How to Live a Little Happier with Dr. Laurie Santos
January 20, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Well, hello, Pod Squad. Thanks for coming back to, We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach:
How come you always get to do the beginning part?
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, actually everybody Pod Squad stay where you are. Don’t move. Go ahead, babe.
Abby Wambach:
It feels a little bit like one-sided here. Hello, Pod Squad, hello.
Amanda Doyle:
Claim your space, Abby. Claim that space.
Abby Wambach:
You too, sister.
Amanda Doyle:
Take it up, girl.
Abby Wambach:
I just want to welcome you back. Here we are. We Can Do Hard Things, Podcast. Ugh, we’ve been talking to Dr. Laurie Santos, we love her so much. And I feel like I am killing this intro.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you know why, I bet you’re killing it?
Abby Wambach:
What?
Glennon Doyle:
The Pod Squad is going to be very excited about this. We’re talking to Dr. Laurie Santos about happiness. And so we have some happy news for you. What’s the happy news? Abby is out of the?
Abby Wambach:
I’m out of the closet, look at it.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s out of the closet. She’s recording now in a room. We are in a room, Pod Squad.
Abby Wambach:
And you are out of the bathroom honey.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, but here’s the deal, the Pod Squad has been so overtly concerned with you being in the closet, but nobody is worried about me being in a basement bathroom this entire time.
Abby Wambach:
Well, they didn’t know that.
Glennon Doyle:
What they don’t know is that my microphone this entire time and computer has been sitting on the toilet and I have been in a room that is like eight inches by 10 inches.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
But I think there’s some kind of cognitive dissonance that people have to see Abby Wambach speaking her bold truths in the closet that makes people upset.
Abby Wambach:
It’s the symbolism or sure. It’s ironic as Alanis Morissette would probably say.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s ironic, but what the Pod Squad should also know is that we have a very emotional relationship with closets. Like I have always done my best creative work in closets. I wrote all of Love Warrior from a closet, okay? Then Abby and I got a house and I got an actual office. And so I sat down in the office to write Untamed and I could not do it because the office was too big and there were too many distractions. And we know I’m like Dory from Nemo, whenever there’s any, I just… And writing is so terrible and horrible that I would find myself like organizing books or like I never organized anything but when I have a deadline, I become like home edit. I’m just like all over the place.
Abby Wambach:
Our house is never cleaner than when there is a deadline and a book in the works.
Glennon Doyle:
No. My friend, Rachel Held Evans, she died and that is one of the worst things to happen to the spiritual world, but she used to put a post-it on her computer that said, Rachel, the next sentence is not in the pantry, so I did that too. But the point is that I actually, even though I had that lovely big office, what did I do? Where did I take my computer every day to write Untamed?
Abby Wambach:
You wrote the whole Untamed book in the closet of the office.
Glennon Doyle:
In the closet of the office. We call this a cloffice.
Amanda Doyle:
Which was tiny by the way, that thing was tiny.
Glennon Doyle:
It was way tiny was it was not a walk-in closet.
Abby Wambach:
The storage space underneath the stairs.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I hit my head every time I stood up or went and screamed the F word.
Abby Wambach:
The angled ceiling.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. She would know I was done writing when I’d scream, “Fuck.” Over and over again, okay? But now we’re excited you all, so we are in an office and we’re together in this room. We are in an actual room speaking to each other and that is a happy thing. And I want to tell you one other happy thing that happened to me this week. Okay-
Abby Wambach:
I don’t even know this.
Glennon Doyle:
You know it, I told you all about it. Okay my friend Kate, we move to a new house, Kate Lester is a friend from our area, she came over and she brought me a plant, okay? And now I take plants very seriously now because my son is obsessed with plants. And so he has taught me to value plants, although not to name them because that is personal. I don’t know, he told me that’s wrong, that’s not respecting the plantness of plants.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s trying to turn them into people, okay? We don’t listen to that, we have grand plans because he’s gone away from college, we are desperately trying to take care of his plants. So when Kate brought me this plant, I was like, “Oh my God, my own chance, this is my chance.” So I watered it every other day with a special little cup that I had next to the sink. And I watched it. It was getting greener. I felt like I just could tell that it was growing and it was so happy. Okay, so Kate comes over a couple days ago and she’s sitting at my table and she’s about to leave. And I say, “Kate, real quick how often should I water that plant?” I point to the plant. It’s on the island. “How often should I water it because I’m doing it a lot.” And she goes, “Well, probably never because it’s a fake plant.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay so what I want you to understand is that I’ve been watering this plant. I’ve been seeing it turn greener. I’ve been seeing it grow, okay. And I just feel like there’s a metaphor here, like-
Amanda Doyle:
So many. So many metaphors.
