my family is we are now living life connected to our phone. And then I see society trying to address what is clearly the problem. I just saw some country name some minister of loneliness and I see courses filling up about happiness, but we're all in it and addicted to it that you don't even see that you're in it and how much it's killing your joy and your ability to connect. And I think you can reclaim your life and your happiness, one of these micro interactions at a time that have you look up and smile at somebody or hold the door or compliment someone, or if you're on the phone, send the text instead of staring at an influencer, they're trying to sell you something. I mean, it's just
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:53:25):
Scary
Mel Robbins (00:53:25):
To me.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:53:26):
In theory, social media was supposed to be social, right? In theory, we could use our phones to socially connect, right? I just told
Mel Robbins (00:53:33):
You they weren't wired to keep you on it so that people could make more money advertising. If the algorithms didn't optimize to literally take advantage of your brain wiring to keep you on it and to manipulate you, then yeah,
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:53:47):
And that's the irony that they should be helping us be more social, but they just aren't. And the study, when you look at the actual data of how much our phones are stealing our attention, it's just so terrible. Liz Dun, who's a professor at the
Mel Robbins (00:54:00):
University, it's not even stealing. They're actually designed to
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:54:02):
Yes, exactly designed to steal design and to do it kind of undercurrent. So we don't notice. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has this study of people just in a waiting room. You go to the doctor's office or something, you're sitting in the waiting room. She either lets people have their phones there or not, and what she finds is that there's 30% less smiling in the room of people when people have their phones out, even if they're not on their phone just having it's in your purse. It's incredible, but you get it because...
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:55:13):
The sad thing is what folks have done with phones is they've engineered content that's built to be more exciting than what we assume is true for social connection. Liz Dunn, when she was on my podcast, had this lovely analogy. She said, you go to dinner with your husband and I have my phone flipped over on the desk, but imagine instead of my phone, I had a big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow where printouts of every photo I've taken since 2015, like big binders of my emails since I moved to Yale the first time, newspapers from every country in the world like videotapes of cat videos and porn, just huge wheelbarrow of all this stuff on the internet. And she's like, if that wheelbarrow was sitting there at dinner, you would not be able to pay attention to your husband. You'd be like, oh look, just watch that real cat video, throw it in the VCR or something. She's like, your brain isn't stupid. Your brain knows that on the other side of that phone that's sitting flipped over on the table, all that stuff is there. So even when you're not looking at it, even when you're not ignoring your husband and sort of fobbing him, staring at your Instagram feed, something in your brain has to hold back this leashes being like, Nope, don't look at the cat videos, don't look at the old photos. We've kind of set up this distraction that's there with us all the time and every study that's looked at it has found we do worse on memory tests when our phones are with us, we engage
Mel Robbins (00:55:52):
In, it has a direct connection to happiness
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:55:55):
Because what's happening is when we're not on our phone, we're kind of missing out on something and the question is, what are we usually missing out on? And it's usually other people. All the social connection that we're not experiencing, which we just heard is so important for happiness, which then kind of psychologically makes us feel lonely. It also ends up decreasing our presence, which is something we haven't talked about yet, but it really kind of matters for happiness.
Mel Robbins (00:56:18):
You used the word fobbing. What is that?
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:56:20):
Fobbing is a term that my students used. It's A-P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G, so it's phone snubbing. So it's like you're trying to talk to me and you notice I'm like, but I'm really looking at phone.
Mel Robbins (00:56:33):
Well, when somebody does that, and I am hovering here, not because I want to spend too much time talking about the phones, but I think it's extraordinarily important
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:56:42):
Totally
Mel Robbins (00:56:43):
To highlight and to also embrace the truth that if your life feels like you are a tire that is flat and you would like to be happier, then there is a direct connection between your unhappiness and your phone use because the phone and the way that you've allowed it to take over your life is interfering with your ability to do these five things in your day-to-day life that actually based on the research, will fill up the tire and make you happier in your life and with your
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:57:19):
Life. And with your life.
