The Big Lies & the Truth About Happiness with Dr. Laurie Santos
January 18, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
You came back, you came back again, to We Can Do Hard Things. It’s a freaking miracle, I tell you. Thank you. All right, so I am very curious about what the hell is going to unfold in this episode, and that is because today we are talking about happiness. And I have a very complicated relationship with happiness, I’m honestly kind of against it, okay? I just, for so long have resented the fact that we seem to have some kind of unwritten cultural happiness mandate, that it’s just accepted that all women must be happy all the time. And then because of that, it feels to me when I’m out in the world, that the world is just teeming with happiness bullies, like happiness gatekeepers, and I stand against them. I stand against them wherever they are, but I might suggest that many of them are at the airport for some reason, insisting that women, they do not know, smile at them for no reason.
Glennon Doyle:
But honestly, they’re everywhere, and I guess we’re all happiness bullies to some extent, starts when we’re born. Every time a child expresses something other than happiness, we cannot take it. We just bully the unhappiness away. Turn that frown upside down, shh, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. Like, can we just pause for a second? Why in the Sam Hill, do we tell people not to cry? Don’t cry, don’t cry, we say it to our friends, we say it to our kids, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. It’s like saying don’t sneeze, or like don’t pee, because crying is a physical freaking release. And it’s also a spiritual release, it’s like organic baptism, it’s how we wash it all away and begin again.
Glennon Doyle:
So I stand for crying, I stand for lots of crying, even though I myself cannot cry because for some reason I feel the crying feeling, and then the Lexapro stops the tears right at the ducts, like it doesn’t come out.
Abby Wambach:
That’s exactly right. No water involved in your tear ducts.
Glennon Doyle:
No. So I literally have to say the words to my people, I’m crying, I’m crying, because they can’t see it.
Amanda Doyle:
So you’re an anti happiness, pro Lexapro warrior.
Glennon Doyle:
Correct, correct. I’m a clinically depressed motivational speaker, so I literally motivate people to go ahead and feel sad. I stand against toxic positivity in all its oppressive forms. So at first, I was hesitant to dive into the work of our guest today, and then as soon as I did, I got hooked. I got hooked. Dr. Laurie Santos is not a happiness bully. I am going to admit to my beloved pod squad that Dr. Santos makes me happy.
Glennon Doyle:
Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University, which if you haven’t heard of it, is a fancy ass place. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Oh Jesus, please tell us all the things. Her course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students what the science of psychology says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. Her class is Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years and has been adapted into a free Coursera program that has been taken by over 3.3 million people to date, one of whom is my wife, she’ll tell you about that Dr. Santos.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s a winner of numerous awards, both for her science and teaching, from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association. She has been featured as one of Popular Science’s brilliant 10 young minds, and was named Times leading campus celebrity. Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, launched in 2019, has over 48 million downloads. But to be fair Dr. Santos, 47 million of those are for me in the last two weeks.
Glennon Doyle:
So I am so excited to talk to Dr. Santos, thank you for being here. I feel like this is a happiness expert meeting a sadness expert, and I just want to know who’s going to win. I think it might be you because of Yale. How did you become a happiness professor?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, well it actually all started by me seeing just how stressed out and depressed my students were. So I’ve been teaching at Yale for a very long time, like over a decade, which makes me feel super old, but in just the last couple years, I took on this new role as head of college on campus. And so Yale is one of these funny schools like Hogwarts in Harry Potter, where there’s a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, there’s these colleges within the college. And so I’m head of Silliman College, which means I live on campus with students, so I eat with them in the dining hall, and I hang out with them in the coffee shop.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And I was expecting college life to be party, party, party, a little bit of work here and there, maybe with some adjustment because it’s Yale. But what I saw was this college student mental health crisis up close and personal, so many students reporting that they just feel depressed and anxious, asked how’s it going? Students would be, oh, if I could just get to the weekend. Or oh, if I could just get through midterms. I’m like, you’re 19 and you’re fast forwarding your life, you know?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so I started digging into this mental health crisis and it turns out this isn’t just stressed out type A Yale students, this is a national issue. So right now nationally, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days, over 60% say that they feel overwhelmingly anxious, and more than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year. This is not like a couple snowflakes who are having a tough time, this is a real crisis. And so I’m a psychologist, so I was like, okay, there has to be some strategies that these students can use to feel better.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And if I’m being honest, I’ll say, as I was worried about them, I was partly worried about myself. I was kind of doing this sort of motherly thing that you do in a head of college role, where I cared about my students, but the sad thing is I was seeing myself and all of their answers. They’d be like, oh, if I could only get to Friday, and I’d be like, yeah dude, me too, [crosstalk 00:06:45] schedule. And so I was like, wait, what is going on, that we’re kind of really striving for happiness, and all the ways you talked about with this toxic positivity, but we’re clearly getting it wrong. So what can we do to do better?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And yeah, so I started this new class, it was totally new on Yale’s campus. I figured 30 kids would take it because it’s just this random class, but then we had to teach the class in a concert hall because a quarter of the entire campus tried to enroll.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, bless their hearts. Okay. So I’m so grateful to you because I was a teacher, you taught at Yale, I taught at Annandale Terrace Elementary School, so different levels. But I always felt like, why aren’t we teaching these kids how to human? I used to spend weeks teaching them hieroglyphics, but not how to feel their feelings or find joy. So in your course, you teach about the misconceptions about happiness, so can you just share with us, what are those? How are we thinking wrong about happiness, because clearly we are?