Glennon Doyle:
Stop watering dead plants. Like it’s good to have real plants and real friends and… I don’t know something, I’m working with a metaphor, but I think that was kind of happy. Like, oh my God, this is amazing, right?
Amanda Doyle:
And also a metaphor for happiness, right? Because in your judgment, your experience of that situation was that that plant was thriving and growing. And you had an experience of that, that was just based on your perception. And I would say it’s correct to say misperception of what was happening, but nonetheless, it made you happy.
Glennon Doyle:
It made me so happy until Kate ruined it. She ruined it.
Abby Wambach:
She ruined it baby, but I have a question. What do you think’s happening or happened to all that water?
Glennon Doyle:
I blew dry it. I blew dry it yesterday.
Abby Wambach:
You are kidding me.
Glennon Doyle:
No. I took a blow dryer and I blew dried the fake plant because I don’t want to kill a fake plant. That feels like something even I shouldn’t be capable of.
Amanda Doyle:
Wait, wait, wait, wait back up. You’re saying, you were just not going to tell us that part of the story. You’re saying-
Glennon Doyle:
I didn’t feel that that was an important bit.
Amanda Doyle:
After you found out it was a fake plant. Well I have a problem to solve. I’ll go get my hair dryer and I’ll shoot it on the plant.
Glennon Doyle:
What else was I supposed to do?
Abby Wambach:
Many problems that Glennon has is solved with the hair dryer actually.
Amanda Doyle:
Well, Abby, when we were 10 and she was trying to make cookies, the first thing on the recipe said preheat the oven. Okay, so we’re not a big cooking, baking family so her little analytical mind was like, “Preheat, how would I preheat? How would I get the oven hot before the oven was on?” So what did she go get Abby?
Abby Wambach:
The hair dryer.
Amanda Doyle:
She got the hair dryer.
Abby Wambach:
This is-
Glennon Doyle:
And I got caught, who was it? I think it was my friend Carrie’s mom. I think I was at a friend’s house and she walked in and she said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m preheating the oven. I’m getting it.” But listen, in my own defense I don’t understand cooking, but I know words. And I looked at that word heat before, heat the thing up before, okay? It’s not pre if it’s you turning it on.
Amanda Doyle:
Right. They should just turn on.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Right and wait until that’s 350 degrees.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. Turn it on. And wait till it’s 350 degrees. That is just heating. That’s not preheating.
Abby Wambach:
And now, I think that we have actually figured out the exact moment that you and cooking split.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. Humiliation of that moment, that my family has never effing stopped telling that story.
Abby Wambach:
Well also, because it didn’t make sense. You’re like, “No, that’s not the way you define it.” Like, I’m not going into that territory.
Glennon Doyle:
And I’m bitter about cooking. I very much resent every time someone says to me, “It’s just following directions. Cooking is just following directions.” No, no, no, it’s a recipe. It’s a recipe. Okay, so I pick up a recipe and I’m like, okay, “It’s just going to tell me what to do. Okay, I’m just going to do, it’s number one, number two, number three. And then the first sentence is something like julienne the carrots. And I’m like, “What the fuck does that mean?” That’s not a direction, that’s mocking me. I don’t want to get a dictionary to make a salad. So no, I’m not, I’m not and I know hair dryers. Tell you what I know how I know my way around a hair dryer.
Abby Wambach:
Do you think that you got all-
Amanda Doyle:
When your only tool’s a hair dryer, every problem looks like something that needs some hot air blown on it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. All right you guys, I didn’t really know that this was going to go this way, but-
Amanda Doyle:
Neither did we.
Glennon Doyle:
Here we are just trying to bring some happiness to your week.
Abby Wambach:
You did. My face hurts right now, I’ve been laughing so hard.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Let’s welcome Dr. Laurie Santos so she can help us bring this conversation into any sort of reality. So we are so lucky that Dr. Laurie Santos is back to answer our Pod squad’s happiness questions. Thank you so much, should we just jump in and hear from them?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, let’s do it.
