Brandon: Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast.
I’ve been remembering this moment from my childhood recently as I’ve been preparing for our next guest. And those of you of a certain age, perhaps you’ll remember this kind of moment.
I’m 15 years old and I’ll date myself because CDs had just come out, right? So I had a large cassette tape collection and CDs had come out. And so, you know, each week I would save the money that I would make mowing lawns or washing dishes and I would buy a CD. And I can remember so clearly going to the music store at the mall, of course. And it was just such excitement. My whole week was built around the anticipation of going to the record store and which CD that I was gonna get. And I can remember so clearly landing on the INXS album kick, this is probably my first CD, love the album to this day, but something really interesting happened that as I began walking to the register and paying my $11 for the CD… I could instantly feel the pleasure, the excitement, dissipate. And it had nothing to do with the music of the band itself. I’m a huge INXS fan because I hadn’t even listened to the album.
But that I realized that this sort of dopamine hit I was getting was much more about the anticipation than it was about the actual getting. I’ve thought about this moment so many times. It’s really influenced how I’ve lived my life in terms of realizing that the craving self wants so much endlessly and it’s not actually ordered to my wellbeing. Will never produce the happiness that I think. Anyway, today’s wonderful guest provided me for the first time a name for this, and it’s called the arrival fallacy. This fallacy that if we just get that thing, if we just have this experience, if we just get that favorite dessert, just get that relationship, just get that job, just get that house, the vacation, right? Then we’ll be happy.
And in fact, my guest, the wonderful Professor Lori Santos, talks about why in fact this is a fallacy. And it’s a deep honor to have had this conversation with Lori Santos. As I mentioned in the podcast, when folks discover that I’m here working and teaching at Yale, the first question they ask me is, Do you know Lori Santos? And up until now I’ve had to say No. I’m really, really thankful for her presence.
If you don’t know Professor Santos’s work on happiness, it’s really been groundbreaking in so many ways. So let me tell you a little bit about Professor Santos. She’s a professor of psychology here at Yale. In addition to her work on the evolutionary origins of human cognition, Professor Santos is an expert on the science of happiness and the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. Her course here at Yale, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. The class has become the most popular course in the history, the 300 year history of Yale; almost one out of every four students at Yale enroll in her course. The course was featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, the Today Show, GQ magazine, Slade, O Magazine. The online version of the class, The Science of Wellbeing on Coursera has attracted more than 4 million learners from around the world. She was recently voted as one of Popular Science magazine’s brilliant 10, The Young Minds, and was named in Time Magazine as leading campus celebrity.
Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, which I hope you all will listen to as a top three Apple podcast and has attracted a hundred plus million downloads since its launch. So we dive here into the nuance, the science of happiness and spoiler alert, it’s incredibly simple. It’s not always very easy, but things like connection and kindness and helping others and being present and being compassionate with yourself really do make a difference. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
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Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision that needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Professor Laurie Santos, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast.
Laurie: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
B: I am thrilled. I have to confess, we’re big fans over at Berkeley of your work and of your research, but if there’s one single question that folks ask me when they discover that I’m here at Yale, it’s, Do you know Laurie Santos? Like I think in their mind they think we’re having coffee like every Tuesday afternoon at Claire’s and they’re very disappointed to learn that we’re not doing that, but at least I can tell them now that we’ve met.
L: I know, they can listen to our most recent conversation.
B: So I’d love to hear a little bit of your journey. It was– one of the great blessings of my life is just to hear folks’ stories about how they get from kind of wherever they started to now. And I wonder if you would sort of tell the story of how you became involved in your research, but maybe also telling it through the story of the really meaningful people in your life who guided you and inspired you to the life of research and to studying the brain.
L: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I think I’ve long, maybe perhaps, innately been a psychologist. Somebody who’s really interested in people and wanting to understand people and stuff. I was the little kid that always wanted to hang out in the room where the adults were, and parents were like, “Go in the other room, go hang out with the kids.” I’m like, people, you know, making sense of the world. And so when I finally realized there was like an academic discipline where you could study this stuff, that was amazing. And that for me was like really early on in college. I was lucky enough to have a few different like college professor mentors, my intro psych teacher, the researcher I would later work with, who kind of guided me on this path of realizing like, “No, there’s a career here. “You can study this stuff.” Which for me is like a working-class kid was like, “Wait, someone will pay you to go to school and get your PhD?” And like faculty of arts and sciences departments, we get paid and we get TF-ships to go to school. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s not like med school. This is amazing.” And so, yeah, so I was really lucky to get exposed to that, even as a first year student in college, which was amazing.