Mel Robbins (00:57:19):
Correct. And that's why I want to be very clear that this is a massive problem and you have an opportunity if you're serious about being happy, you can spend the rest of your life mainlining social media and staring at other people's lives and then get to your grave and go, oh God, I actually didn't use my time while I was here to do what I needed to do to be happy and to live my life. And that's what's happening to the majority of people.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:57:48):
And for sure that's what's happening to our students, but you don't have
Mel Robbins (00:57:50):
To let it happen.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:57:51):
Totally. Yeah. No, you have power over this, right? You can flip it over, you can leave it somewhere else. Or if you can't get out of your hand,
Mel Robbins (00:58:00):
Go to a doctor because that's a problem. No. Would you walk around life with an eight ball in your hand and it would destroy it? And I do think if you look at the research, and this is again why I want to hammer this point, is that I think every one of us is at this really scary tipping point
(00:58:20):
Where there's a before and an after and you could hear this episode and decide that you want to be the kind of person that actually happiness is important and taking care of your mental health is important, and staying connected to people in a meaningful way and being present for your life is important. And if it is important, you have to be honest with yourself that it will take a decision on your part to go, I'm not giving my life to this phone and to social media. I'm just not doing it. I'm going to follow this advice. Go ahead.
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:58:53):
I was going to say one of my favorite strategies for dealing with this comes from the journalist Catherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, which she doesn't exactly argue that you need to break up with your phone, but it's more you need to take it to couples counseling, sort of the idea. And she has this lovely acronym she uses. In fact, you could go on her website and get those little plastic bracelets that you can slide around your phone. The acronym is www, which kind of fits like worldwide web, but hers is what for why now and what else? And her argument is every time you find your phone in your hand, ask www what for? Was there some purpose? Maybe you needed to look up directions? On my way here to the studio, I had to pull my phone out. I didn't know where the studio is looking, but I also, when I was walking was just also scrolling through other stuff. It's
Mel Robbins (00:59:33):
Boredom
Dr. Laurie Santos (00:59:33):
Usually for me, so is there a reason? Reasons are good. Why now? This is a really important one because it's about what was the emotional trigger that caused you to go there? Because my sense is if you're listening right now and you heard Mel's advice, you're like, I'm going to put it away. There are going to be some moments where that's easier or harder and the why now question forces you to ask the question, well, why now? Why is it harder now? Oh, I was bored or I was a little bit anxious, or whatever it is. Kind of notice mindfully, nonjudgmentally, what drives you to go there, but the most important one, Mel, I think the thing you're getting at is the last one. What else? What is the opportunity cost? Whether that's talking to your husband at dinner, just having that moment of time, confetti that you could use for something more positive, maybe even most important, just being present.
(01:00:23):
I was saying when I was walking over here, I pulled the phone out for a good for reason. I was looking for the directions, but then once it's in my hand, it's in my hand. I had this moment where I kind of looked up for a second. I was like, oh my gosh, we're in this beautiful neighborhood in Seaport where there's the water and there're red bricks. If I was deep in my email, I would've missed that. Right in that little moment of noticing and being present with the sights and the sounds, that's a really important thing to boost your leaky happiness and so many of those moments are just lost and social media.
Mel Robbins (01:00:52):
Well, that kind of brings us to the third way that you're going to build this skill of being happier and boosting happiness in your day-to-day life, and it has to do with what you were just talking about, kind of being present and grateful.
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:01:05):
Yeah. This is one that is in the cultural zeitgeist. We talk a lot about mindfulness, but we don't spend a lot of time doing it. I feel like this is sort of grandmotherly wisdom, but it is not common practice. Most of us spend a lot of our time mind wandering where your brain is flitting to like, oh, what should I have for dinner tonight? Or that weird conversation you had with your spouse, you're just like, brain is anywhere. But in the present moment, there's a very funny study by the Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert that tried to estimate, well, how often do we spend mind wandering? And what he finds is that people self-report, I am absolutely not paying attention to what I'm doing just under 50% of the time. I think it was like 48.9% of the time. You're like, yeah, wasn't paying attention. And he finds that there's a kind of equal not paying attention this in all the different activities, whether you're at work at leisure, watching tv, he found a slight dip for one activity, which is when people self-reported that they were having sex, but I actually don't believe this data point.
(01:01:59):
I was like, I don't know. But in any case, basically all the good things in life we're not paying attention to. But the most important part of Dan's study for happiness research is that last question. How are you feeling right now?
