How to be happy

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Sean Rameswaram: It's National Teachers Day today, so let's all take a moment to thank the teachers in our lives for what they do and what they've done. And then maybe thank them a second and third time for what they're doing right now. Teaching classes remotely, trying to manage dozens of children and teenagers on some video chat platform. From what I've heard from my teacher friends, it's been a bit of a beast. Thank you, teachers.

Sean Rameswaram: To mark the occasion, we thought we'd talk to a teacher on the show today. I'm Dr. Lori Santos. I'm professor of psychology at Yale University and host of the Happiness Lab podcast.

Sean Rameswaram: Professor Santos is extremely popular on campus. I teach a class called Psychology and the Good Life, which is a class all about the science of well-being. And it recently had the distinction of becoming the largest class ever in Yale's 300-plus year history. What does that mean? You got a lot of students on your waiting list?

Dr. Lori Santos: It meant that we had over 1,000 students actually taking the class. So we ended up teaching the class inside a concert hall, which was a little surreal. Wow. But I think shows that, you know, college students today really want to think more about what they could do to feel happier. You know, they don't like this culture of mental health crisis that many of them are experiencing. And I think they want evidence-based solutions for things they could do to feel better.

Sean Rameswaram: And this class has like transcended Yale University, right? I mean, I'm in a text chain and someone sent your class to the entire group saying, hey, you can take this class right now for free on some site.

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, it's been a little humbling. So when we when we first launched the class at Yale, we just got a ton of press for the fact that so many students on Yale's campus was taking the class. But then we got all this national, international press about the class. And so we realized, you know, this isn't just Yale students who are worried about what they can do to feel happier. Like, lots of folks feel like they're not flourishing as much as they could.

Sean Rameswaram: And so we decided to put the class on Coursera.org, which is the digital partner Yale uses for its online content. And it's up there completely for free. It's called The Science of Wellbeing. And we've had over a million and a half learners sign up just in the last month and a half. A million and a half.

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, it's a little surreal, you know, especially in this current time of COVID-19. You know, so many of us know what we need to do to protect our physical health. You know, we need to wash our hands and socially distance. But I think a lot of us are looking for what we can do to protect our mental health. You know, we're feeling overwhelmed and anxious and uncertain. We don't like that. And we want similar evidence-based tips for like, okay, how can we deal with that during this crazy time?

Sean Rameswaram: So clearly, despite all the job losses and hardship and health concerns, this isn't frivolous. This is something that people want to know more about than ever.

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, and I think, you know, we often can get in this mode of thinking that happiness is sort of, as my students would say, a first world problem, right? You know, it's the thing you worry about when everything else is sorted. But there's research to suggest that we might have the causal arrow backwards. You know, there's data suggesting that positive mood can actually impact your immune function, that positive mood can increase longevity, that positive mood can actually help things like your job prospects and acing a job interview and even having a higher salary, you know, depending on what job you get.

Sean Rameswaram: And so we think that all these life circumstances get worked out and then we're happy, right? That's when we can worry about well-being. But the data actually suggests the opposite, that maybe focusing on well-being can make the other stuff that we want to get in life a little bit easier.

Dr. Lori Santos: Well, before we get to happiness during this pandemic, let's talk about the class and the coursework itself. I mean, how unorthodox was this class when you dreamt it up? I mean, psychology and the good life, did anything like that exist beforehand?

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, well, not at Yale, but the dirty secret of my class is that there are lots of other institutions who had similar kinds of courses. But on campus, it was really weird for a couple reasons. One is that I really didn't want the class just to be a normal science class. The science shows it's one thing to know what you're supposed to do to be happier, but it's a completely different thing to actually do that stuff. You know, this is true in behavior change generally, right? Like we know how much sugar we're supposed to be eating or how much we're supposed to save for retirement or how much we're supposed to exercise. But it's a completely different thing to like actually do those things in real life.

Dr. Lori Santos: And so I set up the class in this weird way where, in addition to the normal course requirements, I also gave students what I called course rewirements, which were these practices to rewire their habits. And they were, you know, not the usual homework, things like, you know, take time to meditate or take time to sleep or promote social connection or do a random act of kindness. You know, these were literally listed in the syllabus as things that students had to do.