And that was around the time that I got interested in the first set of questions I really cared about, which is this problem of like, what makes humans special? Like, why are we thinking about the cosmos and what’s beyond us and these big transcendent questions using language, using technology like a podcast when pretty much no other species of the hundreds and hundreds of other species on the planet are really doing that. And so that was what led me to do the work that I first came to Yale to do, which was sort of studying the origins of our minds by looking to non-human animals. So I spent a lot of time studying monkeys and how they think about the world. More recently, worked with dogs to try to see what a creature that grows up in the same environments we do can understand about the world.
And I did that for a very long time. But the transition to really studying wellbeing and flourishing and happiness took place when I took on a new role on Yale’s campus. I taught here for 15, 20 years, and I was often like at the front of the classroom, watching, like I was participated in student life, but not closely. That all changed when I became a head of college on campus. So as I’m sure some of your listeners know, Yale is one of these funny schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, or at least at Yale College, there’s like colleges with it, there’s like a Gryffindor, Slytherin kind of thing, these individual colleges. I became a Head of College, which meant as a faculty member, I was living on campus with students. So my house was in the courtyard, I’m eating with them in the dining hall. I was now seeing college student life up close and personal. And I genuinely didn’t like what I was seeing.
I was seeing a thing that everybody talks about in the news, which is this college student mental health crisis, where right now, not just at Yale, but nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days, more than 60% are overwhelmingly anxious, which is kind of like the highest level they can report on a scale. This is really awful, more than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months.
These are national statistics, but this was like what I was seeing in my tiny community. And I was like, we’ve gotta do something about this, right? I’m not in the clergy, I’m not doing the kind of thing you do, but I’m like, somehow I need to engage in some service to help these students. And because I’m a nerdy psychologist, I’m like, well, the service I do is I teach courses, I teach some about psychology. And so realizing that my field had all these strategies, tips, things you can do to do better, I’m like, well, let me develop a new course for students. I’m gonna make it not just like a regular psychology class, it’s gonna be super practical, it’s gonna have all these tips they can use to feel less burned out, less stressed and so on.
But when I thought about making that class, I assumed it’d be like other psych classes on campus that have 30 or 40 students. Maybe you’ve already given the punchline of like, what happened, it wasn’t 30 or 40 students, it was a quarter of the entire Yale undergraduate student body showed up the first time we taught the class– over a thousand students.
B: Oh my gosh, the most successful course or the most subscribed to course in the history of the university over 300 years.
L: Yeah, at least the largest. The largest. I mean, we can debate whether it was successful. And that was humbling and incredible, a small logistical nightmare we don’t need to get into. But it really showed that students are voting with their feet, right? They I think don’t like being in this culture; a feeling like their values aren’t meeting what they’re doing all the time, they’re feeling so burned out, they’re chasing all these external rewards. And I think when you had a class that was giving them solutions to this, they really wanted to go for that. And I think the thing that made the class different, maybe we can chat about this, is like, what I was trying to offer them is really evidence-based solutions. And I think that they resonated with that, right? They wanted to know like, what does the science say I can really do better?
And so that was the story of how I pivoted, but that could have just been a one-off class that I taught. What happened differently was what happened outside of Yale, which is that this could have just been a weirdly viral class on some random campus that nobody heard about. But what was odd was like, everybody heard about it. About a couple weeks into the class, there was a New York Times article about the class that then turned into pretty much every week a major national or international news media organization filming the class while I was teaching it. Because the story of Yale students who are 19 or in an Ivy League school have everything going for them. The fact that so many of them were flocking to classes, not about econ or AI or whatever, they all wanted to learn how to be happy or how to flourish more. I think that story resonated like far beyond campus.
And so I just realized like a lot of people need these strategies. And so, I really made a massive career pivot, not from psychology, I was always a psychologist, but really retrained in this work in the science of happiness, which now is sort of my full-time job to try to share that broadly.
B: That’s amazing, thank you for that story. So I’m a fellow at Morse College. So for those outside the Yale world, I’m an advisor to first year students.
L: That’s Slytherin.
B: Yeah just Slytherin. Our Morsels have shared with me the kind of deflation, the kind of overwhelm they’ve worked their whole life to get to this extrinsic goal that they thought would bring them everything, fulfillment. And Yale’s a terrific place, a wonderful place to work and to study. It’s bountiful and rich in all the ways. And yet there’s a moment, there’s a kind of epiphany like, Oh, this isn’t the silver bullet that for years I had hoped it would be. And now what? This is a beautiful moment of opportunity to really explore what is it actually? And so what is it that you found? Were there surprises along the way that you’ve discovered around what actually contributes to happiness?