(01:02:10):
And what he finds is that whenever you self-report, mind wandering, whatever to it's too, even if it's a good thing like, oh, I was thinking about my upcoming vacation, you're less happy than if you just weren't mind wandering when you report like, oh, I was deep in that dumb Excel spreadsheet that I was working on at work, when you're in flow and doing that, you feel better than if your mind is off thinking about something else. And so the implication is that the way we become happier as we get in the present moment, we kind of notice what's going on. For me walking over to the studio, I put my phone away and just notice the nice kind of chill in the air and the sights and all these things.
Mel Robbins (01:02:46):
How does that boost happiness to practice and grab these moments and come into the present moment?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:02:54):
Yeah, I think partly it's just being in the present moment. I mean, that's striking about some of this research is that when you're just there, even if they're there isn't awesome. Even if it comes with this morning, it was a little chilly, right? Be honest, and it was one of those days in Boston where it was beautiful water, but it was a little smell, a little smelly side. Just even though it didn't seem good, just the fact that I was there with it made me a little bit more grounded, a little bit more pleasant in my life.
(01:03:22):
That's one of the striking things is that presence works not just when everything is unicorns and rainbows being present also seems to work well when things don't feel so good. And you asked before, what are the biggest misconceptions that students have from the class or the biggest aha moments? And I think this is a real big one, which is that sometimes we need to commit to being present even when we don't feel so hot.
Mel Robbins (01:03:44):
What's interesting is that we always walk to the studio in the morning, and I'm almost always with Tracy, who's the executive producer, and Christine, who's our COO, if she's in town and we're never on her phones because our phones are in our bags and it takes us about 15 minutes to walk over here, and I always feel better. I always feel happier. I feel energized. And so it is something that I think we all know works. We wish it were something we could buy because that would feel instant and easier versus what you've been telling us all along, that happiness is something that you need to practice. It's a skill. It's something that can start leaking from the tire if you're not paying attention to it. But the really good news I'm realizing is that at any moment you can use any of the five things that you're teaching us to rewire our brains and help us boost our happiness.
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:04:48):
That's right.
Mel Robbins (01:04:49):
Now, can you share the third way that we rewire our minds for happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:04:53):
Well, it's something that you just mentioned getting on your drive in. It's the practice of experiencing gratitude and gratitude I think is a special form of presence that we really need to dig into. It's this idea of not just the noticing, which is regular presence, but noticing the things that are really good.
(01:05:09):
On my walk to your studio, it could be I'm walking right now. A few months ago I had a knee injury. I would've had to take that Uber, but oh, I'm out walking. I recently had covid and lost my sense of smell, completely lost my sense of smell it worst, which was awful. But even as making fun of the Lake Boston Harbor smell a little stinky, I could have a moment of gratitude for that of I can tell it's stinky, right? Which, oh my gosh, what a miracle that was and how easily it could have gone away. And so that's what gratitude does in presence. You're being present, but you're noticing that things don't have to be this way. I could miss out on these kind of gifts then. And if you kind of have your attitude like that, if you can kind of bust out of that negativity bias to notice some of these things, there's so much stuff out there that's a gift from our basic senses to the fact that we're above ground today.
(01:06:03):
Right? One of my favorite hacks for noticing the blessings that you might not have noticed is actually an ancient hack. It comes from the ancient stoics who had this idea of what they called negative visualization. And so their idea was just something that you love in life, your husband, your kid, your car, whatever. Just imagine it's not there anymore. It's gone. The last time you saw it was the last time you'll ever see it. You can, I don't want to think about that. Yeah, right. Then do that with your email, like your husband with Chris, right? The last time you saw him was the last time you're ever going to see him. My guess is when you get home tonight and you give him a hug, just that two seconds that we spent on that, you'll hug him a little bit more. So if you're listening right now and you've got a kid, the kid one is powerful, last time you saw your kid was the last time you're ever going to see them or gone or your parents or your parents. That's one hack that I like for gratitude. But another one is just kind of committing to scribbling it down.
