Feminism and Power

[MUSIC] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is no small endeavor. Exploring what it means to live a good life. [MUSIC] We have some theories about the kind of stuff that will make us happy, right? We often assume it's about our circumstances if I could. You hit the power ball tomorrow, I would be happier. But what many, many studies have shown is that our forecasts are off. That's Yale Psychology professor and host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Dr. Laurie Santos talking about her research on the science of well-being. A lot of the scientific work in the field of positive psychology, happiness studies, really winds up verifying a lot of the stuff that we've known from spiritual traditions for a long time. We discuss the viral happiness course that catapulted her into the headlines and the science-backed strategies that can help us all lead happier lives. We know what to do, we know what works, we just have to figure out good ways to put it into practice. All coming right up. 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Each week, we hear from some of the most fascinating scholars and thinkers as we tackle big topics, like how whales became the face of environmental activism, how to succeed at failing, and whether public transportation should be free. Go ahead, listen to Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lee C. Camp, this is no small endeavor exploring what it means to live a good life. The switch took thinking about the science of all being really happened in an attempt to help the students, and a little bit to help myself because of when I was thinking about these students I was realizing I was in doing such a hot example of showing how I was following all these strategies too. That's Psychology Professor and host of the Happiness Lab podcast Dr. Laurie Santos. She's discussing the origins of a hugely successful course that she's been leading at Yale since 2018 with an aim to help students sort out how to lead happier lives. I just saw what everybody's talking about in the news, right? Where nationally more than 40% of college students are too depressed to function most days, nationally more than 60% of college students say they're overwhelmingly anxious. Nationally more than one in 10 college students has seriously considered suicide in the last six months, right? Like these are statistics that are thrown around and how seeing this in my community. The program that Laurie created to help her students navigate the difficult realities of young adulthood quickly became the most popular course in Yale's three century history, almost a quarter of the student body enrolled and her work on the science of well-being made national headlines. Professor Laurie Santos has been teaching Psychology at Yale for 15 years, but it's her newest class on happiness that has the campus buzzing. Each night students have happiness homework, meditate for 10 minutes, sleep eight hours, but don't think it's an easy aim. She said to be happier, you have to decrease your social media usage. So how's that going? It's really, really hard. But when practiced, students say they feel better. Her groundbreaking course, Psychology and the Good Life, has since been featured in the New York Times in NBC Natalie News, Day Show, GQ, Slate and O magazine, and the online version of the class, The Science of Well-Being, has attracted more than four million learners from around the globe. Over a career spanning more than 22 years, Dr. Santos has earned a place among the most important heaviness researchers in the world, and she says that the lessons inherent in her work are only becoming more important and urgent in the digital age. So many of the strategies we talk about, whether that's being present or being grateful or curbing your social comparison, that all gets harder when you've got a cell phone around you looking at stuff on social media. And I worry that so much of the things that allow us to get flow and flourishing are going to get even harder in the face of the AI tools that are coming up, right? A frictionless chatbot that always is very sick of fantic to you, and you never have to schedule with, right? It's going to be easier than like calling a friend over time. The temptation to just get all your work done with these tools, rather than get the flow that comes or pushing through a hard essay or a hard thing at work, I worry that a lot of these tools coming up are going to be even more of a challenge when it comes to some of these strategies. But ultimately, good news is we know what to do, we know what works, we just have to figure out good ways to put into practice. So what is it that works, you might ask? Well, Dr. Santos says the first step is perhaps to reframe the way we think about our suffering. The way I tell my Yale students about negative emotions, I say, treat them like the dashboard on your car. If you're driving in your car and the engine light comes on or the tire light comes on, that's inconvenient, doesn't feel great, but it's giving you some useful information, which is like something's up with the tire. I got to take some time later, you know, after this drive to like check it out and fix it. And perhaps some good news here, you may not need to make drastic changes to your life to improve your happiness, just like the dashboard light on your car, a bit of distress does not necessarily mean you need a whole new set of tires. It could be as simple as performing a bit of routine maintenance. The great news is these baby steps matter, you know, scribbling in your gratitude journal three times a week can move the needle, right, a little 10 minutes of meditation can move the needle like a quick chat with a breeze to the coffee shop can move the needle, right? So you don't need a lot of time to do these things, you need some intention, but definitely finding ways to do it in baby steps is a helpful healthy way to engage in these practices. So today our conversation with the creator of the world's most popular university course on happiness. Enjoy and if I may, don't forget to do the homework. Dr. Laura Santos, welcome. Thanks so much for having me on the show. The light to have you with us. I've been especially pleased to have you scheduled for an interview because I've used a lot of your material and classes I talk to undergrads for years and so it's nice to get to visit with you today. As someone who has done a lot of comparative work in cognition, which is not language that is, you know, lay accessible perhaps. Give us some ideas about some of the things that you early on began to discover or compare between dogs, monkeys and humans and how that has informed some of your work. Yeah, well comparative cognition is just this big field in psychology that explores this question of what makes humans unique, right? How are we different than non-human animals? Why argue and I, having this