Shannon:
Hi, Glennon, sister and Abby. My hard thing is this, like Abby I am a huge people pleaser. I love making people feel happy, cared for and supported, however I’ve crossed the line where it has become unhealthy for me. I drain myself for the sake of others no matter how much it costs me. While I’m working on boundaries and putting myself first, there’s an overwhelming amount of guilt I feel when I can no longer meet people’s expectations, have to say no to something or know that I’ve disappointed someone. Do you have any advice on how to cope with, or free myself from this inevitable guilt that I feel? Thank you so much from your fan Shannon.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, well Shannon, you’re not alone in the world. I feel like a lot of people are probably nodding their heads along right now. There is lots of evidence that doing for other people can make us happy, but that’s only if we have the bandwidth to do for other people. And the problem is that we sometimes don’t, right? Like we really have to be putting our own oxygen mask on first before helping other people. Like it’s such a cheesy metaphor that comes out of the airlines, but whenever they say it, I’m always like, yeah, yeah flight attendant.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re the only one in my world who’ll say that to me. Thank you.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Thank you for giving me permission. But like, we all need permission, right? And I think this is so essential. I see this in my college students all the time, like these are incredibly driven students. So many of them are really inter promoting social justice and action. And I watch them burning out, right? Because they’re not giving themselves the bandwidth to take a break and take a breath. You need to find ways to kind of say no to give yourself the bandwidth. Boundaries are healthy and then kind of make sure when you’re saying yes, that it really is a real yes. You need to give yourself space to be able to say no sometimes. And if you can’t do that, that’s a spot for some self-compassion.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Right, interrogate, Okay why do I myself, just one human feel like I can’t say no to a million things, right? What’s going on? Do I think of myself as super human, do I need to give myself a little bit more self-kindness, do I need to reset some of these boundaries? Those can often be hard conversations, especially depending on who’s doing the asking, but they’re really essential ones where you’re able to not feel burnt out all the time. These days, I’m trying to get my students to talk a lot about their specific emotions. And we all know certain emotions like sadness, anger, those can be hard to kind of figure out, but we kind of get them.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But the one they feel so much that they need better ways to articulate is overwhelm. Like overwhelm where you’re just like, “I freaking can’t.” Like this is just so much. It’s not anger, it’s not sadness, it’s not frustration, it’s just like, I don’t have the bandwidth. And emotions are signals, right? Like an overwhelm is a good signal of like, this means you got to step back. Like you got to start saying no to some of these obligations, right? This is an honest signal of what you’re capable of and when you don’t listen to those honest signals, you get into really nasty territory. So yeah, setting up boundaries-
Glennon Doyle:
What does that nasty territory look like, like when we don’t say no-
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I think it looks like addiction, right? It looks like addiction. It looks like really having a full, nervous breakdown. It looks like burnout. When you become cynical about even the things you love and the people you love, right? Like you don’t want to get there. You want to act on it ahead of time.
Glennon Doyle:
Can I sneak in a question between voicemails? How do we talk about cultivate, deal with happiness with our children? I don’t think we do a very good job of that in our culture because we just telling them they should be happy in a million different ways. So can you give us, like what does the research say about that, what parents can do.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. I think one thing you can do to make your kids ultimately happier and definitely to make them psychologically healthier, is to let them be unhappy. It is to let them fail. It is to let them screw up. It is to let them cry. It’s to let them see you do the same things, because that is the way by which they do stuff, yeah. I’m interviewing for my podcast, this wonderful woman, Julie Lythcott-Haims who wrote a book about How to Raise an Adult. And she talks a lot about helicopter parenting. And she goes through this idea that in all of our anxiety to protect our children, we’re like ruining our own mental health, but we’re kind of messing them up too. We’ve all had the satisfaction of what it means to get through like a difficult task or to struggle a little bit and then get to the other side or even struggle a little bit and not get to the other side.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But you learn something from it. And we, generationally are taking that away from our kids and not letting them feel any negative emotion. We teach them that like, negative emotion, there’s a cure for that. There’s a cure for everything, we’ll just blanket it. And that doesn’t help them when actually in reality, there’s like death and taxes and all these things you don’t have cures for. And we’re not preparing them for the right world.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Okay. Let’s hear from our next pod squader.