Mel Robbins (01:06:57):
Is the writing important?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:06:59):
So it's more spending time thinking about it. That's important, but the writing kind of forces you to do that. So if you can commit to another practice, I've heard one of my students use is just when they're brushing their teeth, just go through, I'm really grateful for my family, I'm grateful for my job. I'm grateful that my legs work today. All of those things are things that might not be true, and so just find a time when you doing something anyway, brushing your teeth and think about it. But if writing it down helps, that can kind of force you to pay attention to it. And the nice thing is sometimes you can go back to it. I don't have a fancy, some people talk about gratitude journal. I don't have a fancy gratitude journal, but even sometimes in my notes app, if I'm being consistent with it, I'll scribble down things and that's a thing that you can go back to. We talk about our phones being bad, but sometimes we can use our phones for positive things and for me on a bad morning, looking back at that notes app and just seeing all the things, and they're often stupid things like, oh, that latte just tasted Really?
Mel Robbins (01:07:57):
That's actually not that stupid because it's almost like a stupid size of gratitude.
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:08:03):
Well, let's start there because that's the fourth way that we can unlock happiness, and it's through the practice of savoring and really just diving into it. You can drink your coffee or you can really be present thinking, how does this taste? How does this smell? How so lucky am I that I have this miracle of a sensation that can allow me to taste and smell this coffee, which again, just because I lost, it's more fragile than we think and we forget and just that act of being in it, and it's useful to know that we can do that kind of for anything. And so I've tried to remind myself to do that. Whenever I'm doing the dishes, I have a dishwasher, so it's not like I do dishes religiously, but sometimes there's like the one or two you got to do, but just the water on my hands and the suds...
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:08:48):
And a little bit of the smell of the dawn, which I'm like, oh, I like that kind of fun feeling, the porcelain, and it's so silly, but it turns that task that was this onerous stupid thing that I had to get done into a moment to be present and to notice some of these things feel really nice.
Mel Robbins (01:09:03):
My favorite way to do this is the weather. I always step outside and either remark to myself, what a beautiful day it is, or even if it's disgusting and gross and it's raining, I'll remark how wild the clouds look. And so I didn't realize that that's what that was, but it hyper focuses me on this thing that's happening that I just take a minute and take in, and I do feel this little,
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:09:36):
Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons that folks often talk about how being in nature can bring us happiness. I think it winds up being a little bit easier to savor in nature. The clouds are moving and they're so beautiful, or you're out in the trees and you hear the crunching. In places like Japan, they talk about this concept of forest bathing where you're just kind of out bathing in the forest and love that term. It sort of shows you the savoring where you're like, I'm just bathing in all these sensory experiences.
Mel Robbins (01:10:05):
Dr. Santos, what's a fifth way that we can rewire our minds for happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:10:10):
Oh man, there's so many. And my 26 weeks switched into only five tips. We talked about time already, so maybe for my fifth one, I'll talk about a strategy that I have a lot of trouble with, which is that we should bring a mindset of self-compassion. I think one of the ways we make ourselves really miserable is that we beat ourselves up a lot. We have incredibly high standards, and rather than achieving those high standards by talking to ourselves like a kind coach who's always motivating and knows we can fail, we talk to ourselves like this evil drill instructor that our head like, why could you be so stupid? We can't do it. And this, for some people, maybe even if you're listening...
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:10:49):
You might recognize this can just become a constant refrain in our head of beating ourselves up. And I think we do this not masochists, I think we do this, we think it works. We think that's the way to get off our couches and get into the world and do stuff. But researchers like Kristen Eff has studied like, Hey, does berating yourself on a constant mental loop basis really work? It turns out surprise, surprise. No, it makes us feel drained and it has a hugely negative effect on our happiness. And so Neff and others have come up with a much better, healthier mindset for self-talk, which is what they call, and I think self-compassion sound huge. So I think it's helpful to break it up into steps. Step one is something we've just been talking about a lot, which is sort of mindfulness and not even mindfulness of the exterior, but mindfulness of the interior, having some trouble with this, this is hard. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm off my game. It's being mindful that you're not in a perfect space. But then the second step is what people like Kristen Neff call common humanity. It's following that I'm in a bad space up with, and that's normal. It is a common human experience to feel overwhelmed. It is completely fine that I'm going through this. It makes sense. It is a common human experience. But then the third step, which is a hard step, is what Neff calls self-kindness. You say, how can I treat myself with some kindness? How can I treat myself like a friend? What can I take off my plate? What do I need right now? You kind of coach yourself. You would coach someone you really care about.