podcast or using verbal language and all the technology of recording, when no amoeba or obronobo is doing anything like that, right? And so for a long time, I sort of broadly interested in this question of what makes humans special, but I focused on this question of whether or not some of the errors that humans make are special. And so we are really interested, for example, in economic errors, things like loss of version and risk of version. We did some kind of classic studies with Kupuchin monkeys showing that surprisingly they make a lot of the same errors when it comes to money as humans do, which is interesting. With some of the dogs, what we were finding is that the social errors that people make being over trusting or believing and copying the actions of other people, dogs don't seem to make those same errors. And so some of those errors might seem to be unique to humans. And so I like to think that I took a different approach than many comparative researchers where other researchers were asking like, are not human animals as smart as humans doing all the cool smart things that humans do, but really focused on do not human animals share some of the stupid biases that humans have as well. What are some of the comparative irrational economic biases or irrational behaviors with regard to money between monkeys and humans? Yeah. So one of the big ones that we studied was what's broadly known as reference dependence, right? This is just this idea that you're not thinking objectively. You're thinking in terms of a particular reference point. So for example, if you see me holding one grape and you give me some money and all of a sudden I give you two grapes, that feels amazing. But if you see me holding three grapes and you pay me some money and I hand you over two grapes, you Even though objectively that's the same amount, you feel like that's terrible. I could have gotten so much more. Like, why did you take some away from me and so on? And this is the same kind of bias that we were seeing in our monkeys that they're making decisions not based on the amount they get, but they amount relative to what they were expecting. And this is a homework that's been studied in human economic decision-making since the really famous work of Connemon and Tversky. This is what Danny Connemon originally won the Nobel Prize for was showing that humans have some of these errors and that they play out not just in terms of how we make decisions, but also in terms of how we evaluate risk. So we become more risk seeking when we're dealing with losses because we think like, "Well, if I could have the chance of not getting less than I expect, then that would be great." And that can sometimes lead us to take on more risk than we'd like to. - You've used the language of miss wanting a great deal. So help us think about how we miss want with regard to what's gonna make us happy. - Yeah, so miss wanting is just this idea that we have some theories about the kind of stuff that will make us happy, right? We often assume it's about our circumstances. If I could hit the power ball tomorrow, I would be happier, right? If I could get the perfect relationship, some promotion at work for my Yale students, if I could get perfect grades, I would be happier. But we can ask whether or not those theories are correct, right? You can have you make a prediction, what psychologists often call an affective forecast, you forecast how happy you'll be if circumstance A comes out, and then we test when you get circumstance A, how happy are you really? And what many, many studies by folks like Dan Gilbert and others have shown is that our affective forecasts are off. We predict that certain positive things will make us feel very good and very good for a long time, and they just don't. And interestingly, we predict that negative circumstances will make us feel bad and very bad for a long time. And they simply don't. And this is this phenomenon of miss wanting. - So if you think about that from an evolutionary perspective, what would be maybe one of the reasons that that stuff is wired into us? I think it's not so much that evolution wired in a prediction system that's off. I think evolution wired in a whole host of biases that mess us up. So take reference dependence. I think it was really hard for natural selection to wire in objective truths about how much food we should get or how many kids we should have or something like that. But a good strategy for natural selection is to say, well, look, I don't know what the environment's going to produce in terms of like the right number of say fruit to forage. But if you get as much fruit as Joe and you get as much fruit as Lucy, then you're doing okay, right? So now we build in something like reference dependence. You're paying attention to what other people have and just setting some reference point. And so I think those are the kinds of mechanisms that make us miss want, right? It's that we have these ways of viewing the world that are relative to what others are doing. And that means that we're not tracking the objective truths. And if you look at why we miss want, for example, when it comes to money, that's often because we're in theory going from some objective amount. Like when I earn a million dollars, I'll be happy. But as soon as you get a million dollars now, you're hanging out with these other millionaires, you're hanging out with people who are earning more than you. And now you start to feel bad. And so it's not so much that natural selection selected for these kind of bad predictions. It's just that our brains aren't taking into account all the biases we have that are going to make us not appreciate the stuff we get. - Yeah. Another study that I learned from you was the study of metal winners. - Mm-hmm. - Would you describe that study and what we learned from that? - Yeah, very relevant. You and I are having this conversation at the tail end of the Olympics this year. The effect is that we have these objective rankings in the world, right? The gold medal is just better than the silver medal, which is better than the bronze medal. And those three folks are better than the other billions of people on the planet at whatever their sport is. So you'd expect it, emotional expressions on an Olympic stand would reflect those objective ratings that the gold medalist would be the happiest, silver medal, slightly less happy than gold, but still really happy. And the bronze medalist just under that. But when researchers actually went and measured the facial expressions that Olympians were showing on the stand, they didn't find that. Yes, the gold medalist was happy, but if you looked at the silver medalist, they were showing facial expressions like contempt, deep sadness, anger. It's not like they're just a little bit unhappy. They're actively showing negative emotions. And so you ask why? Well, if you won the silver medal, you're not thinking, "Well, I'm