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I mean so many ways, because the sad thing is so many of us are working towards happiness. Even if you hate happiness, you don’t want to be miserable, you’re trying to do things to feel better. The problem is that we go about it all wrong. For example, we think happiness is all about our circumstances. We think, oh, if I could just get that next promotion, or get that new relationship, or just get to the end of the week or something, then suddenly I’ll be happier. But in practice, what the science shows is, people with really fantastic circumstances are totally miserable, like full hedonic pleasures that just find their life empty. And people in totally crappy circumstances are often feeling good, or at least feeling like the things that they’re going through are building resilience or building strength and so on.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so that’s the big one, is that we want to change something about our lives to feel happier. We want to buy something, or do something new, or get the next career thing. But in practice, those things just don’t make us as happy as we think. We kind of have these incorrect theories about what will bring us happiness.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So if those things aren’t going to make us happy, then what does make people happier, Dr. Santos?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Well, it’s like when you hear it, you’re kind of like, oh, well yeah, I guess I kind of knew that. It’s like common wisdom, but not necessarily common practice. So one of the big things that affects happiness is social connection. It doesn’t sound right when you’re feeling like you don’t want to deal with people, but every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They spend more of time, just physically spend more time around other people, and then they tend to prioritize time with their friends and family members.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
There’s also lots of evidence that happy people aren’t really focused on self care. In the toxic positivity world, we hear a lot about treat yourself, like self care, self, self, self. But if you look at happy people, happy people are doing for others, they’re volunteering their time. Controlled for income, happy people donate more money to charity than not so happy people. They’re kind of doing self care through other care.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And then, happy people just tend to have a really different mindset. They have a mindset of gratitude, as cheesy as it sounds, they’re not focused on the gripes. They have an attitude and a kind of mindset of presence, where they can just kind of be. They’re not waiting for their Outlook to ping them, or going to the next thing because they’re so anxious about it. They’re just there and allowing the present moment to be just as it is.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so the key, the cool thing, and this didn’t have to be the case, but the cool thing is that there are behaviors we can engage in and mindset changes we can go towards that will make us feel a little bit happier. It’s under our control, we’re just doing it wrong.
Amanda Doyle:
Can I ask you about, I think some of the tyranny of happy is this pursuit that we should be happier. I have been an advocate for the hedonic adaptation theory, because I was not depressed by that, I was so liberated, this idea that you’re just about as happy as you’re going to be, so just give up the struggle and settle in, because welcome to your level of happiness. Can you talk about that, and whether it’s just the idea that there’s happiness out there could be part of what’s making us unhappy?
Glennon Doyle:
And also, can you define happy for us? I think we need to talk about what are we talking about?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Let’s start there, because I think that’s really important. So I mean, we could have very, very, very long podcast about what happiness is. I mean, whole ancient philosophers spent their whole careers talking about happiness, and eudaimonia and all these big Greek words and so on. Social scientists have to kind of figure something in a really reduced form to try to study it, and to be fair, that’s what they’ve done with happiness. But social scientists tend to think of happiness in two ways, being happy in your life and being happy with your life.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so being happy in your life is that you have a reasonable number of positive emotions, at least relative to your negative emotions, so you have laughter and joy. It’s not that you don’t have sadness, anger, all those things, that’s toxic positivity. It’s not no negative emotions. It’s just making sure the ratio looks okay, like it’s not zero positive. That’s kind of being happy in your life.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But being happy with your life, it’s different. All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now? My Dean and her wife, they just had a new baby, and they’re so happy with their life, like the sense of meaning, of being new moms together. But then in their life, there’s poop, and there’s no sleeping, and there’s like, I don’t know what happened to the laundry, it’s just a mess. But those things dissociate. But the best case scenario is you have a life where you’re happy with your life, you have a life of meaning, a purpose, you’re satisfied with it, and you get as much positive emotion as you can. Or at least kind of get the negative emotion mixed in with some joy and laughter here and there.
Amanda Doyle:
Is one more important than the other? If you’re not happy with your life, is the being happy in your life doesn’t endure, or vice versa?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. I mean, you kind of want both. I mean, we know people in each category. I use the newborn mom, or the mom with the newborn as the example of, so happy with your life, but in your life, it’s a little bit of a struggle. It’s going to get better, it’s just short term things, but it’s tough. But the reverse is maybe even worse. We all know those people who, they’re super rich, they have every hedonic pleasure possible, in their life, it’s like pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, but with their life, they feel horribly empty.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so, best case scenario is you have both, but I think if you want to maximize one, you want to go with satisfied with your life, because ultimately the more you have that, makes it easier to endure a little bit more, the not so satisfied, inside your life in the moment.
Glennon Doyle:
So what do you think about what sister was saying about that, what’s the theory, sis?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. So this is this idea of hedonic adaptation, which I love, I can tell everybody’s taken my class and they’re learning all the vocabulary words, but hedonic adaptation is just a very fancy way of saying that we get used to stuff. So let’s pick just dumb buying things example, like you get the iPhone, and the first time you get it, you’re like, oh my gosh, it’s got all these new features, the camera’s so much better, for a day you’re playing with it and it seems all like glossy and amazing. But then two weeks later, it’s just your phone, you do not derive any more pleasure from it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
We kind of get that with material objects, but we forget that with big life changes, you get this new promotion, or you get a new salary, or you get into a relationship. At first, yeah, it’s amazing, but then over time, you just get used to it. And this is hedonic adaptation, all the best things in life, we kind of just get used to over time. My colleague, Dan Gilbert at Harvard, talks about the first time your child says mommy, that first moment is like, yes, but last week when your kid said mommy, nobody cares, that was all right. Or like the first time your partner says, I love you, that’s a moment, but kiss on cheek, I love you, out the door, nobody cares.
Abby Wambach:
No, no, no, Glennon, you still feel that way.