Speaker 6:
Hi Glennon. I recently asked my husband for a separation and also stumbled on your podcast around the same time. And it has been my saving grace. And I guess my hard question is am I doing the right thing? Will I get past these feelings of I’m an awful person and does my happiness really matter? Falling out of love with my husband has been awful and I wake up every day hoping that maybe today’s the day that I convince myself to be in love with him. Will I move past this? I know nobody can give me the answer that I really want. Do I ask him for a divorce or do I not? But only I can answer that question, but anyway, I appreciate you guys so much. And I adore Abby and your relationship Glennon, know that even though you don’t have all the answers you are helping in ways that you don’t even realize, I love you guys. Thank you.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Well, I mean, lots of threads here. First just acknowledging the pain like that sucks. It sucks to be in a position where the person you thought you’re going to be with forever. You’re not having those feelings for, it sucks to have the uncertainty about what to do, that’s a tough tough situation to be in. And I think this is a spot where these practices of self compassion can be so good. Even if it feels like this is a horrible thing, and you’re a horrible person, you are not the only person to fall out of love with someone. This happens all the time, in fact probably in like 50% of marriages. So let’s do a little common humanity and recognize that these things come up. Then kind of engage in some self kindness, right? Like this hurts, this sucks.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
This is a bad thing to go through. What can you do to kind of do something kind to yourself? And researcher Kristin Neff has this wonderful suggestion that like when everything else fails, just give yourself some kind touch. She literally recommends like just taking your arm and like stroking your arm, like stroking your forearm, like you might for like a child who is going through something. And the beauty is like, your brain doesn’t know the difference. If it’s like yourself stroking or someone else, you just feel this touch and feel a little comforted. So do things that feel kind. And then try to notice a little bit when those thoughts come up, that like I’m a horrible person. Like, no, you’re like literally like 50% of marriages out there that people go through this right?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Common humanity and mindfulness. In terms of the question about what you should do, I think she said it right, you probably need to kind of make the decision for yourself. But the thing to know is that either way it goes, you’re much more resilient than you think. It sounds like she already has the answer that she’s out of love and she might just need to make the hard decision. But I think the reason that decision is hard is, you’re doing some forecasting about how bad it’s going to be.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Like there’s this idea that I’m never going to get over it. That my partner’s never going to get over it, like it’s just going to suck forever. And this is the good side of hedonic adaptation, it will suck when you first make that decision, it’s going to feel like it’s going to suck for a while, but all the evidence points to the fact that it’s not going to suck as badly or for as long as you think. And so you can kind of trust in your own resilience there. And most people who are in that situation, once they finally make the decision, often have the thought, why didn’t I decide to like pull the bandaid off sooner.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I just always remind myself, it’s hard either way. Like I think in this position, we’re always like, well which one’s the right one, the wrong one. Which one’s the easy one, the hard… But actually there’s hard both ways, staying in a relationship that you know is not right for you is hard, leaving a relationship that you know is not right for you is hard. So you really do have to just decide what’s the right kind of hard.
Amanda Doyle:
But she also has this thread where she says, but does my happiness even matter? Can you speak to the idea of happiness as kind of this zero sum game and how our happiness works in ecosystems that she’s saying, “If I choose my happiness, it means their unhappiness, my kids’ unhappiness, my partner’s unhappiness.” Like how does that actually… Is there studies on that?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. I think this is another spot that we get wrong all the time. And I think this is like a common perception. I think moms do this all the time where it’s like, I need to sacrifice my happiness for like my kids’ happiness. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m super anxious about everything in their whole life, but like, how else do I make them happy?” What we forget is like a very core mechanism of our emotions is that they are contagious. Like if you are a super anxious, super unhappy mom, your kids are going to pick that up. They’re going to like soak that up.