objectively the second best on the whole planet, "you know, better than billions of people." You're looking to the one person who did better than you were thinking, like, crap. That's the very salient reference point. Three, one hundredths of a second better. And I would be very happy. Exactly. So that's the salient reference point for silver medalist. And now you might think, well, if we look at the bronze medalist, they should be even more contemptuous and angry and sad. Turns out, no, if anything, they seem to have even happier expressions than the gold medalist. And so you're like, how could that be if they're objectively even worse off? Well, the answer is that the salient reference point for the bronze medalist probably isn't gold. They're probably thinking, oh my gosh, by the skin of my teeth, like, I'm on the medal stand at all, 2.2 seconds and I would have missed it and I would have gone home empty handed. We often talk about finding a silver lining and I often joke that from this study, we really want to find the bronze lining. We want to recognize there are people doing worse off than us. And that there's reason to be grateful for the situation that we find ourselves in. (gentle music) (gentle music) - Let's talk some about some key practices that your research has pointed towards as helping us cultivate happiness. - Yeah, for my students, I often break these down into behaviors we can use to feel happier and sort of mindset shifts that we can use to feel happier. And in terms of behaviors, it's just the classic stuff that social scientists have known for a while. A huge one is social connection, right? Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Both with their close friends and family members, but also just with the priest at the coffee shop, your neighbor down the street that you see outside when you're walking the dog, those kinds of small moments of social connection matter. Also, there's lots of studies suggesting that becoming a little bit more other oriented makes us happier. And this is something that I think pushes back against the current cultural narrative. The current cultural narrative is all about self care and treat yourself and me, me, me. But studies show that individuals who, for example, donate money to charity or happier than those who don't control for level of income and so on. You find that people who do kind actions for others are happier. And even in experiments where you force people to do nice stuff for others, those folks wind up happier than if you force someone to do the same nice thing for themselves. And so studies really show that getting into the headspace of other people, thinking about other people's happiness is really a path to your own happiness. And then there's behaviors that are just the standard stuff, getting a little exercise, making sure you get enough sleep, getting rest, engaging in what social scientists these days call time affluence, like making sure you have some free time for the things that matter. Those kinds of behavioral changes can make a really big difference. Talk more about time affluence that you just mentioned there. What are you learning about that? Yeah, well, I think it's something that religious leaders have known for a long time. If you look at most religious traditions, they have this idea of the Sabbath or taking a break or having some contemplative time. What researchers are learning is the subjective sense that you have some free time matters a lot, right? So if somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey, can we get coffee sometime?" And you're like, "How about never?" 'Cause if I look at my schedule, it's like the hour's never gonna fit in there. That has an enormous cost. And studies by Ashley Willins and her colleagues find that if you self-report being the opposite of time affluent, what folks call time, famish, where you're like starving for time, that can be as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report suddenly becoming unemployed. So I think we need to promote having free time. And this one's an interesting one because I feel like not only do we miss want to this, but I think we're often filling our time with lots of stuff that we assume is gonna make us happy and it's not more hours at work, more accolades, chasing the next promotion, whatever it is when we might just be better off having a date or rest. - Hmm. What about this notion of good enough? Maybe even the virtue of good enough. What are you seeing learning about that? - Yeah, I think this winds up being really important in part because it's related to a mindset shift that I talk a lot about with my students, which is sort of fighting self-criticism, fighting perfectionism, fighting this cult of should. Right, I think so many of us are walking around with this drill instructor in our head that's screaming at us being like, you need to do more, you should be better, you should should should. And joke with my students that this is shoulding all of your self-haha, right? But I think that coming to terms with the fact that we are not gonna live a life where we're going to be perfect, we only have limited time on this planet. And that means that there's gonna be lots of great things that we just can't fit in. And that sucks, but we can have some radical acceptance about that. And I think it can be very hard, especially for the type A folks that I work with at Ivy League Institution to be like, I'm not gonna do more, I'm gonna just do it good enough. But that understanding that you are just a human and it's normative to like not be able to do everything, that can be really powerful. Is that perfectionism something that you've struggled with yourself? - Perfectionism is a big one, but the study show it's not just me, there's some lovely studies by Thomas Kern and colleagues just showing how much perfectionism has increased since the 1980s. Either because our cultural standards are changing or because we see these images of perfection on social media that are curated. I think there's lots of reasons for it, but so many of us are meeting ourselves up much more than we would have been in the 1960s or 70s. (gentle music) You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with world renowned happiness researcher and Yale Professor Laurie Santos. I love hearing from you, tell us what you're reading who you're paying attention to or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at Lee@nosmall Endeavor.com. You can get show notes for this episode your punty. cast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in the episode and a full transcript. Would be most appreciative if you'd go to your favorite podcast app. Write us up a glowing five star review of No Small and Ever. Those reviews help extend the reach of the beauty, truth and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world. Coming up, Laurie and I discuss the challenges of behavior change and