Sean Rameswaram: And that was kind of a change from a typical Yale class. You know, it wasn't the normal kind of homework that students were typically getting. And I think that that's one of the reasons the class became so popular was that I was really giving students these practical strategies of like, you know, today in this 10 minutes that you have free, do this. And that we know, scientifically speaking, should in theory improve your mood.

Dr. Lori Santos: It came about in part because I took on this new role at Yale. So I've been teaching at Yale as a professor for the last 17 years, but most of that time I spent sort of at the front of the classroom. You know I was paying attention to student life but not like in the trenches And that all changed when I became a head of college So Yale one of these strange schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there like you know Gryffindor and Slytherin these like you know schools within a school And so Yale has these residential colleges I the head of Silliman College which incidentally of course is the best residential college on campus no question But in that role, I really was living with students. My house is in the middle of their quad in the courtyard. I eat with them in the dining hall. I see them in the coffee shop. And it was working with students closely that I really did see this mental health crisis up close and personal where, you know, I had students who are experiencing like active suicidal ideation or students who are like experiencing panic disorder. but even lots more students who are just kind of depressed or sort of fast forwarding their time in college to the future or just really uncertain.

Sean Rameswaram: Like it wasn't what I remember going through when I was in college. You know, people, you know, went through their own mental health stuff, but it wasn't like such an epidemic. And so the class came about because, you know, I'm part of this community. I'm kind of like a big aunt to all these students and just seeing them so depressed and anxious just felt awful. And it felt particularly awful because, you know, as a psychologist, I realized like we have solutions to this stuff. Like there are practices that students can do to feel better. And so I thought, well, let me teach them a whole class about this stuff. That was the main reason. But if I'm being totally honest, there was a second reason too, which is I also was seeing a lot of myself in them. You know, this prioritization of work over social connection. When things get busy, you know, you toss out sleep and exercise and all these things that we know matter for happiness. Part of the reason I taught the class was really for myself, because I knew if I was teaching my students to do these practices, I was going to have to practice what I preached. And that would probably have a positive impact on my own well-being, too.

Sean Rameswaram: How did it go? I mean, beyond being wildly successful and popular, I mean, how do students do in the class?

Dr. Lori Santos: Honestly, it was kind of like a white-knuckle experience, to be fair, where it's like so many students and figuring out how to get enough teaching assistants to grade things. And, you know, we ended up doing a midterm exam that, because they couldn't take it in this concert hall because there were no desks, had to be taught across 17 different classrooms on campus. So it was a little surreal.

Sean Rameswaram: And part of the white knuckling meant that I kind of messed something up, which is that with my scientist hat on, I would have loved to do a really rigorous pre and post testing of students about, you know, did their well-being really get better and, you know, have a control group of students who were in the class and so on. All we really have is student anecdotal reports. But the anecdotal reports suggest that students really got a lot out of class.

Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I still get emails from people, you know, two years on from the first time I taught this class saying things like, you know, this class really changed my life or it changed the career path that I took. And I think the students who did the practices got a lot out of it.

Sean Rameswaram: Do students fail your class?

Dr. Lori Santos: You know, we're not allowed to talk about you. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it was actual scientific class. You know, they didn't show up. They failed. But in general, you know, I tried to push students not to be thinking about their letter grade that they were getting in their class. You know, the actual grade on their Yale transcript. because what the reason they were really hard at Yale to be like, don't think about your grades at Yale. Yeah.

Sean Rameswaram: But I think it's that, you know, the students who right now are totally killing themselves to pay attention to a grade per se, they're not necessarily the ones that are really worried about learning and enjoying their learning. And this comes about through something we know about scientifically. So there's lots of work in psychology about what's called internal versus external rewards.