Glennon Doyle:
I do. But I was just thinking about how the kids used to go mommy, mommy, and I literally would think, say mommy again, I dare you. Say it one more time. It felt so aggressive at a certain point.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And this is the sad thing is, the stuff that could give us the most joy in life, we get bored with. My Yale students in my class, one of the many weird things they do is that when they get their admissions decision, they film it and put it on YouTube. So this moment of potentially sheer, like the biggest shame and embarrassment, they got a phone of all right, I’m going to click on the link now, did I get into Yale or not? And the ones that do get in, then put this video of screaming and their parents crying and all this stuff on YouTube. It’s like if you want to see a video of sheer happy emotion in the moment, look at kids getting into yell. But then I show these videos to my students on some random Tuesday in the middle of the semester, and I’m like, did you wake up in the morning screaming like that? You’re still at Yale, right? You’ve been at Yale for two years, but no, you get used to it. That first moment’s great, but it kind of goes away.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
This is hedonic adaptation, which you could think sucks, like this is a crappy feature of our mind that the good stuff doesn’t stay good. But hedonic adaptation also has a very good side, which is that the same is true for negative emotions. You have a horrible breakup, you’re super sad that first day, but six months later, a year later, you’re fine. You get really bad job news or really bad health news, you kind of adapt to that, and surprisingly, we adapt much more quickly than we really think. In fact, the hedonic adaptation for negative stuff actually kicks faster and better than hedonic adaptation for positive stuff. We get used to the bad stuff even more quickly. Which kind of makes sense, there’s real processes there, we rationalize it, we have friends who show up with ice cream for us, there’s things that kick in for that.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But that means we’re much more resilient than we think. We don’t take risks because we think, oh, if that happens, something bad will happen and a bad outcome and how horrible that will be. Well, your brain’s just going to adapt to it anyway, so put yourself out there.
Amanda Doyle:
The part that’s liberating to me about hedonic adaptation is that I always have to be like, look, I have healthy kids, I have this wonderful partner, I have this job, with the hell is wrong with me? I should theoretically be so happy. But when I learned that from you, I was like, oh no, I shouldn’t, I’m just adapting properly to my baseline happiness. I don’t feel the guilt on top, which I think has been liberating to me.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, it makes total sense, because this is just a normal process. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your job or your partner or whatever, that’s just kind of what happens. But then the sad thing is okay, what are some strategies we can use to get that joy back? My Yale student, that moment she found in, there was a reason she was so excited to go to Yale. How can we re-harness that?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And there are a few strategies we can use. One is a really ancient one, in fact the ancient Stoics, back in the day, talked about it, they called it negative visualization. So the Stoics thought, literally, when you wake up in the morning, you should have this little meditation where you think today I’m going to lose my job, I’m going to lose my spouse, I’m going to get ostracized, ostracized was a big deal back in Greek, every crappy thing that can happen to you, you think it’s going to happen. Not like you dwell on this for hours and hours, you just do this for five minutes in the morning and then you open your eyes, and then all those terrible things didn’t happen and you can kind of have this little appreciation of it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I do this exercise when I give talks for parents, I say, that mom, mom, mom, everyone has that phenomena, but imagine that’s the last time you ever hear that word? Whatever horrible scenario you want to stick in there, go for it, but that’s it, never going to hear that word again. My guess is, the next time you hear mom, mom, you’re going to and grab them, and all it takes is this one second of kind of breaking that adaptation up and we can all do that.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And we have it naturally, I was talking about the adaptation you get from your phone. I’m really bad and misplace stuff all the time, and so occasionally I’ll be like, my phone is gone, I must have left it at some restaurant, it’s like, I’m never going to see it again. Oh my gosh, all my photos, all this stuff, I haven’t backed anything up. And then you find it and you have incredible gratitude, like my phone, embrace it. So we can create those little mini negative moments for ourselves, and it doesn’t take long, but it does bring back the appreciation.
Glennon Doyle:
Because relief, to me, there is no better, don’t tell me about happiness, tell me about joy, whatever, relief is the ultimate happiness to me. When I think something horrible’s going to happen and then it doesn’t happen, that’s my biggest joy. Is there anything better than relief?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
No. And in fact, that’s in part because of another feature of our minds, which is, you’d think that we’d evaluate our life in objective terms, whatever’s happening. But we don’t, we really think relative to expectations. So if you think something bad is going to happen and it doesn’t, even if whatever happened, wasn’t that great, you’re like, it wasn’t the most horrible thing ever, awesome. It turns out our expectations matter.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
The problem is that not everybody has reasonable or appropriate expectations for stuff. We expect, for example as moms, we expect our kids to be perfect, perfect, perfect, and never cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. Oh my God, there’s crying, something horrible’s happening, that’s an unreasonable expectation for a human, but we kind of have that. Same thing in our lives, we just tend to look towards whoever in our life has stuff better than us and that really affects our judgment.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
One of my favorite studies on this, tried to look at people who were objectively really awesome, but might have had somebody to compare themselves against. And so they went out and they studied Olympians, people who just won medals at the Olympics. So the gold medalists, they got the gold medal, they’re super excited, happy on the stand, question is what about this silver medalist? And what you find is instead of slightly less happy, what they’re showing is active emotions of contempt, disgust, deep sadness, they’re not just slightly less happy, they’re actively miserable. In fact, some silver medalists say it was the worst moment of their life. They’re second best in the world, they’re better than literally billions of people, they’re bringing home a medal for their country, but they feel like crap-
Abby Wambach:
Because they win silver, they lost gold.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Exactly. Whereas what’s funny though, is if you look at bronze medalists, you might think the same thing. You might be like, well, they lost silver and gold, how terrible. But no, it turns out if you analyze their expressions, they’re super happy. Why? Their salient comparison point wasn’t gold or silver, maybe it was silver, but definitely wasn’t gold, that was super far away. A very salient comparison for them is, if I just screwed up by a couple more points or a couple more seconds, I would be going home empty, I wouldn’t even be up here. So they’re just like, by the skin of my teeth, I’m reasonable and medalled, and thank goodness.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And that is such a message for us, right? There’s not really that much objective difference, but our vision, our expectations make it so. You’re doing this strategy great, which is, you want to set your expectations not low, but reasonably, because you can get this awesome boost in happiness that comes from meeting those expectations, and even in some cases going beyond them.