a little something she calls the GI Joe fallacy. Hello friends, Lee C camp here. Do you ever wish you had more folks to discuss the conversations we offer on No Small and Ever? Something like a podcast listening club where you could engage big ideas about what it means to live life well and then discuss it with friends and companions. If so, you have stumbled upon the announcement you have been waiting for. We're pleased to announce the start of Endeavor together. Our new initiative that equips and nurtures close knit communities to talk about the things you actually want to talk about. Each small group conversation series is built upon our podcast content and provides you with super easy to use content with questions, videos, links and guidance so that you or any good and willing soul can host small group conversations exploring what it means to live a good life. Maybe you'll meet in homes around a table, maybe in a coffee shop or a local park, maybe at work during lunch hour, maybe in a church Sunday school class. What we are providing is the scaffolding for good conversation. The rest is up to you. And here's the best part. Thanks to generous support from the Lily Endowment, it's free. The first two series have been released. The first lets disagree better and the second vulnerability. Get started today. Visit No Small Endeavor.com and click on Endeavor together. Again, go to No Small Endeavor.com and click on Endeavor together. Enjoy. If you listen to No Small Endeavor chances, are you care about questions like what does it mean to live a good life? And how do we grow in wisdom, compassion or purpose? Which is why I want to recommend another podcast I think you'll enjoy with and for hosted by Dr. Pam Kean. Pam's a leading voice in the science of human flourishing and on our podcast with and for. Pam brings together psychologists, researchers, practitioners for conversations about how we grow as people and live lives marked by meaning and resilience. So you might check out some of the No Small Endeavor friends she's had like Parker Palmer reflecting on vocation and community or Kristen Neff exploring the power of self-compassion. Need somewhere to start? Well, check out my recent conversation with Pam. We talk about the pursuit of a good life and the role faith and community play in shaping who we become. We had a great time and a great conversation. Follow with and for hosted by Dr. Pam Kean on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. So when you think about attending to the self, one of our guest Kristen Neff down in Texas has done a lot on self-compassion. How do you see helpful self-compassion as opposed to a sort of deleterious effect upon me, me, me? Yeah, I think this is really critical because I think we often get self-compassion wrong. I do our Kristen Neff's work. It's one of the like mindset shifts I focus on a lot with my students. But I think I think we often get wrong, especially when you hear the term self-compassion is we often think that it's self-indulgence. Like we often think if well if I was just kind to myself and was it screaming at myself in my head like I'd never get off the couch, right? But I think one of the things I love about Kristen Neff's work is that she reminds us that self-compassion is treating yourself and talking to your self like you would a friend. If you had a friend that was really messing up, he's sitting on the couch all day eating the bonbons, I hope you wouldn't scream at them like a drill instructor, but I hope you wouldn't just be like, "Oh yeah, you're messing up. That's okay. I hope you get curious. Be brave and tackle the problem." This isn't working. How can we fix this? Like, let's get curious. Let's problem solve. You'd become this kind of compassionate coach who's dealing with the problem, radically accepting where you've been before, but moving forward to figure out what you can do better. And that's the attitude that you want to take towards yourself. What about with regard to loneliness and the loneliness epidemic? What's especially standing out to you that's helpful in your research that are appropriate and fruitful responses to that? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things there. One is really just that all of us really need social connection for high happiness, right? And I think so many of us are substituting the social connection. We'd normally get in person in real life for what we're doing online, right? We're scrolling, we're looking at feeds, and I often say that that's like the "nutri-sweet of social connection" kind of gives you the sense that you're connecting, but it's not giving you any psychological nutrition. And so I think finding ways to really prioritize connection is huge. But I also like to give a caveat to that because there's some lovely new work coming out of Michaela Rodriguez's work at the University of Michigan finding that all this talk of loneliness can sometimes make the alone time we naturally experience and a alone time that's normative feel bad. And her work shows that if you recategorize your alone time in a healthier way, like this is my time for contemplation, or this is my time that I need to emotionally regulate, it can make the time that you spend alone less lonely. I guess in some traditions of spiritual formation they'll speak of the difference between loneliness and solitude, whereas solitude is sort of helpful posture towards that. What would be other key steps in letting this be solitude as opposed to loneliness? Yeah, I think one is kind of taking time for intentional contemplation, right? Whether that's forms of meditation, just kind of being present. I think it's also a great time to make sure you're using that time to emotionally regulate. This is your time away from the busyness of the world to take a breath, to notice what's going on, use it wisely. And then I think this is also just like a time that we can use for self-reflection, right? These days, of course, a lot of folks are in therapy and using some time to talk through things with friends, but there's also really powerful studies showing the importance of things like expressive writing, sitting down and journaling and thinking through problems. And that can allow you to get the narrative inside you need. And so I think there are ways to use alone time in healthier ways. When you think about the word happiness or the phrase "well-being," how do you define those? Yes, I know you had Sonya Lubramirsky on the show recently, and I totally steal Sonya's definition. So she defines happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. And this is in part because psychologists like to think of happiness as having an affective component, the emotional part that's being happy in your life, having a decent number of positive emotions, and also a cognitive part of happiness, how you think your life is going, that being happy with your life. One of the reasons