Sean Rameswaram: So internal rewards, like for something like learning is just like, you know, that hit of happiness you get of like, oh, I figured that out. Like that was like such a cool thing to find out, right? Like there's something cool about learning stuff. But oftentimes we end up slapping onto an internal reward, some external reward, you know, we give it a grade. And what we know from the science is that once you give people external rewards, they have this insidious character where they take on a life of their own. Like they make you stop enjoying the thing.

Sean Rameswaram: I think back to this wonderful memoir by Andre Agassi about, you know, he always hated tennis because like he had to do it. And I'm like, how can Andre Agassi you know, who's so good at tennis, hate tennis, right? But I think that's what we're doing to our poor students is that, you know, the focus on grades and the obsession with grades and the early focus on grades where kids are paying attention to this, you know, nowadays from like toddlerhood, that's kind of messing up their love of learning.

Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like you kind of talk about this class in the past tense. Why is that?

Dr. Lori Santos: I was supposed to get a sabbatical and I actually teach less because of my head of college role. And so it'll come back probably next year sometime. But the online class is there for anybody in the world who really wants to take it. And how many people have taken it again?

Dr. Lori Santos: We're up to, I think, 2.3 million learners, which is a little crazy. And a good like three quarters of those learners just signed up since COVID-19 started hitting the U.S. And I think that's so interesting. I mean, I think part of it's that people have a little bit more time on their hands. But I think people are really out there trying to figure out what they can do to protect their well-being right now. Happiness in the time of COVID.

Sean Rameswaram: After a break.

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Sean Rameswaram: Does this feel like the ultimate test of your course of psychology and the good life, happiness during a pandemic?

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, I mean, you know, there are lots of things that we normally do to be happy that we can't do right now, right? You know, I think, you know, one of the things the science teaches us is that social connection is one of the biggest features of happiness, right? It's some scholars even say that it's a necessary condition for high happiness is having these strong social relationships. and during the time of social distancing we're having to renegotiate all of our social relationships through technology in this really strange time and we're facing an incredibly I mean unprecedentedly challenging time right I mean people are dying there's a global pandemic that's killing people around the world and we don't know when we're going to go back to resuming our normal life and so I think even if you were a person that was flourishing a couple months ago you could be really struggling right now but the good news is that that's when I think the science of happiness becomes even more important than ever, right? Because all of us need these tips about like, okay, science, like tell me what I can do right now to feel better.

Sean Rameswaram: And that's why I think people need the class is to kind of learn what these tips are.

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, I mean, I often get asked for the Cliff Notes version, which I'm happy to give, you know, because people can sign up for the deeper one. It's for a good cause. Yeah, totally, totally.

Sean Rameswaram: And so I think one of the big tips that we teach in the class is that we have to come to terms with this fact that our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. If we could just change our circumstances, everything would be great. But the research suggests that that's just simply not the case.

Dr. Lori Santos: There are people with fantastic circumstances who are utterly miserable and people with really seemingly awful circumstances objectively who are actually quite happy. And so the first thing the class teaches is that we got to overcome these misconceptions. It's not money. It's not our material possessions. It's not our circumstances. It's more about our behaviors and about our mindsets.

Sean Rameswaram: And what are some behaviors that really help?

Dr. Lori Santos: Behaviors like connecting with other people socially can be really powerful. I think, you know, the way we do that normally, we have to shift around a bit, but grab an informal, you know, happy hour drink over Zoom with a friend or, you know, call an elderly neighbor or connect with somebody you haven't talked to in a while.

Sean Rameswaram: Another thing that class teaches is that if we want to be like happy people, we should be a little bit more other oriented. Other oriented. Yeah. Like rather than self-oriented. And I think this one is culturally kind of strange because right now we're all in the phase of like, treat yourself, you know, self-care, like self, self, self. But the happy people don't do that. Happy people are much more focused on other people and their happiness than they are on their own.

Sean Rameswaram: And so we can replicate this simply by thinking about what kinds of random acts of kindness we could do. Or this time, you know, when you're feeling stressed about your own situation, how can you reach out and help someone else's situation?

Dr. Lori Santos: Have you ever heard Bob Dylan's spiel on this by any chance?

Sean Rameswaram: No, I haven't actually. What does Bob say?

Dr. Lori Santos: No one's ever played it for you?