Mel Robbins (01:12:21):
I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, how could you possibly think you're going to be happy while you're hating on yourself?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:12:27):
Exactly.
Mel Robbins (01:12:27):
And so I think it's important for all of us to also be reminded that you should just assume that everybody that you meet is busy.
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:12:35):
Everybody's trashing themselves. Yeah, trashing themselves. No, one of my favorite quote that my students really love in the courses, you shouldn't be comparing your insides to other people's outsides, right? I see my inside of like, oh, and messing up, and I was thinking that thing that I didn't say, but I'm just comparing them to say your outside like, oh, you just put together podcast, you're doing a great job, but we don't see what's going on internally, so we shouldn't be comparing ourselves anyway. But that's a really unfair comparison. People are actively good at hiding when they're insides are self-critical or filled with doubt and so on.
Mel Robbins (01:13:08):
How does comparison play into happiness and unhappiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:13:12):
Oh, it's huge. I mean, another stupid feature of our mind is that our minds don't ever think about something objectively. So it takes something like salary, right? What's your salary? Right? Think about your salary right now. Is that a good salary? Probably not thinking about it objectively in terms of how much purchasing power you've had. You probably said, well, it's not a good salary makes more, or I could be making more, right? You're just comparing it to something else. Are you instantly think of people that you think of as pretty, and you kind of compare yourself often in a downward way. And this is just true of how our minds work. And the problem is that usually when we pick a kind of reference point as it's called, that's the comparison point, we pick a comparison point that's particularly awesome. That's really, really good. And even if you're at the top of your game, you do that too.
Mel Robbins (01:14:02):
Oh, of course. I feel like that never changes it just who you're looking at changes, but tend to be obsessed with, what is it called? Upward comparison, which is somebody that we perceive to be either of higher social status or that has something that we've been trashing ourselves over and then we obsess over that. Well, how the hell that's clearly draining the tire. So how do you stop doing that? I know all five things kind of honestly snap you out of
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:14:33):
It a little bit. I think one thing with comparison though, and this might be true for some of these hacks already, is it's going to be hard to fully shut it off because we just don't, our brains just work that way. They can't think objectively, but we have a little bit of control at what counts as the comparison point. I was just walking over the studios become the sort of metaphor we're using for this. But walking over the studio, I could compare myself to all the runners that were passing by really quickly, but my thought pattern went to, well, remember when you knee was toy messed up and you couldn't even walk and you'd be crutching over here? It's like finding a comparison that makes you feel good can actually make you feel, but our brains naturally go to the ones that make us feel crappy, but we can find sometimes find one that make us feel good.
Mel Robbins (01:15:20):
I'm starting to realize you have the ability to inflate your tire
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:15:25):
And you're constantly at the autobody shop with the little thingy pin in and it's ready to go. We just miss opportunities to fill it up.
Mel Robbins (01:15:32):
And you could even ask yourself at any moment, is this going to let the air out or is this actually going to fill me up a little bit? Even if it's just a little boost?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:15:41):
And those boosts last, right? We talked before about this idea of being happy in your life, which is a sort of positive emotion and being happy with your life. The more you just commit to those little boosts, it's not just an in your life boost that just makes you feel like your life has purpose. It makes you feel like your life is meaning. It makes you feel satisfied with your life too.
Mel Robbins (01:16:00):
So for the person that's listening, that may just feel a little bit of conflict about why this matters. And we do have listeners that are in refugee camps and we do have listeners that are facing extraordinarily difficult situations in the countries that they're living in right now, or they're going through just devastating grief or some kind of health scare, or they're just overwhelmed by the state of the world and how depressing things seem.
Mel Robbins (01:16:35):
Why does working on your own happiness matter when it feels like the world around you has such bigger problems?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:16:47):
I love that you asked this because honestly, if I had to say the question I get from students the most, it's this one. And I think the form for college students is a little bit similar. It's kind of like, how dare I dare I, with all the problems of the world focus on my own happiness? And I get it. There are real problems out there in the world, but I think this comes to that question shows a different incorrect theory we have about happiness, which is like if we are feeling happy, we're just going to let the rest of the world burn. I dunno if you're listening right now and the meme with the dog, with the flames going up and the dog's like this is fine. I think we think if we're just focusing on our own happiness, we'll be like that. But that's an empirical question. Are happy people doing stuff to fix the world? Are they letting it burn? And the answer is really clear. It comes from folks like Constantine Kush left at Georgetown and others who study, who are the people that are out there making a difference? And what he finds is if you survey people's level of positive emotion, if you survey how satisfied they are with their lives, the people who are taking action are the ones who are happiest.