I like this definition is that you can notice times in life when these dissociate. There's times where you're really pushing to something that feels really meaningful for you, but you have to get rid of some hedonic pleasure and some positive emotion to do that well. And I think we all have heard and spiritual traditions are right with the opposite balance, with people who are getting every single hedonic pleasure, but when it comes to meaning in life or a sense of purpose or thinking your life is going well, you don't have it. Those definitions I like, in part because they're good standards for the interventions of the kind I talk about these behaviors and mindset shifts that matter for happiness, we can measure those things pretty well. Like we can ask people, are you happy in your life? And all things considered, how do you feel your life is going? But I think it's in some ways a narrow definition when we start thinking more spiritually, it would sense what somebody like Aristotle might have meant by happiness, a sense of you, Diminia, sort of living a good life, and so on. I think that the word happiness also leads us to a particular confusion and they're interesting studies about this that when most people use the term happiness, they mean that first affective part of happiness. They mean feeling good in your life. They almost confuse happiness with a sense of joy or just broadly any positive emotion, not thinking about the purpose part or the meaning part or the kind of the deeper part of happiness. So all these terms are not great. And I think that's one of the reasons psychologists have used well-being. They're like, oh, we'll just pick a different word that means to not confuse people, but I'm not sure it has helped. The GI Joe fallacy that you know it doesn't necessarily help you. So help us with that. Yeah. So this is a concept I worked on with my colleague Tamara Gennler, the philosopher, and it stems from a bad 80s cartoon that your listeners may or may not remember called GI Joe, which is a cartoon about army guys. I think nobody really remembers what happened in the cartoon, but what people remember is at the end of every episode, they had this little public service announcement where they talk kids in the 80s things like don't talk to strangers and look both ways when you cross this very point when you look back at some of these videos. But at the end of the public service announcement, the kid who was learning whatever GI Joe was teaching would often say, thank you, GI Joe. Now I know. And GI Joe would say, and knowing is half the battle and go, GI Joe. But this is the idea, right? This idea is knowing is half the battle. I know what I'm supposed to do to feel happier and like, I'm done. But you know, so much work suggests that you're not done. It's one thing to know what you're supposed to do, but it's another thing to put those things into practice. We know these things, of course, when it comes to our physical health, so many of us know that we should be eating more green leafy vegetables and getting the right recommended about a sleep and exercise. But that doesn't necessarily translate into doing that in your daily life. And I think so many of the happiness things we've been talking about are like that. You know, here all the news reports about loneliness and social connection. That doesn't mean that when you you get home from a busy day rather than plopping on the couch and scrolling, you're going to call a friend. You really need to put in some work to make these strategies happen in your own life. So what's the golden ticket to doing it? I wish there was one. There's another domain. I mean, you know, behavior changes really hard. But ways to do it are, first of all, to know the science. I think it at least has helped me know some of these studies and realize, wow, like I can see the graph of how you'll be, if I'm hanging out with friends regularly versus not, right? I think there's also lots of evidence for the power of habits. Something else Aristotle knew very well that if you just do these behaviors over and over again, that becomes your character, right? And the science of habits shows that the more you do this stuff, the easier it becomes to do it. Finally, again, something else Aristotle knew was that if we engage in social support, these things become easier. So if your family members are engaging in gratitude at the table, or if you have a religious group that's going to work with you and pray and meditate, or if you have a community group that's getting together regularly, you can harness social support to put these positive behaviors into practice. So those are some of the techniques we teach, but we did not have the magic pill for behavior change. It'd be so great if we did. So you've alluded to Aristotle a couple of times. How do you think of the work that you do in continuity with Aristotelian virtue theory, virtue tradition, or other virtue traditions, and how do you see there being discontinuity, if any? I think a lot of the scientific work in the field of positive psychology, happiness studies, whatever, really winds up verifying a lot of the stuff that we've known from spiritual traditions for a long time, right? I put Aristotle in that category, I put Epititus in that category, I put a lot of Buddhist traditions in that category, a lot of Christian traditions, even if you look at the stuff we've just been talking about, like time affluence, there are sabbaths, there are rest, self-compassion, compassion is the type of thing for ourselves and others that many spiritual traditions talk about grace. If you look at social connection, even if religious traditions aren't preaching about it, most religious practices are having you engage in it where you go to services with other people and so on. And so I think of much of this work is really tied with some of these principles, but in some ways it didn't have to be that way. The nice thing about the science is we can do the experiment to ask, is this really helping? Is it really moving the needle? And often we find that it is, but it didn't have to go that direction. What about burnout? I guess in some way that just goes back to time affluence or lack thereof, but I don't know how have you thought about that? Burnout is another one of these terms culturally that's tossed out a lot, but in clinical spaces means a very specific thing. And so burnout isn't just like I'm feeling too tired or whatever clinically, according to work by Christina Masleck and colleagues, has these three particular symptoms. So symptom number one is what's called emotional exhaustion, not just you're tired, but you can't emotionally handle putting one more thing on your plate. Even if you had a really great night's rest or a week long vacation, like you still would come back feeling just as emotionally tired, that sort of symptom number one. Symptom number two is what she calls depersonalization, but