Glennon Doyle:
Abby and I often will say, okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen? And I’ve always felt like I’m being negative when I do that, but actually it’s super helpful, because when we’re scared, we’re scared of this nebulous thing that we don’t know. But when you say, okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen? First of all, everything’s uphill from there, you’re like happy. [crosstalk 00:22:59]-
Abby Wambach:
Except if it’s death and you’re dead.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. But that’s also, at least [crosstalk 00:23:04]-
Dr. Laurie Santos:
There’s an acceptance and peace to that too. But yeah, literally, you are stealing a strategy out of an ancient playbook that’s over a thousand years old, this is what the Stoics thought you should do. And they were just like you, where they weren’t so much obsessed with happiness and being happy, but they kind of just wanted to be even keeled. They wanted to experience the negative emotions, but not get messed up by them. It’s like, they’re there, we’ll allow them and accept them, but not kind of be in them and ruminate in them.
Abby Wambach:
I think that that’s really interesting, so my question’s a little bit about relationships. So my setting is happy, I’m what we would call on this podcast, I’m like, 2:00 PM, I’m sunny, I see the positive in the world, glass half full. And my wife’s setting is, and I wouldn’t say sad, that’s not what I would call it, I would call it, she’s contemplative. How does sunny people and moon people love each other? Because truly, I mean, we do a great job, but I think our listeners would love to hear if you have a partner that doesn’t have the same temperature-
Glennon Doyle:
Like default.
Abby Wambach:
Default, yeah.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Well, we do have these different defaults. I mean, it’s worth noting that there are these interesting, probably genetic differences in our natural set point for happiness. It’s not as deep a genetic difference as you think, it doesn’t mean like people are set and that’s it, and they’ll never change. All these things that we’re talking about can change you around, but people do have a set point. And I actually think that there’s something to be said for people with slightly different set points, because the toxic positivity is a thing. You need to experience negative emotions, especially right now, like if you’re going around in the world filled with a global pandemic, structural racism, all this stuff, and you’re like, everything’s Hunky Dory, like Pandora, that’s not normative. There’s something wrong with that, to be paying attention means you got to feel some negative emotion. And so you kind of don’t want to be too off in the toxic positivity side.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But the flip side is that, sometimes you need a little reminder of things to be grateful for, of things to be optimistic about. It is the case that we can reshape our mindset towards more things that are joyful or delightful. Not in a cheesy way, but really in like attention setting way, our brains are just more tuned to the good things. So I think that couples who have, like two folks who are slightly different can really help one another, because maybe she can kind of tune you more to the Moonlight things and their Moonlight things, and you [inaudible 00:25:43] appreciate them. But by the same token, maybe you might tune back towards the positive in a different way.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And this idea of, what is happiness, I think is so important to me, because to me happy, happy, happy, I mean, I’m from a recovery background too, so sometimes people who are smiling and happy all the time looks fake to me. It feels like you’ve just had a lot of red bull or something, it doesn’t feel real. I mean, to me, happiness is just like an alert, paying attention, and being open and grounded, but it’s not like a hyper, it’s not like Tigger. But it’s not like Eeyore either, it’s like piglet.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, and I think happiness gets a bad rap. I mean, literally if you Google, if you do a Google image search for happy, you get horrid, happy emojis, like super smile, smile, smile, yellow face, you get pictures of people jumping and you often get Pharrell and pictures from that video, which also have people jumping and emojis with happiness to be fair. But that’s not what it’s about, I mean, it’s about kind of again, being sort of happy in your life, which involves this combination of negative emotions, and being happy with your life, which you can’t do that if you’re kind of Pollyannishly going through things and ignoring the bad stuff. A true, good life of flourishing involves recognizing negative emotion, it involves a kind of moral life as the Greeks used to think about, where you’re solving the big problems of the world.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
So I think that happy, happy, it is culturally kind of problematic. And this happens to me a lot, I go on podcasting, I give talks, and you all didn’t do this, but sometimes they’ll be playing Bobby McFaren, don’t worry, be happy, you’re like happy, happy, like happy, clappy. And you’re like, that’s not what this was about, this is really about kind of acceptance and coming to terms with what’s going on, and finding a way to make peace with things. And so yeah, it doesn’t have to be revved up Red Bull emoji happiness, I think true happiness doesn’t look like that.