(01:17:52):
There's this lovely effect in the field called the feel good, do good effect,
(01:17:56):
Which is that if you put people in a positive mood, they wind up doing better stuff. Studies, for example, like pipe really happy music at the gym versus kind of sadder music at the gym. And you have people when they're leaving the gym volunteer to do a survey or volunteer to help someone or donate blood. And what you find is that people, when they listen to the good music or are in a better mood just wind up doing the nice thing that takes them some time and energy, but it's for a good cause. And I think this is the answer to why we should all be focused on our happiness, is that I think one of the reasons the world is burning so badly is that we're all not feeling so good. And if we could intervene on the feeling good, we'd probably get a long way towards the doing good part too. Now, does that mean we just focus on our own individual happiness and ignore all the structural problems? For sure. I think we could work on those together, but I think we're all going to have a lot more emotional bandwidth to fix stuff if we are focused on filling up our happy tires.
Mel Robbins (01:18:51):
I have another reason that I would add to it, and it comes back to your metaphor of the tire, which is so helpful. If you're going through a period in your life where the tire is flat or deflated, it's very hard to move forward.
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:19:03):
Exactly.
Mel Robbins (01:19:03):
It's very hard to meet the challenges of your life right now. And if that's you, the reason why happiness matters is because absolutely every single thing that Dr. Santos just shared with us is a small way to fill the tire up, which means you can be better equipped to roll forward in your own life. And I also understand a great professor that you give your students happiness homework,
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:19:32):
It's not as bad as it sounds. It's not like happiness essays or multiple choice questions
Mel Robbins (01:19:37):
Or well, why is it so important to give them happiness homework? And what have you found over the years as students have tried to complete this happiness homework?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:19:46):
Yeah, so the analogy I use with my students is imagine if instead of being worried about my students' happiness, I was really worried about my students' level of fitness. I wanted them to get fit and make better muscles and get healthy. I could teach a whole class about day and how to do squats appropriately, and this is a deadlift and here's how muscles work. But if students closed their books...
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:20:08):
At the end of that lecture and went home and didn't hit the gym, nothing would change, right? They'd know, but they wouldn't necessarily put it into practice. And this is kind of the problem with a lot of the happiness research. The biggest bug in the whole class equation is like, you got to have to do this stuff. And if you're listening right now, it's not just my students. You just heard all this great stuff, but if you don't put it into practice and get your social connection and think about what you're grateful for and find ways to savor and put your phone away. If you don't do that stuff, nothing's going to change.
Mel Robbins (01:20:39):
What is one assignment that you can give to the person listening to take something that we talked about today and go do?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:20:50):
Well, I'm going to pick one that you're good at. I'm going to say that all of your listeners, sometime this week, the next seven days, you have to give at least three compliments to people in your life. They can be strangers, they can be someone else, but really kind of try to present the compliment in a way that really matters to the person you're talking to. And that's nice. It's boom, it's other oriented. You're doing something nice for somebody else, boom. It's social connection. You got to talk to somebody. And three, it's kind of savory because when you noticed my necklace this morning, it meant that you noticed it. You were present with it, you kind of liked it, noticed the color and things like that. So you're going to get a three fer with this compliment practice and extra bonus points if you tell us you did it, find me on social media, find mal and tell us what you did and tell us how it went.
Mel Robbins (01:21:33):
Yeah, I bet you're going to notice exactly what the research said. The tire inflates a little
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:21:40):
Bit, and again, the tir inflating especially, it's not going to pop right. It's not going to be so happy that you burst a single compliment's not going to do that. But over time, a few of these in the week, and you can be an overachiever like my Yale students, you don't have to stop at three. You could just do one every day. The more you pump it up, the more your happy your tire will be.
Mel Robbins (01:22:01):
Dr. Santos, what are your parting words?
Dr. Laurie Santos (01:22:05):
We can all be a little bit happier if we put in a little bit of time and energy.