Amanda Doyle:
Are you sure? Are you sure Dr. Santos? Is there a loophole? Let’s just really look for a loophole.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But for our caller, we’ll get off the mob, but for our caller, if you are deeply unhappy in a relationship, you’re not making the other person as happy as they could be. In some ways you might be giving them a gift to just like, again, rip off the bandaid so that, that person… And again, that person at the time might feel like it’s never going to get better, but all the studies suggest it’s not going to be as bad as you are forecasting and even if it takes some time, because grief takes time, right? Like grief is about any loss that we didn’t really want, right? And that even if you’re in the position of falling out of love with your partner, you have to grieve what you thought it was going to be at first or what it was in the beginning or something. And so you need to kind of give yourself some time to grieve, but you will get stronger even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember when I was deciding about my marriage and feeling this way, like does my happiness even and matter, can I free myself from this without ruining everyone’s lives? Liz said to me, there’s no such thing as one way liberation. When you free yourself from something that wasn’t meant for you, you are automatically freeing the other person because if it’s not meant for you, it’s not meant for them. Okay. Let’s get to our next voice mailer.
Ellie:
My name is Ellie. Hi Glenn, Amanda and Abby. I am in my twenties and I just look up to you all so much for different reasons. I would love to know what advice would y’all have told yourselves in your twenties, just starting out with career, relationships, all those things. Would love to hear it. Bye.
Abby Wambach:
Love it. Love this question.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I think that was-
Glennon Doyle:
20 year old Dr. Santos.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I was going to say, I think that wasn’t for me, I think that was for you all. So I want to hear you all go with that question.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, this is good especially because I have lived a life that, I mean, I would say that I basically wake up thinking what fun things can I do today? And I usually actually put them off to later on in the day. But something that I’ve been trying to do more recently is to actually put it on the to-do list of my life so that I don’t miss out. Like for a long time, I gave myself the reward of doing the fun thing after doing all of the other things that I needed to do, whether it be pay bills or workout or whatever. And so now I give myself the gift of maybe going surfing first in my day, it also helps that surfing in the morning is better, but I just am happier all day long. And then I go for my run, like right after I surf so that I get that thing done.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s cool. So it’s like, instead of holding your breath all day and then breathing, breathe first and then the rest of your day has more joy infused into it. Cool the opposite of [crosstalk 00:23:11]
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And you are literally putting in your to-do list stuff that is fun. You might need the remedial step first of not like when does the fun stuff happen in my to-do list, but like make sure it gets in there anyway. And I think the problem is that for some of us, when we’re feeling really time famished, it’s the fun stuff that goes out the window where like sometimes when I’m looking at my calendar, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I have to squeeze extra stuff in.” It’s not that work meeting that I hate that goes, it’s like my yoga class with my friend. I’m like, well, I guess I’m going to have to skip yoga this week. Or I guess I’m not going to have to sleep as much this week. Sleep also so important for mental health and happiness. So just that it is in the priority list at the same level as the bills and all the other stuff, is really powerful.
Amanda Doyle:
Not to Dodge this question, but I have a question about research on this, because what she’s saying is go back and look at your twenties. And it’s like, we all know that at the end of our lives, there’s only going to be a few things that matter. I mean, like we intellectually know that. No one would argue, but then even though we know that, right now we’re not acting as if that were true.
Glennon Doyle:
What’s wrong with us?
Amanda Doyle:
What the hell is that? No, I’m honestly wondering what is wrong with our brains and our lives that we know that, but we are not doing anything. Like everyone has advice for the person that’s in their twenties, but no one has ever done the thing they should have done in their twenties.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
This is like sometimes when I talk about my happiness tips and there’s people who say this about my Yale class too. They’re like, all of this is common wisdom, like we already know this stuff and I’ll say, “well, it’s not common practice. Did you just do all this stuff today?” Like, no, right? We need some kind of help with it. And like why don’t we do it? Our brains are built wrong. There’s that wanting, liking disconnect, capitalism, there’s lots of messaging coming in that’s not telling us to just like be present and enjoy the joy and look out your window, that doesn’t like sell iPhones. So there’s a lot of outside pressure to kind of keep us stuck in this rat race. But then if you do look at people at end of life, like none of that stuff is going to matter again not to go back to like the Greeks and the Romans here, but you know, this is the concept of carpe diem.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
It’s like seize the day. They don’t mean like get through your whole to-do list. It’s like seize the day, because tomorrow you may die. And when you do the reflection on, what if tomorrow was the last day? What if someone came down and was like, “Just going to give you a window, when you walk outside and you get hit by a car, nothing you can do about it. Today’s the last day, just wanted to like give you a FYI. Probably the to-do list would go away and probably you’d be present with the people you care about in a different way. You’d want to be present with the food that you eat or whatever. Like you’d just do things differently. I hate there’s like carpe diem on like planners and things and like [crosstalk 00:26:02] and I’m like, no, they meant something different. They meant like [crosstalk 00:26:05]