Abby Wambach:
And I just have a question, because I’ve traveled the world, and what I find to be very interesting is Americans especially have this need to be happy. And in fact, I had a teammate one time sitting in a locker room, she was from Norway, and evidently she brought to our attention that Americans, we Americans, we say, that’s funny, but then we don’t laugh. And I do that, I’m like, that’s funny. And she’s like, but then you don’t laugh, I don’t understand what you’re… So my question is, culturally speaking, are there other cultures in the world that get this more right than maybe we do here in America?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, I think definitely, and the empirical data bear this out. I mean, just culturally Americans are obsessed with happiness, it’s literally in the declaration of independence, like not being killed, like freedom, and what’s the other thing? Oh, happiness. Yeah, happiness, it’s the top three. But we don’t do it, I think because we go about it all wrong.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And then when you look cross culturally, what you find is that, there are lots of other countries that self-report being way happier than the US. And then you can ask okay, what are the factors? One you might expect, it’s not wealth, it’s actually inequality in wealth. So the US is a pretty wealthy country, but we’re really unequally wealthy country, and that’s kind of a hit against happiness.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But the other is just a whole conglomeration of behaviors that are the kind of thing I talked about before, social connection gratitude. Another one we haven’t mentioned is just exercise, moving your body, being in nature. If you look at the countries that are ticking off high on happiness, and Norway’s up there, Denmark is usually the highest, it’s countries that just naturally, culturally prioritize that stuff. Like in Denmark, people walk to work, they’re moving their bodies, they’re out, they’re present. They have a shorter work week. Another thing I bet we’ll talk about is this idea of having more free time, that matters a lot for happiness, not feeling time famished. They go to work at four, they have hobbies and friendships. It’s just weird in Denmark not to have a ton of friends who are doing weird hobbies with you.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
They kind of just have this reaction against talking about your accolades, you just don’t brag about stuff at work. You don’t ask when you meet someone for their first time, well, what do you do? Well, that’s just not part of your identity in the same way.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so it’s not so much that in Denmark everyone’s genetically more predisposed to be happy, they just have a whole cultural infrastructure to do the stuff that makes them happy. Now cut to the US, where we’re so time famished, we don’t even have maternity leave, we’re working a billion hours, we don’t get social connection because we’re too time strapped to do it. Most of our leisure is not walking around and moving around with other people we care about, it’s plopping down and watching TV. We’re just culturally doing stuff that’s not as good for our happiness, and so it’s not surprising that we’re kind of on average, less happy.
Glennon Doyle:
Because all we do is work really hard and then rest crash, but there’s a whole another third, that is rest is not necessarily fun and joy in life.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And it’s also weird, the evidence suggest we’re really crappy at rest. First of all, we don’t get very much of it, we rest with our phone near us, where it’s pinging us and our Outlook is just humming around in the background. And when we do finally get rest, we don’t do things that feel engaging, we’re usually so exhausted that we just plop and watch TV, which is not social, it’s not moving our bodies, it often doesn’t even feel engaging.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
One of my favorite studies has this funny thing where they survey how happy people are feeling, just in terms of positive mood, when they’re at work and when they’re at home. And so when you survey people at work, they often actually report that they’re kind of sometimes happy, because at work we often get flow. You know what? You all are at work, but we’re having this nice conversation, it’s kind of enjoyable. A lot of people’s work has some element of flow, or time is flying by and you’re feeling engaged, you’re doing something. Then they survey people when they’re at home, and they say how are you feeling, and they often catch people when they’re on screen number 47 of Netflix, where you’re like, [inaudible 00:32:11]? And they say, how are you feeling? You feel like, I feel gross, kind of apathetic, and just whatever.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But then if you ask people, would you rather be at work or rather be at home? People like at home, definitely at home, I want leisure time. Which of course makes sense, we don’t always want to be at work all the time. But the problem is, we’re not paying attention to the fact that we’re not using our leisure time well, we’d feel more rested and relaxed if we actually used it appropriately.
Glennon Doyle:
Like how? Because I want people who are out there to be thinking, what can people do? They’re tired, they did all their things, what can they do that will inevitably eventually increase their happiness?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Well actually, so this is something I struggle with a lot as a busy professor, I often find myself incredibly time famished, incredibly exhausted, and my instinct is to do exactly what I just said, makes you feel like crap, which is to plop down and look at TV. Or if I’m even too exhausted for TV, like the Netflix scrolling just seems too much, I’m just going to pull out my phone and look at whatever feed is there. And I don’t even have to work, I’m just going to scroll through the feed. And then afterwards I feel like, now I feel gross, I feel super gross. Whereas I’d be better off doing something that was a little bit challenging, challenging like in a physical way, just doing a reasonable yoga class, not even a hard yoga class, but just one that moved my body. Calling a friend and connecting with somebody, like taking a walk out in the world. Engaging in some sort of hobby that feels good, even something silly, like Duolingo where you’re learning a new language or something like that. These things are going to feel better, but our mind tells us that they’re not.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
We talked about a couple of other stupid features of the mind, but the feature of the mind I hate the most, the stupidest feature, is that if you think about the kinds of things we like, the kinds of things really enjoy that give us pleasure, the way the brain processes those is different from the things that we want, the things we crave, the things that we naturally have these motivations to go after. So what are some things we crave? If you’re as addicted to your phone as I am, like the email ding is something you crave, you want to get to that next screen of your inbox. There are mechanisms that are telling you to do that. I personally don’t have mechanisms to tell me to get on my yoga mat. Afterwards I feel great, I really like it, but I don’t crave my yoga mat. I crave a glass of Chardonnay, or I crave a good cupcake, or I crave anything to do with technology or interacting with screens. But then I end up doing the thing I crave and I don’t really feel good.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so this is a really dumb feature, this feature of our mind goes really bad in cases of addiction, you were talking about being in recovery. You can have incredible craving for alcohol or a drug that is not going to make you feel good, and in some cases of drug addiction, you can have a drug that you’re completely habituated to, but you still have this incredible craving for it. So even when you get it, it doesn’t make you feel as good as you’re expecting. But these wires are also kind of not connected up even in people who don’t experience addiction.
Glennon Doyle:
It speaks to discipline, because I feel like discipline has such a tie to happiness, my version of happiness, which is just a low humming of acceptance, because it’s like all day you have to not think of what am I craving? But you have to make yourself do the thing that you know makes you feel better afterward instead of worse.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yep. And this again, I feel like you were part of the Greeks, maybe you’re reincarnated from the Greek times, but this was Aristotle’s idea of happiness. What Aristotle thought was that happiness required setting up the right habits and the right situations. The world’s always going to move you around, you can’t trust your own virtue, what hap happiness is, is practicing the right stuff and setting it up so it’s easy. He actually thought that’s what virtue was generally, not just for happiness, but he thought being a good person meant setting up the situation so you wouldn’t mess up.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
So I feel like we get away from this now in the Protestant work ethic, like founding fathers who had the pursuit of happiness in there, they thought it should be hard, it should feel really difficult, and that’s how you push yourself. But actually Aristotle was like, no, it shouldn’t feel hard, because if it feels hard, you’re going to screw up all the time and you’re going to make bad choices, just make it easy for yourself and get the right habits in there, and then it’ll be fun.