Sean Rameswaram: The holiday season is a time for joy. However, we'd be remiss if we didn't take a moment to talk about the holiday blues. It can be a time of loneliness and sadness. And let me tell you, if you got the holiday blues, if you got any kind of blues, I feel for you. I know life is hard, but you don't need anyone to tell you how to feel better. You don't need Dr. Phil. You don't need Tony Robbins. You don't need any of those people on television. Any of those people in magazines. You especially don't need me. I'm going to tell you the magic formula. What you got to do is go out and help someone more unfortunate than you. Go to an orphanage. Play football with the kids. Go to retirement homes. Go to soup kitchens. Go into prisons. Go see some people. There's people everywhere who aren't as well off as you. No matter how bad you have it, somebody got it worse. Instead of adding to the sadness in the world, Why not lend a hand, help somebody out? And not just on Christmas. Why don't you give it a try year round?

Sean Rameswaram: Oh, man, I love that. That's fantastic. And exactly on point. Yeah, it just sounds completely aligned with what you're saying.

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, I mean, there's data on this where there's lovely studies by Liz Dunn, who's a professor at UBC and her colleagues, where she just goes out on the street and hands people money. You know, here's 20 bucks. And she tells people how to spend it. either by the end of the day, spend it on yourself, you know, treat yourself, or by the end of the day, use it to do something nice for someone else. And what she finds is at the end of the day, people who spend the money on other people are happier than those who spend the money on themselves.

Sean Rameswaram: And in cross-cultural work, she finds this is true even if you struggle to put food on the table at the end of the day. You know, so people who are living at low-income means are still happier when they try to do something nice for other people than when they do it for themselves.

Dr. Lori Santos: Which again, it's not our intuition, you know, to be honest, like if I'm having a crappy day, I'm not like, let me gift my coworker a manicure. I think I want the manicure, you know, myself or something, right? We think we want to treat ourselves, but that's actually just not what the results suggest. We should be more focused on others.

Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so keep in touch. I mean, be it Zoom, be it yoga night, be it playing some trivia with your friends, whatever it might be.

Dr. Lori Santos: Second thing is, instead of always thinking about how you can make yourself feel better, maybe try and feel better via helping others.

Sean Rameswaram: What's next on the list?

Dr. Lori Santos: I think next on the list would be to protect our healthy habits. And by this, I mean stuff that we know is good for our physical health, but we forget is good for our mental health. So things like exercise. There's evidence that a half hour of cardio is as good at reducing symptoms of depression as an anti-depression drug. Like, there's tons of evidence that our mental health is protected if we can just focus on our sleep.

Sean Rameswaram: You know, this is a tricky thing during this time. You know, people are even talking about, you know, COVID insomnia. But I think this is something else we can take action on. Like, a lot of the COVID insomnia comes with how we're behaving before we go to sleep. You know, it's about our sleep hygiene and whether we're, you know, scrolling through those scary statistics or, you know, reading awful stuff on Reddit right before we go to bed.

Sean Rameswaram: I tried to institute this myself by like putting the phone away around 8 p at night and trying to use that time before bed to like talk to my husband or call a friend or like read a physical book just staying away from the panic scrolling right before bed But prioritizing those things can be huge

Dr. Lori Santos: And this is something not just for COVID-19, but just in general. I think when things get stressful, that's when we stop exercising, you know, stop our normal yoga routine, we stop sleeping, but that's actually the time we need both of those habits the most.

Sean Rameswaram: Okay. So stay on top of what you need to do for yourself. Is that fair?

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, perfect.

Sean Rameswaram: And then and I think the next one would be kind of it's more of a kind of mindset and an attitude, but it's sort of developing an attitude of thankfulness or counting your blessings. We can get really focused on the griping side of things. But the data suggests that we'd be better off and much happier if we focused on the things we're grateful for.

Dr. Lori Santos: And even in the midst of this crisis, we can find things. In fact, sometimes it's easier to find things we're grateful for right now because we realize just how fragile everything was. You know, when I was having a bad day, I could drive to my mom's house and give her a hug. Like, you know, how could I have not been so incredibly grateful for that opportunity? How could I have taken it for granted?