Mel Robbins (01:22:10):
Well, I just want to thank you for being with us today and sharing everything that you just poured into us. I'm so excited to try it. I'm excited for the person who's listening to us to try it in their life and share it with their friends. I just really appreciate your generosity and you just have this unbelievable way. I feel smarter as I listen to you because you're weaving in so much science, but you do it in a way that makes me see the study and to understand the research and to feel very convinced that this is going to work. And I just truly appreciate that gift in you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And it's such a pleasure to always be able to spend this time with you. And I want to thank you for listening all the way to the end and for taking time.
(01:22:57):
We talked a lot about time when we were learning from Professor Santos for taking time and spending it on yourself. You deserve to be happier and so do the people that you love in your life. And there is zero doubt in my mind that if you follow the homework and if you really absorb everything that Dr. Santos taught us today and you do it, you will be happier and you deserve it. And one more thing, in case no one else tells you. Today, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your power to create a better life and learning how to just fill up the tires a little bit to keep your rolling forward. No matter what's going on, that will absolutely make your life a lot better. Alrighty, I'll see you in the very next episode and I'll be waiting for you the moment you hit play.
(01:23:50):
And because you're here on YouTube, I also just want to acknowledge you for watching all the way to the end. I mean, wasn't that extraordinary? I feel like I was back in college, but in the best way. And so thank you, thank you, thank you for watching all the way to the end. Thank you for hitting subscribe. It's my personal goal to have 50% of you that watch this channel become subscribers, and I'll tell you why. It's free. It supports this show. It tells my team that you love the content that we're putting out. It also helps us bring world-class experts like Professor Santos to our studios here so that we can bring you these videos and this life-changing information for free. So thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting me, and thank you for hitting subscribe. It really does matter and it's a tiny thing that you can do to say thanks. Alright, speaking of new videos, I'm sure you're thinking, my gosh, Mel, that was awesome. That really, really was something I'm going to use. What should I watch next? Well, you should definitely check out this one because you're going to absolutely love it. It's the perfect thing to watch after this one, and I'm going to be waiting for you as soon as you hit play. I'll see you there.
Key takeaways
Happiness is like a leaky tire…you don’t fix it once and forget it; you have to keep refilling it through small, daily actions that boost your mood and mindset.
Your brain’s negativity bias makes you notice problems more than blessings, which is why practicing gratitude and being present are essential for happiness.
Social connection boosts happiness for both introverts and extroverts, even if your brain thinks that talking to someone will feel awkward or draining.
After $75,000 a year, more money doesn’t increase your happiness. However, using money to buy back time can make you feel more fulfilled and less stressed.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, the fastest way to feel better is to help someone else. Doing something kind gives you a sense of time, connection, and meaning.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Laurie Santos, PhD
Dr. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist, professor at Yale, and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, specializing in the science of well-being and happiness.
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Podcast: The Happiness Lab
You might think you know what it takes to lead a happier life… more money, a better job, or Instagram-worthy vacations. You’re dead wrong.
Based on the psychology course she teaches at Yale — the most popular class in the university’s 300-year history — The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos will take you through the latest scientific research and share some surprising and inspiring stories that will change the way you think about happiness.
Resources
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- Yale University Comparative Cognition Laboratory: Dr. Santos Publications
- The New York Times: Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness. Here’s What Some Learned.
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Mistakenly Seeking Solitude
- Re-Quilibrum: Ashley Whillans: Time Affluence and Time Poverty
- The University of British Columbia: Not enjoying your dinner out? Try putting the phone away
- Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: Smartphone use undermines enjoyment of face-to-face social interactions
- The New York Times: Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness
- Stanford University: Take Time to Be a Good Samaritan
- Science: Wandering mind not a happy mind
- Greater Good Magazine: Happiness Doesn’t Make You Ignore Social Problems
- Princeton University: Kahneman resolves conflict on income-wellbeing study, finds point at which unhappiness stops decreasing for unhappy people
- Psychological and Cognitive Sciences: Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved
- Mindful: It’s Time to Break Up with Your Phone
- The Washington Post: The Test of Time
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life
- Science: Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness
- New York Times: How to feel less lonely.
- Harvard Business Review: 3 things that won’t make you happy.
- Forbes: 5 ways to break out of your slump.
- Stanford Center on Longevity: Strong relationships help you live longer.
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