Glennon Doyle:
And the ease is part of the joy, also our culture screws us up. Dr. Santos, you say, moving your body. Yes, that is correct, except our culture twisted that so much for me and twisted it so much for women that I turned the joy of moving my body into this barbaric work, like eating disorder, do it so hard until it’s a punishment.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Totally.
Glennon Doyle:
I had to quit that.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
We do this with so many things. We do this even in our leisure. One of the reasons that the Netflixes of the world make us feel so gross is that we’ve packed it with so many choices. If there’s just one show that was reasonable, it was just like Ted Lasso, that was the only thing you’d watch when you turned the TV, it’d be fine. That’s it. But we don’t want a world where there’s one show, even if it’s good, we want a billion choices and then we exhaust ourselves. So we end up setting up these structures that make it worse for ourselves, assuming that that’s what we want, that’s what’s going to make us happy, but in practice it just gets all messed up.
Glennon Doyle:
This is why the monks have three versions of cereal and why happy people don’t have 40000 million pieces of clothing to decide from every morning, because we overwhelm ourselves with all of these little choices and then we can’t make the big choices.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
President Obama for example, had just a whole set of the same shirts and ties, just so he would never have to make a decision. And he apparently claimed, allegedly, I got big decisions to make when he was president, I don’t need to be thinking like, oh, the blue tie or the light blue tie today. But we literally spend our income to purchase this stuff, to give ourselves choice overload as it’s called, this idea that we’re exhausting ourself from too much choice.
Glennon Doyle:
What interview on your happiness lab podcast changed your life the most? What interview did you do that you were, actually I’m going to do that thing, and that has made me happier?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Well, I’m involved right now in what I’m calling a funvention, a fun intervention, where I’m trying to have more fun, because as I just mentioned, my job is really busy, it can be the case that I just feel exhausted all the time. And I think it can feel tough to prioritize fun, it can feel really tough to prioritize enjoyment. So the guest that changed me the most is this woman, Catherine Price, she’s a journalist, she’s amazing. I first met her because she has this wonderful book called how to break up with your phone, where she argues that you don’t have to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to couple’s counseling so you can get some sort of agreements about when the phone’s going to be there and what its deal is.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But she’s more recently gotten obsessed with fun, she has this lovely book called The Power of Fun, and she’s really tried to take this empirical approach to what is fun, what do we get wrong, and how can you build more of it into your life?
Glennon Doyle:
I love it. We’ve talked a lot about fun, because Abby has told me that I have no fun, that I’m zero fun.
Abby Wambach:
You have a great sense of humor, I love being around you, but I don’t think that you take any time in your life to figure out what is actually fun for you.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s like a hierarchy to me, like a peer pyramid of needs, and I’m still in the middle just trying to not lose my shit, and that’s all the discipline things, like the yoga and the meditation. Fun feels to me like Yale level life.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I’m with you, this is a misconception that so many of us have. But if you look at the research, and Catherine has used this such a lovely way in her book, what she finds is actually, if you put in more fun, it makes the productivity part better. There’s so many surprising benefits of the fun, it reduces your inflammation, it improves your heart condition, it can improve your relationships. It actually stimulates brain growth, this is why very young kids play a lot and baby animals play all the time, because play and doing fun things can actually increase brain growth.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But it also has a surprising effect on your productivity. Why? I mean, you get it, if you’ve ever had like a super fun activity, a super fun vacation or something, you kind of go back a little bit more ready for the bs of life, you’re kind of a little bit more energized. And so we forget that it’s not just good for us in general and fun, but it can help us with this bottom line, it can help with the productivity and the forming good habits part.
Glennon Doyle:
And then is part of happiness, also just rejecting that idea. [inaudible 00:41:13] ministry has helped me a lot with this, but I hate the idea of all of my rest, all of my joy, just actually being another way to get back to work and produce more. Isn’t that just like a capitalistic exhausting, I resent it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, I resent it too. But it’s the way I can sell my administration on running a happiness class for Yale students.
Amanda Doyle:
Don’t ruin it for me Doyle, don’t ruin it for me.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, we get a lot of corporate money, man. But really, this is fundamentally problematic, that the only way we should value for example, fun, is to say, oh it can help me with my productivity. But the point is, actually it does. So it didn’t have to be that way, so it’s kind of a win-win.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But yeah, no, it’s hard, but I think it’s worth it. So Catherine defines fun as this combination of playful connected flow. So play is just like, you’re just in a playful mood, you’re kind of joking around, like something that I bet you could do a lot, but you have to have that in the space where you’re trying something out, which means you can’t be beating yourself up, saying I suck at this, being self-conscious about it. For me, whenever information about my body is activated, like my body identity or something like that, now I’m, oh God, do I look okay? That kills playfulness. Flow is this sense of time flying by, you’re just present and involved. And that means you can’t be distracted, you can’t be trying to be, I’m going have fun for this four minutes before I have my Zoom call. That doesn’t work, because you can’t kind of get into flow.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And this idea of connectedness is that most of the time, we’re having the most fun when we’re with other people. But again, our leisure is so split up in the day and weird times, and sometimes we feel so exhausted, we don’t realize the benefits we can get from other people. So she argues, if you can get that kind of bullseye connection of playfulness, connection, and flow, then you’ll achieve some fun.