Glennon Doyle:
Laurie you’ll be shocked to know that my entire career started with an essay called don’t carpe diem.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Love it. Love it. Yes, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think that there is such a wisdom to that. It’s like, how do we avoid the big deathbed regret? It’s like avoiding bedtime regret. It’s like how the Annie Dillard idea of how we spend our days, is how we spend our lives. So it’s like, how do we divide that up and make it smaller and make sure if like, what we really love at the end of the day is our family and our peace and our joy and our friends. Like, did we, did we spend any time on that today?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. And I think the sad thing is how little we do. We do this values exercise with my students where I have them come in and they write a big list of, what are the things you value? And they circle all these virtues of like a spirit of adventure and learning and all this stuff. And then we do this exercise like, okay, new exercise. New exercise, we’re going to have you just write down how you spent your day, just like a typical day, like 7:00 AM, da, da, da, da, da. And then I go back and I say, “Okay, let’s match those up. Like how did those things go together? And they have this moment where they’re like, “Crap, the things that really matter to me, I’m not putting my time into, and then there’s like the further exercise of like, okay, well what would you do differently?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And I think it’s an exercise we can all do. I’m no better here, right? Like if I looked at my day today, I mean, this part’s fun, but like I had a bunch of stuff that was like staff meeting and boring and emails and da, da, it’s like wait, if tomorrow was the last day, I really wouldn’t have wanted to spend it this way. And so what can we do to restructure our lives? That might mean setting up boundaries that might mean saying no, that might mean recognizing, “Hey, I’m not going to get to this next accolade in the way that careerist me would want, but that’s okay because deathbed me is going to be a lot happier about it.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And wise me knows. I mean, I think what I would tell, tell my 20 year old self, that my 20 year old self would never believe and would still go ahead and live her life the same way she did. I was talking my almost 20 year old, he just is a freshman in college now. And just like trying to promise him that he’s working his off in high school so that he can get into this college, so that then he can work his off in this college, so that then he can get to this job, so that then he can work his off into this job. That it’s just this constant destination promise of happiness and there’s no, there there. As a writer who decided that eventually, if I just reached this thing, if these many people read my… If this, then I’ll be happy and then you get there and there’s no there there. And no matter what happens, you learn that the good news and the bad news is it’s just a little freaking thing that’s every day.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And this is another bias that researchers call the arrival fallacy. I’ll be happy when, fill in your well. I’ll be happy when I get married, I’ll be happy when I get that promotion, I’ll be happy when I buy a house, right? Then it happens and it’s not that it’s awful, but, I mentioned before, my Yale students who film their admission acceptance video and they find out, you got into Yale. Yale, they actually play this little song, it goes, bulldog, bulldog bow wow wow. And they know like, oh my God, I got in, they cry. My students will say that was like one of the happiest moments, but the instant after it was one of their darkest moments because they’re like crap now I got to…
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Like it was all for that. And I have to chase next carrot to get into med school or chase the next carrot to get my banking job or whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s quick.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And we’re constantly chasing these carrots. We really believe, I think Disney sold us a lie. Like we really believe happily ever after. But as my colleague, Dan Gilbert, who I mentioned before is fond of saying, “Happily ever after only works if you have six minutes to live.” Like it doesn’t last that long. Like what do you think it’s going to be? It’s going to, and just back to baseline quickly.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh. I relate so much to what you just said, having literally gotten a gold medal put on my neck, seeing the flag and listening to the anthem and then literally stepping off of that podium and being like, “Okay, I guess I want to do that again.” The whole thing starts all over. And like, I always just thought, that’s the only amount of time I’m letting myself celebrate because I’ve got more or work to do here. And that’s how I rationalize it. And that’s how you just stay on that rat wheel, running and running and running for the happiness that is always actually there, you have access to it, right? Like however you want to define happiness, I just feel like we as humans have more control, like you’re saying Dr. Santos. I mean, Ugh.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. We often do the same thing you just mentioned, which is like you get the gold medal, you’re on the stand. You find out you got into Yale, whatever, you have this moment. And then you have this deep dark despair. And instead of saying, well, hang on, maybe it wasn’t the arrival, maybe it was the path and the journey. And I should da, da, da. We say, oh, maybe it wasn’t one gold medal, I need to be triple gold medal. And this happens with salary all the time, right? You get a promotion and you think, oh, if I get more money I’ll be happier. And then you get more money and you’re like, “I’m not happier.” And you don’t think maybe the connection with money and happiness isn’t what I think. You think like, “It must be more money.”