it's basically a form of cynicism. You start to read negative intentions into everybody that you're working with, your clients, the people on your team, you're just like, oh, that person's getting on your last nerve. And that's a real symptom of burnout. Number three is what Masleck calls a sense of personal and effectiveness, which is this idea that like even if you did your job perfectly, it would just be bad or it wouldn't work well or just wouldn't be worth it. I think classic cases of burnout people hear about in the healthcare field, nurses who are just feeling exhausted, getting annoyed with their patients, but more, feeling like their job is a big mismatch with the values they came into it for. I came into like, you know, help people heal and feel better, but like I'm feeling out insurance forms around canceling care, whatever it is, right? The idea is that the job you had, what you wanted to be doing is kind of mismatched with what you ultimately wanted to. That's really what burnout is, and it's important to know that burnout isn't just your psychology. It's often in an interaction with the form of work you're doing, whether that's work at a job, but it could be caregiving for elderly parents or doing a volunteer job where these things get mismatched. It's really you interacting with an institution. And that's important because when you think about solving for burnout, you often have to solve for those mismatches with what's going on at your work. So in bringing in this question of relationship to institutions or even more broadly social conditions, talk just about this so-called weird science bias. Help us think through some of that. Yeah, so weird is an acronym that researchers like Joe Heinrich at Harvard have used to describe the typical subjects of studies. So it stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. You know, the undergraduate students, institutions like mine, that tend to be the ones we test, right? And the problem with testing those folks is that the interpretation is often not about Western, educated, but you'll undergraduates. This is what happens if they write in a gratitude journal. The idea is, here's what happens for people everywhere they write in a gratitude journal. And of course, at times that assumption is wrong, right? I think this is something psychologists know, but it can be hard logistically to fix. The best kinds of studies are the ones that use methods that allow for these huge data sets, often international data sets that are testing people around the world. And I think more and more positive psychologists are starting to partner up with teams who have access to those data sets. So for example, the World Happiness Report, which is a big report that looks at factors that matter for happiness around the world, is able to test more than 200 different countries, and they do kind of nationally representative samples in all those countries. So they're really able to say like, no, no, no, we find something with the world happiness scallop data set like, this isn't weird, right? This is kind of everybody we could possibly test that we can have access to. And some of those new studies are bearing out the sorts of things that we've just been talking about. So it's a critique that I think is important to remember, but sometimes they wind up generalizing in ways that we expect. Coming up, short break followed by our discussion on toxic positivity, tech, and the latest social media trend that is driving Laurie crazy. So how do you think then about the importance of playing out extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, saying this case to be kind or to be generous? Where does the line fall for whether that's helpful or not for a person's happiness? What are the mechanisms we use for behavior changes like let's pick in the physical health domain, right? I want to run more. I want to get more physical activity. I know I'll buy one of these tracker devices and I'll give myself a little being in a gold star every time I get the workout in, right? In theory, this is useful for behavior change, but psychologists since the 1950s have known that it has a nasty effect on your motivation, which is that when you slap an extrinsic reward on something that used to be intrinsically motivated, it can decrease the intrinsic motivation you get. What do I mean? I used to like running and I wanted to go running for the kind of runners high, but now I'm getting this little ding on my Fitbit or whatever the tracker device is. And now I'm only doing it for the Fitbit, right? Which means I cheat, have friends who do this who like, I'm just going to walk back and forth in the room and like shake my arm a lot. So the tracker thing's time like, you know, moving around a little bit, right? You know, that's a funny domain of moving physically, like I see this in the connection with grades, right? There's real worry that students are doing things to get the perfect grade, not for the ultimate intrinsic goal, which is learning the material, you know, this sort of nice feeling that you get when you learn stuff. There's a real danger of this with the happiness work too, right? If you're giving yourself little gold stars of like, oh, I meditated today or I wrote in my gratitude journal, whatever, all of a sudden that's going to reduce your motivation to do it naturally. It might even sap some of the little happiness boost that you get from some of these things. I think the extrinsic motivators also come with all the sheds and I have to and these kinds of things, which can also make these things feel a little bit yucky over time. So I think the key is that whenever possible, you want to honor the intrinsic motivation that you're getting from these things, really take time to notice that and use that as the reinforcer that causes you to do a behavior more. What about the quest to be happy all the time or toxic positivity? This gets back even to our definition of happiness, right? Sort of partly about being happy in your life. And I think people can mistake that for being happy in your life all the time, like every moment of every day, right? This is this idea of toxic positivity that any negative emotion is like, oh, I'm feeling sad, something's wrong. I need a pill. I need to fix that, right? But pretty much everything we know about human psychology suggests that negative emotions are normative, right? It is normal in the midst of our attention economy to feel overwhelmed sometimes. It is normal with the current news cycle to occasionally feel frustrated or anxious or sad, right? But we don't like those negative emotions. And so our move is to suppress them or think, you know, in these toxic positive thoughts, like, something's wrong. I get to get rid of them. And I think a much healthier way to think about our negative emotions is to realize that they are useful, normative signals. And I think our sense of loneliness