Amanda Doyle:
And also, I’ve heard you talk about this kind of place where fun, happiness, playfulness intersects with hedonic adaptation, like if you’re going away for a seven day vacation, by day one, you’re like, I’m used to this, here I am, that splicing in the ability to get the maximum initial buzz where you can actually feel it from the fun, actually argues for smaller splices of that stuff, rather than what Americans do, which is be miserable for 51 weeks of the year and then have that one and hope it lasts.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. And Catherine talks about these fun inoculations, where we get this little dose of fun that can get you through the week. And I think, that’s a thing that we should think about. I mean, Americans in general don’t take their vacation, the number of vacation days that are left, that people just don’t use, is really depressing. But sometimes when we do get a vacation, we horridly kill ourselves, no breaks throughout the week, even weekends. And then we go on this one vacation that we have such high expectations for, getting back to expectations, where it must be perfect, no one will cry, there will be no rain, everything’s going to be perfect. And then we’re miserable, well, that didn’t really work. Whereas if we allowed ourselves to take real breaks, get some what’s called time affluence in, where you really feel like you have a little bit of breath of time, you’d feel so much better.
Glennon Doyle:
Go ahead, sis.
Amanda Doyle:
I’ve heard you before tell the parable of the second arrow, which is also subtitled the story of my life. So can you tell us that?
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah, it can’t be the story of your life, because it’s also the story of my life, but yeah. I mean, this gets back to this idea that, we have more control over this stuff than we think, and that there’s ways to navigate when you’re not feeling good. The happiness isn’t all about perfect, happy emojis times, but it’s really about navigating and allowing the negative stuff too.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so the way the parable of the second arrow goes is, Buddha is talking to his followers and he says, if you’re walking down the street and you get hit by an arrow, is that bad? And the followers are yeah, it sucks to get hit by an arrow. And he said, all right, well, if you’re walking down the street, Buddha says, and you get hit by not just one arrow, but two arrows, is that worse than just getting hit by one arrow? And the parable, his followers are like, yeah, two arrows suck even more. Also just bracketed, it’s very strange, I don’t know what was going on in Buddha times, arrows are just flying around hitting people, but whatever.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But Buddha goes on to say, the first arrow you can’t control, that’s the circumstances in life. That’s like, if your partner leaves you or if you get a bad medical diagnosis, or if there’s a global pandemic, that’s just circumstance. But he says, the second arrow is your reaction to it. It’s whether you react to the global pandemic by being pissed at your kids for the next six months, or you react to the breakup by gorging yourself with ice cream and never seeing a friend. The second arrow is usually our reaction to the suffering, and the bad part is, maybe the good and bad part, is he says, that’s on you, a lot of those second arrows you are jamming yourself with.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And it’s the parable of my life too, because I do this all the time. I’ll have a coworker at work who makes a mistake, and that’s annoying. But then six hours later, I’ll find myself complaining to my husband, did you know what that person at work did? Oh my God, they did… and it’s like, we’re having dinner, we could just be enjoying the dinner. That’s not the arrow of the coworker messing up, that’s me stabbing myself with it. And so often if we think about the things that get us, this is my reaction to it, this is my lack of understanding that I’m human and bad stuff happens. This is my thinking that I’m supposed to be special and none of this is supposed to happen to me, but it’s all on us.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And so powerful to realize the second arrow, and that’s our fault.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
We could have had a better strategy. And then the question is, what’s the better strategy? Because it’s one thing to realize you’re not supposed to react to these negative things, and then it’s another to do it. And that’s where I think all the principles you talk about in recovery, this idea of allowing and we’re just going to be with this, and I’m not going for happy, that’s not the baseline, it’s not perfect, perfect that we’re going for, we’re going for just present with what is, those are just some strategies you can use to deal with it.
Amanda Doyle:
And I love that too, because I think part of our second arrowing is justifying and make sure everyone’s onboarded with the injustice against us. And there’s this difference between being compassionate to yourself, acknowledging it, and being, that wasn’t okay. That feels bad. But any more of your time and energy and emotion that gets backed up into proving out that point, really just goes in the bucket of what you’re talking about with the happy in your life, because now that thing that could have been processed in five minutes with me acknowledging it was wrong, I have given three hours of my time and negative emotions. So I’ve not enjoyed my day because I’ve been feeding that fire.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And if it’s just three hours, honestly, with the second hour, you’re making it out good. Where I got arrows that three years ago, man, I’m still like, and then that person did that, it’s like, they are gone. Yeah, we can hold onto these things for so long.
Abby Wambach:
It’s just our ego, right? It’s our ego and our need to fulfill the story or the narrative that we are constantly writing in our mind about what our life is, rather than just accepting what actually is. That’s something I know that I definitely do.
Glennon Doyle:
Can we talk about that? Are we accepting this or are we changing this? Because it’s one or the other. What we’re not going to do is talk about it for seven years, either we’re going to say, this is what it is and I accept it, or we’re going to do something and change it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And even that last second thing of doing something, it’s just going to be so much easier to do something, if you’re not in the negative emotion space. Last night I had some friends coming over and I was slightly time famished and frantic, and I made this little tray of hors d’oeuvres or something, and I went to put it on the table and the rug wasn’t in the right spot and I was moving the table, and the tray of hors d’oeuvres fell on the floor. Fell on the floor. And it’s like, okay, I need to fix this, but it’s going to be a lot easier to fix it if I wasn’t then slamming the cheese and angrily yelling at my husband while I’m doing. If I’m, oh, it just fell, things fall, gravity, total force of the universe, it’s just a thing. Just going to clean it up. That’s very different than the typical reaction to something like that, which is making it so much worse with your own emotions.