L: Yeah, well, I’ll say one thing on the Yale students’ realization of like, This wasn’t it, and I think this resonates with folks who are incredibly successful, like Yale students, they’re getting in, 6 or 7% of them, maybe it’s like 3% at this point, are getting into a place like Yale, right? So it’s like, oh my gosh, folks who are really successful in the thing they were going for doesn’t work. That can really resonate, but this is a bias that so many of us are walking around in our heads with. It’s what researchers called arrival fallacy, sort of the happily ever after fallacy I call it. I’ll be happy when, I make my first million, when I get into Yale, when I get that first relationship, when I get through my next quarterly report, whatever it is, right? We have this in our head of like, if I get there, I’ll be done. And the problem is like happiness isn’t ever really done, it’s kind of a journey that you’re on where you’re growing and learning things and navigating situations that come up, it’s not really over.
My textbook colleague, I wrote a textbook with other psychologists on this stuff. Dan Gilbert, who’s a professor at Harvard, is fond of saying happily ever after only works if you have three minutes to live. (Laughing) It doesn’t last that long. But in terms of what really makes us happier, again, recognizing it’s a journey and that we have to put more work in, it’s just not the stuff we think, it’s not the circumstances, right? It’s not the accolades at work, it’s not getting into the perfect school. It’s much more about our behaviors and our mindset.
So in terms of our behaviors, it’s just simple stuff, getting social connection in, right? Doing kind things for others, just kind of being one with your body, right? So it’s just simple things like sleep and exercise, which so many of our college students are not getting enough of, right? Especially sleep, those things really matter. Getting rest, for example, lots of interesting new social science work on this concept of time affluence. The fact that you just have some free time.
And you’ll notice in all of these things, it’s I think, especially on a podcast like this, it’s worth noting that these are the things that the researchers are finding, but these are the things that religious leaders have been telling us for a long time. Like the Sabbath, that Sabbath was written in, what is it, number two, number three, and they’re like big lists, right? Things like doing nice things for others, social connection, right? So many of the things we do as activities in religion are picking up on these behaviors that we’re supposed to engage with. And those are just the behaviors. As I said, it’s happiness is about our behaviors and our mindsets.
And the mindsets that matter are things like presence, things like gratitude, things like equanimity, things like kind of noticing and having compassion, not just for yourself and others, right? It’s really a set of mindsets that are straight out of the playbooks of most of the world’s religious traditions, including Christianity.
B: Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing how simple this is. And I’m struck in some ways.
L: Well, simple, yeah. It sounds simple, but as many of the teachings are, it’s like these things are simple, but you actually have to put them into practice.
B: Not so easy. I’m just struck by the maybe juxtaposition of this particular moment, right? Jeffrey Epstein in the news a lot these days, we’re sort of reckoning, I hope we’re reckoning broadly with patriarchy and violence against women and power and greed. And in some ways, I hope we will be able to look in the mirror a bit and see the ways in which we’ve constructed a society around supremacy, power, greed, standing in proximity to power, even, is so desirable to so many folks. And social media drives a lot of this as well.
And the juxtaposition of that with the maybe simple, but not easy findings of your research.
And I mean, how do you sit with that juxtaposition with students, right? We’ve organized society in some ways around the complete opposite of everything you’re discovering.
L: Yes, yes. Well, one, and I’m so with you, you and I are having this conversation right after the Super Bowl and my glorious Patriots did not do so well. But more than that, I remember sitting watching these ads going by and realizing like we have constructed society around gambling, weight loss drugs, and Bitcoin. And I’m like, that’s like, if you just watched, if you’re an alien that came down from the planet and was like, these people are paying $7 million for spots, what’s the most important stuff in society right now? You’d be like, I guess it’s those three things, which is just pathetic.
And so I think the way I reconcile that is that we have these minds that are not necessarily built to seek out flourishing and happiness. We have these minds that are really built to seek out the next big reward hit, the next big dopamine hit. And they’re minds that aren’t really great at understanding the kinds of things that we need to flourish. I think this is one of the reasons that religious scholarship and philosophical scholarship and all these things are so important is like, you need to like sit around and contemplate and read texts to kind of figure out what your mind naturally gets wrong to figure out what we all should be doing to live a good life.
And so I think that that’s really an inroad, right? To realize like, society’s getting it wrong, but that’s because I think many of us are walking around with these individual minds whose instincts are to get it wrong, right? This is why we need leaders to come help us understand our nature and what we’re doing wrong and how we can do better. So I think that has helped. It’s not just, oh my gosh, social media is leading us astray and all those advertisers in the Super Bowl are leading us astray. It’s true, but all our minds are built to do that. And so, we need these better strategies. We need scholarship to help us figure out what we should be doing better.
B: You were the second voice to bring up our dear friend dopamine in a Leader’s Way podcast recently. So James Kimmel was here. Are you familiar with his research around revenge and what a dopamine hit the thought of revenge provides? And it’s another one of these instances where sort of our evolutionary DNA has not caught up with our desire for thriving, right?