is like that. Like, ooh, I might need to get in some social connection. Sadness suggests there's something wrong in the world. You might want to pay attention to or notice, right? Over a while, the big one, that means, whoa, something's wrong. I get to take something off my plate. These are signals that our body is using to tell us something's not in equal. equilibrium here and we need to change things around. How do you consider the relationship between, let's say, disorder, desire and thus, unhelpful information from our emotions? So I think there's a way to think of like the negative states we want to honor, right? Like loneliness or sadness or something like that. And the negative states that are coming from the miswanting, right? Like, I need that promotion or kind of craving and so on. And this is a spot where I think understanding some of these biases can really help us. And also the kind of contemplative practices that folks talk about, like Buddhists will notice that there's a ton of kind of sense of craving, but they say, Oh, that's not a negative state I should listen to. That's a negative state I should work to notice and radically accept and regulate as opposed to maybe something like loneliness where you might realize, like, Oh, this is a need that's not being filled, right? And I think in other domains, we can start to figure this out. We can tell the difference between real hunger, like I haven't eaten something in a long time. I need to get some calories in my body and like a craving of like, Oh, that cupcake on the table on the desk right now looks really good. I should have it, right? But that takes a lot of mindfulness, a lot of noticing a lot of paying attention to your own body signals to distinguish the two. And then how does all this play into grief? What's the research showing about helpful and or unhelpful practices of grief? Grief is one of these practices where it is normative, right? It is normative. If you've lost someone to feel sad about them, it's normative. If you have a connection to want to honor that connection over time, have memories of that person and so on. These are the kinds of things we want to build into healthy, happy community. There's a time and place for some of these things that might come with some strategies for regulating emotions so that it was interviewing one of my podcast guests who was talking about grief that said the worst moment of grief she experienced was she was just like picking out yogurt at the store and realize she wouldn't need the for pack anymore because her partner had just died and literally like collapses before in the grocery store and was balling crying like, you know, not ideal, right? And so I think we want to honor those healthy, negative emotions like grief, but also have strategies for regulating them so that we can experience them at the right time and place. And I really do like these strategies of making space for negative emotions so that you can honor that and use them in the productive ways that they're there, but find ways to regulate them and have that at the right time and place. Are there other kind of social trends that you think are especially damaging to our pursuit of these helpful practices of well being? Well, tell you one that I see on social media all the time that like this practice of manifesting. So this is like right now it's like, oh, just think about getting money or the perfect relationship and you'll kind of manifest it. And the reason I really don't like this one is that it's nuance because there is evidence for positive psychology, but the power of positive belief, right? Believing that something is possible optimism, hope, these are great things, right? We've known this for a long time. There's a very famous effect called the banister effect, which is named after Roger Bannister, who's those the first runner to ever run the four minute mile. And the reason his story is interesting is like nobody believed it was physically possible for a human body to run the four minute mile. Bannister was a doctor and he was like, no, no, I think bodies can do this. And he finally believed it was possible, ran it and did it. And what's interesting was like in the months that passed, several other brothers started running the four minute mile. So this thing that no one ever done for decades now of a sudden lots of people do it. That's the power of belief. If you believe something's possible, it makes it more achievable. But there's a danger to the particular form that all these manifested people talk about how you're supposed to think about positive police, which isn't just believing it's possible. It's visualizing all the rewards you'll get from it, right? So it's like, oh, if I could get the perfect partner, if somebody did give a Valentine's Day gift to it, it'd be so great. And I'd love it so much. This is a problem because we know that imagined rewards in the mind and brain work a lot like real rewards. There's these studies by Carrie Moore wedgen others that if you either imagine slowly putting quarters into a vending machine versus slowly eating M&M's one by one, those forms of imagining have different consequences. If I later give you a big bowl of M&M's and you've been imagining eating those M&M's one by one, you don't want anymore because your brain already thinks you've gotten those rewards. And this is the danger of manifesting. She's like, oh my God, this is the wonderful thing that would happen if I got a new relationship. Or this is the wonderful thing that would happen if I got a perfect grade on my midterm. Your brain thinks you already got that reward and there's studies by Gabrielle Otingen and colleagues that show you'll put in less work to do that reward. Okay. That's what people are. That is, I've never heard this before. That's his fascinating. Yeah. So she finds it. For example, the women who have the most positive fantasies about weight loss, like, think you, oh, it's going to be so great. They do the less stuff to get to weight loss. The students who have the most positive fantasies about getting good grades, do less stuff to get them. And again, it makes sense. If your reward areas think like already got that reward, I'm good. Then you don't have to put the time in. And so this is the danger of manifesting. It's just really subtle, distinction like you want the hope. You want to believe it's possible, but Joe, just spend your time fantasizing about the rewards. Otingen's work finds if you just take one other step, it's great, which is that you use your imagination to think about the obstacles. So I think you're like, oh, I'd be so great. If I got fit, there'd be all these benefits. But what's holding me back? I don't have a gym membership. I don't have any workout shoes. You realize, oh, I can solve this obstacle with this if that plan. Fascinating. So I'm also wondering then if I can hack this. So for example, I have this disorder