Glennon Doyle:
Bigger. And also Laurie, is there something to be said for, one of the things that keeps my sanity which is my happiness, my version, is deciding that whatever just happened is something that just happened? Yet another example, so if my hors d’oeuvre tray falls, I am looking at that tray and thinking, yep, this is what happens to me. Of course, this is just like when I was 15 and this happened, and this is the pattern. And this story, the hors d’oeuvres, are now a metaphor for my entire life.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And I think we do this all the time, I think women do this more. I had this interesting conversation with one of my faculty colleagues who’s an incredibly competent human, she’s a Dean here. And she was expressing deep shame over the fact that she bought this corn and she hadn’t had time to cook and had gone bad in her crisper. And she was like, I’m the kind of person that wastes food, and I’m like, the corn was $2, throw the corn away. No one cares you wasted the corn. But again, like you said, this is just a pattern, I’m a person who does, it’s every single trigger and bad thing you ever thought about yourself gets locked to this piece of vegetable that you could have just tossed away. And so we do this all the time.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
And this is a spot where I think practices like self-compassion can really help us out. Self-compassion, it’s a bunch of different things. A researcher, Kristin Neff, defines it in three parts, which is the mindfulness sort of recognizing, wait a minute, I’m beating myself over the corn again. Kindness, stopping yourself from doing that, finding strategies for more positive self-talk. But the most important one with the corn is this idea of common humanity, which is you’re not the only person that left, I’m not the only person that accidentally dropped an hors d’oeuvres tray at some point, gravity happens. I’m not the only person that forgot what vegetables I have in my crisper. I’m just human, and that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it’s just the way it is.
Glennon Doyle:
And also, that is so helpful in relationships, because our relationship changed completely when I stopped coming to the conflict and attaching what just happened to 40 million things that happened in the past. This happened to us yesterday, we got in a little conflict, and staying like, this is about what just happened, and it’s not this is how you always do it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
I think this is really powerful, is that, we want to stay not in the noun space, like you are a this kind of person, you are a, and it’s like, this is just what happened. We want to be in the event space, we want to be like, this is just a thing that happened. I mean, the other thing is it’s not just things that happen, it’s often our thoughts about things that happen. I could drop the hors d’oeuvres on the floor and have the thought, this sucks, I’ve wasted these or hors d’oeuvres, whatever. Or I could have the thought of, I’m privileged enough that if I drop that food, I’ll just find something else to put out. They’re just as good as other thoughts.
Glennon Doyle:
And our thoughts create our emotions.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Correct, right. And so if you think this is the worst thing ever, your body is naturally going to react to it as though you’ve experienced a threat. That hors d’oeuvre tray falling on the floor becomes a sort of proverbial tiger in the evolutionary sense, because it activates our fight or flight response. Now I’m off, now I’m wanting to go inward because I feel like a loser for dropping the thing. We’re literally changing our physiology with our thoughts, which is kind of incredible. And it’s not just changing your emotions, once you activate your fight or flight, you’re releasing stress hormones, you’re putting your cardiac system under stress, you’re literally shutting off your sexual function, your digestive function. You’ve changed the physiology of your body because of your interpretation of an event, and getting control over that is probably pretty good.
Glennon Doyle:
So our thoughts are our interpretation of an event. So if we interpret it in a positive way or a meaningful way, then our emotions will follow. Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
If you had to pick one thing that people could do today that would increase their happiness, and we need it to be not that hard of a thing. It’s called-
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Remedial, like two minute window, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re tired, our pod squad is tired, and they want to know what’s this easy thing they can do that will increase their happiness just 1%.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
Yeah. Well, just since we just talked about the fight or flight system, and since so many of us are running it so often, one really easy thing we can all do right now, we can do it together, is to shut off that fight or flight system through our breath. So one thing to know about the fight or flight system is again, it’s engineered to like, tiger pops out, your body is like, crap run, and you either run or fight it or freeze so you don’t move, it’s built to get out of threats quickly. But we run it constantly, I mean, we’ve all been running it in the context of this pandemic constantly. I think we run it with low grade stress about our kids, and our careers, and what’s happening in our relationships. It’s just on, finding these little often pretend and mad generic tigers all the time.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But when we’re running our fight or flight system, our sympathetic nervous system, that means we’re shutting off what’s so called, the rest and digest system, the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s what would normally just be ongoing, digesting your food, building your body tissues, like the normal maintenance stuff. And normally that system, the fight or flight system is built to act just on a stimulus. So if a tiger popped out, you couldn’t be like, no fight or flight system, don’t go on, it can just turn on.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
But there is one way it turns out that we can consciously shut it off, and it’s good that nature gave it to us, and it’s our breath. The breath is kind of connected to this vagus nerve that when you take a really big, actually deep belly breath, in and then out, what that does is it activates the vagus nerve. And as you’re doing that, your body somewhere in your brain is saying, well, there can’t be a tiger there if you’re taking a really long, deep breath, like you’re not running away from it. So all right, switch back, rest and digest, let’s do it.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
So to turn on your parasympathetic nerve system, let’s take a deep in breath, way into the belly… and then slowly out. And we just did one, but I think if you’re mindfully noticing what that feels like, it feels different than three seconds ago. That was one breath, three seconds it probably took us. I guess we did a couple seconds in, a couple seconds out. But that’s awesome, that’s a way that you can activate the rest and digest system of your body. And that will have a whole cascading set of effects on how easily you’re going to stab yourself with that second arrow because you’ve just given yourself a little break. It’ll kind of cause your reactions to be different, because you’re not running your stress hormones on red alert all the time. Super useful.
Dr. Laurie Santos:
You all seem a lot calmer, I’ll say.
Glennon Doyle:
I feel so much better. I buy that, I am with that, I agree with that, I fully support breathing, and that is going to be our next right thing for today. Everybody, relax your jaw, relax your face, drop your shoulders, deep breath. We can do hard things. We’re going to be back with more from Dr. Santos, we’re not letting her leave. Thank you for being here. When things get hard this week, deep breath, we can do hard things.
Glennon Doyle:
I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.
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.