Dr. Laurie Santos:
One of my most harrowing interviews that I did for my podcast with this guy, Clay Cockrell, who’s a wealth psychologist to the 0.0001%. And first of all, like there is a job like wealth psychologist to the 0.001%, we’ll say like I have 500 million, but I’m not a billionaire. Like I just got to get to the billion and he watches them, go through these financial hurdles. So we never think like, oh, it’s not the arrival, we always think like, oh, I just need a different arrival, a bigger one. Like, that’ll make me happy.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s how capitalism always wins, right? It’s like the house always wins because you can go in and win a little bit, but you don’t leave. You don’t say, oh, now I have enough. You stay. And then the house wins at the end.
Amanda Doyle:
And I think that’s a cool part of it because it doesn’t mean we’re naturally greedy and we’re naturally… To actually think about it in terms of like, I’ve heard you say, Dr. Santos said like the brain is just a comparison machine. Like it’s not that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just that’s the function of your machine, is that it can’t process absolute. It can’t look and say, look, I have food and shelter and health, therefore I’m happy. It can only process the comparison to what you just were or what somebody else is across the street. That’s literally the only processing it can do, right? So we have to understand that about ourselves to say like, you are incapable of actually assessing your situation. You are only capable of comparing it to something else.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Totally. And maybe like that’s where this issue of recognizing a thought as just a thought is powerful. And emotion is just, emotion is powerful. Like just because I want to do that, doesn’t mean it’s real. Just because my brain is delivering me this information, doesn’t mean it’s real. And that’s the one extra thought process we have, right. We can have a meta level say, do I really want to follow that? Do I want to extract capitalism? Do I want to do hard things? But hard things that don’t destroy me and don’t destroy my happiness. And we can think at a meta level, if we have the bandwidth to do so, and sometimes it can be really powerful for our wellbeing to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s end with that. We’re going to hear from our Pod Squader of the week, we’re going to let you go and we’re going to leave you with that thought that we don’t have to believe everything we think, right? We can be smarter than our brains. You’re just a freaking delight and so damn smart. I’m so grateful for all of your work. I will be listening to all of your podcasts on the Happiness Lab, we actually have our children listen to them too when they’re stuck with us in the car on the way to soccer and thanks for taking care of those college kids. We have one now and they’re under so much pressure.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Caitlyn:
Hi Glennon and sister and Abby if you’re there, my name is Caitlin and I just had to share a fun little moment with you. I was just listening to your latest episode and sharing it with my friend Rebecca, say hi Rebecca.
Rebecca:
Hello!
Caitlyn:
And I was introducing her to the podcast and we are actually driving right now. She is helping me move across the country. And as we started listening to Tisha’s song, a truck drove by me that said Melting on it. And I just had to share that little bit of joy with you because this has been a very hard process getting here. I’m changing careers, I’m changing cities. Everything just feels very overwhelming right now. And this podcast and everything that you guys say just helps me feel a lot less alone. And I just had to thank you for everything that you all do. It really helps. I’m really excited for this next chapter. And that’s it. Thank you. Have a great day, bye.
Amanda Doyle:
We sent it for Caitlin, right?
Glennon Doyle:
We did. Of course. Yeah. We know when you’re making big changes and you’re doing hard things and we send just little signs so that you’ll know you’re on the right track, which you are. I kept thinking about Caitlin and Rebecca just traveling across. I kept thinking of wide open spaces. Just congratulations-
Abby Wambach:
Just thinking of Thelma and Louise actually.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, that’s better.
Abby Wambach:
I kind of hope that that’s what they’re doing over there.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you Rebecca and Caitlin, good job taking care of each other and doing the hard, exciting life giving things. All right the rest of you, we already are excited to see you the next time we all get together.
Abby Wambach:
I feel that. I feel that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, don’t you. I just, I love this. I love them, I love Dr. Santos, I love my sister and Abby. I love the Pod Squad. Okay, we’ll see you soon. Bye.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it, it’s fine.