desire for dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sugar and sea salt from Trader Joe's. I love those things. I know exactly the little plastic watch your talking about. I'm with you on the subsession. Yes. Yes. And you know, so my wife gave me one of those for Valentine's Day. And then we pulled them out the next night to have some over dinner. And she said, who ate all of these? And she, of course, we knew who ate all of them. Me. But I hear you saying, maybe that would be one thing I could experiment with is if I spend a little bit of time thinking ahead of time about eating them, then maybe I'll have less desire to eat them. Yeah. It's kind of like, imagine what you're going to feel like when you're done. If you really play out the fantasy, and again, it's a not good desire. Right. It's dire that you ultimately, you're very high level conscious self would want to curb. You probably notice like, oh, I feel gross. And like my wife's going to walk in and see that empty plastic container. I'm going to have to blame it on the dog. It's not going to work. When you play out fantasies that don't work, sometimes that can be helpful to and noting and talks about this, she says, sometimes when you really do this positive thinking correctly, you realize, oh, it'd be so great. If I lost all this weight, well, what I really need to do, I got to go to the gym every day. I have other goals that I'm working on right now. I'm trying to learn a language or maybe I'm trying to spend time with my husband. Like, maybe I need to get more realistic about what's actually possible. Right. And so it allows you to not just have these fantasy goals that are not grounded in reality, but really think about what the consequences are actually going to be for your behaviors. What do you suspect in your life history led you to do the research that you've done? Well, a lot of it was just an experience of pain that I went through seeing the mental health struggle that my students were facing and also kind of felt a little bit like my field has these answers often in a form that I think the students resonate with, but they want to see the evidence that they want to see the graph. It wasn't just platitudes, but we're not doing such a great job of sharing these strategies. And so in that work, what are you seeing that now gives you some hope about the trajectories and what is the most significant concern for you that you're not seeing traction that you would like to see? Yeah. Well, the hopeful part is that if you do this stuff, fuel, feel better. Like my colleague Dan Harris, who's been on my podcast a lot has this book called 10% happier. And that's really what a lot of the effect size the studies show. Right. If you engage in this stuff, you'll go from a seven to an eight or five to a six, right? Like you'll see movement of about that form. And that's really hopeful. I think that means we can move the needle for people who are really struggling in a way that makes a big difference. In terms of the spots where I'm worried, there's so much of our natural biases tend to lead us astray when it comes to the stuff that makes us happier. And I think emerging technologies haven't helped that. But ultimately, good news is we know what to do. We know what works. We just have to figure out good ways to put it into practice. Been talking to Dr. Laurie Centos, one of the world's leading researchers on happiness and the science of well-being. Laurie, thanks so much for your time and thanks so much for your work and beautiful contribution it is to our world. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on the show. Here's one closing take on today's interview. There are a couple of things I wish we had had longer to sit with. First, Laurie's warning about technology. This is of course a warning we keep hearing. She said so many of the strategies being present, being grateful, curbing your social comparison all gets harder when you've got a cell phone around you. As Laurie noted, it's not that we don't know the practices that facilitate human flourishing. Instead, it's a social architecture problem that the systems, structures of our days, our culture are bent against it. The frictionless scroll, the always available affirmation, the endless comparison, all these make the truer goods less likely. So the question is not simply what works. Instead, the question might be construed as one of sacrifice even. What am I willing to give up so that what works can actually take root in my life? Second, I'm fascinated with Laurie's point about reference dependence that we evaluate our lives. life not based upon objective measurements. No, we evaluate our life," she said, "relative to what we were expecting. If my reference point is always the one person ahead of me, I will live perpetually slided, always be carrying a tinge of resentment, three-one-hundredths of a second from a gold metal, and I miss the joy that I'm standing on the podium at all. Expectations shape experience. Sometimes, the most serious work on my life is not changing my circumstances, but retraining what I count as enough." This episode's full of practices toward a good life here are three that especially stood out to me. One and related to the observations just made about how our expectations inform our evaluation of our life is what Laurie jokingly called "finding the bronze lining." Gratitude is not pretending everything's just fine. It's a sort of disciplined attention to the gifts that are, in fact, right here, right now. "To pursue time affluence, time-famishment," Laurie said, "can be as big a hit on your well-being as becoming unemployed." That's a staggering sort of claim. So Sabbath, whether you name it that or not, requires saying no, but not saying no will cost us. Saying no will afford us a different sort of riches is a different sort of yes to a more liberated and potentially joyous life. And finally, one of the things I've been pushing my students on for years, do not confuse knowledge with transformation. Knowledge is crucial, but perhaps ultimately meaningless apart from putting what we learn into practice. Habits matter, so very much more than we give them credit for. So tend well your habits. That's a small, but not so small take on today's episode, peace to you, my friend. You've been listening to No Small Endeavour and are in a re with Yale professor and host of the Happiness Lab podcast, Dr. Laurie Santos. We grateful acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation, supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion. All right, thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Carried Harmon, Jason Cheesley, Sophie Byard, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, and Audrey Griffith. Our theme song was composed by Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No Small Endeavour, it's a production of Tokens Media, LLC and. Great feeling in the studio. Oh!