Sean Rameswaram: And so I think this crisis is causing a lot of us to realize, you know, what else are we taking for granted? You know, I'm healthy right now. I don't have COVID. My husband and a lot of the people I know are healthy. You know, I still have my job. Like, all of us who have things to be grateful for need to be focusing on those. And it can help to realize just how fragile they actually are.

Dr. Lori Santos: I know you have, you know, empirical data to suggest that a lot of people are asking themselves the questions that you and I are trying to answer right now. So this isn't, you know, an exercise in frivolity to just be thinking about how I can be happy and sustain myself in this moment. And yet, you know, for those people who are feeling privileged right now who still have jobs who are just unfortunately relegated to their homes, which might be really nice homes, it just, I imagine people are struggling with the idea of even considering their happiness in this moment, right? I mean, when people are actually dying, when people are struggling.

Sean Rameswaram: We talked to EMT workers in New York who said terrifying things about their lives right now. I mean, what do you say to those people who can't even allow themselves to put something like their happiness on the table right now?

Dr. Lori Santos: Yeah, well, I guess a couple of things. I mean, one is just the practical evidence about how happiness can impact your health, right? I mean, there's evidence suggesting that positive mood can affect the extent to whether you contract a respiratory virus if you're exposed to one. You know, so there's a study where they vary people's mood and then expose them to one of these rhinoviruses, like literally like shoot it in your nose. And what you find is that the people who develop symptoms are the ones who tend to be in negative moods.

Sean Rameswaram: So again, like, you know, this is like one thing. It's not like if you're happy, you'll never catch COVID. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that, you know, it's part and parcel of the things that we can do to protect our immune function, right? Like eating healthy and being careful and washing our hands and so on. We also know that things like happiness and gratitude and these positive feelings build up resilience. And like, that's something that all of us need right now. Like, we're going to need to be in like peak performance to deal with this crisis once it's over and rebuild society in a positive way. And if all of us are in a negative zone, like, we're just not going to have the resilience we need to do that.

Sean Rameswaram: And so in some ways, you know, I've been telling people on the podcast, like, you know, if you have privilege and it's your responsibility to kind of work on your happiness, it's your responsibility to work on your mood, because that's going to allow you the kind of strength to go through and help the folks who are really going to need it.

Sean Rameswaram: You know, finally, it's just, you know, that in some ways we have to realize that there, of course, there are lots of things we can't control in life, but our reaction to these events is one thing we really can control, you know, and later, you know, future you when you're telling your grandkids about this horrible crisis. I think you're not going to want to say, yeah, I got super mopey even though I was in my awesome house. I couldn't bring myself to be happy because everyone was so miserable. So I just like was super miserable through this crisis. Like, no, like you're going to want to have a story of resilience after this. And to do that, we really need to protect our own mental health. And I think that there are going to also be a lot of benefits for our society. I think this whole crisis has made it completely clear that we are facing a form of inequity in our country that needs to be remedied. that there are, you know, political and societal problems in our country and elsewhere that we really need to fix. And I think that getting through this crisis, once we're on the other side, folks are going to mobilize to try to fix some of those things. And so I'm actually hopeful that once we get out of this crisis, we'll actually be a lot better off. And the data really backs me up. I'm not being kind of like, you know, sort of Pollyanna-ish about this. Like, the data suggests that even though a lot of us can experience things like post-traumatic stress, there's also just as much evidence for what's called post-traumatic growth. In other words, after going through a crisis, people, individuals, and communities come out stronger, they come out more willing to do things that promote meaning in their life, and they come out more socially connected and more ready to help the people that are around them.

Sean Rameswaram: Professor Dr. Lori Santos teaches psychology and the good life at Yale. You can also find the class for free at Coursera online. And if you still haven't had enough, she's got a podcast. It's called The Happiness Lab. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from You Stay Classy San Diego. Thank you. Anyone can in a click. And collaboration tools put feedback right where you need it. See how you can turn your team into a content machine with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.