I’m struck in your research around what you found around religiosity and sort of folks who have spiritual pursuits and the power of being in a community of conviction or a faith community. And at a moment when a lot of our faith leaders are feeling, I mean, as overwhelmed as everyone else, a little bit maybe demoralized, feeling like their voice historically doesn’t matter as much as it did at one point in time. And I’ve really been heartened by so many guests from across sectors, scientists and folks from business, who are saying, actually, we need our philosophers and theologians and faith leaders to actually find their voice in this moment. Walk us through a little bit of what you’ve discovered in your research around maybe the protective role that faith involvement or involvement in faith community can provide.
L: Yeah, well, I love this word because like a lot of the work in the science of happiness, it’s interestingly nuanced, right? Because it turns out that if you look at faith, it does seem to have an incredibly protective happiness benefit. Pretty much all studies of religious individuals find that religious individuals are happier, they have a deeper sense of purpose and so on. But for a nerdy psychologist like me, I wanna ask the question of like, okay, why is it so beneficial?
And you could have two different hypotheses, at least two different hypotheses about this. One is that it’s something about the beliefs that come with faith that are very protective, right? Like I believe in a benevolent God and Jesus who loves me and these kinds of things. But you could imagine a person who has those beliefs who didn’t as much participate in a faith community, maybe they don’t go to services or they don’t like participate, they don’t pray, they’re not doing the stuff that the faith tradition and their beliefs suggest they should do. You could also imagine a different individual who is really participating in their faith community. Maybe they go to like, you know, Catholic spaghetti suppers and they pray a lot or engage in meditation, whatever it is. But deep down, they have some questioning about, you know, the real tenets of what’s going on. But they’re doing all the right behaviors and so on. So researchers have tried to kind of compare these two populations. And what you find is it seems like the religious benefits or the benefits of religion in terms of your happiness, they seem to come from the behaviors.
They come from the fact that religious individuals are engaging in a community of like-minded individuals, right, you’re going to services, you’re engaging. And as I just mentioned, social connection, huge for happiness. These are individuals who are doing the kind things, right? Living the path of donating to charity, engaging in service, volunteering and so on, which we know matters for happiness. These are individuals who are taking time off, you know, like respecting the Sabbath, if not in Christian traditions then in Judaism and in other traditions. These are individuals who are praying and having time for presence and contemplation, which we know matters for happiness, right?
So if you kind of go down the list, you know, tick down the list of all the things that I’ve just said of behaviors and mindsets that matter for happiness, religion preaches those. And if you engage in those, it really does seem to matter. But interestingly, it doesn’t, it’s not what you believe, it’s what you do. And as someone who considers themselves an agnostic or an atheist, like that’s really heartening for me because it means like I can find ways to engage in these communities and it really matters. I think it should also be heartening for religious leaders because these days, I think on the belief side, there’s a lot more questioning, right? There’s all these folks who are, you know, the so-called “nones” who are like, you know, neither spiritual nor religious, right? And I think if the goal of bringing them to the table involves like, you know, you gotta say for sure that you have all these exact beliefs and so on, that’s gonna get tricky.
But if the goal of bringing them to the table is like, hey, there are these problems in the world that we need a community to get together and solve, right? You know, and our faith tradition, you know, we care about these things, but maybe we’ll partner up with this other faith tradition that has different beliefs, but kind of overall cares about these same behaviors and communities and things we need to do. Now, all of a sudden we’re in a space where we’re building on the things that make us happier, probably doing all the good stuff that matters for making the world a better place. And it kind of almost doesn’t matter exactly what the beliefs are. So yeah, so I was a little surprised by that. You might’ve thought that it’s really these beliefs that are kind of mattering for happiness. They seem to matter less than just doing the stuff that you tend to do if you’re in religious community together.
B: It’s striking over the course of the last number of generations, last hundred years, however we want to track this, how disconnected we are, right? It’s been how many years since Bowling Alone, right? We’re thinking about our connection is really vital to our collective life together. We’re seeing in so many ways, right? The erosion of kind of the fabric of neighborhoods, and we’re seeing the political divide become even more extreme. And so, I mean, it matters not just for individual happiness, but our collective well-being that we have connection, right? And so as you’re working with undergraduates, who I’m sure in some ways may have lots of natural objections. I don’t have time for X, Y, and Z as simple as these are. These are really hard, Professor Santo. It’s like, can you operationalize some of this for me? What does this look like? More connection or, I have trouble sleeping, so like, am I doomed? Can you bring us really into the weeds of what can move the dial, at least a little bit for us?
L: Yeah, well, let’s take connection, right? Part of it’s about making time for the people that you care about, right? And there’s an opportunity cost with that. That means making less time for work and for my students studying and doing these things. Less time scrolling like this, which is a fake form of, it’s like the nutrasweet of connection. You feel like you’re seeing what other people are doing, you’re not actually connecting.
B: Oh, the aftertaste is so bad.
L: Yes–no, it has similar aftertaste, right? So it means making the time for it. It also means … a lot of the research will suggest going a little deeper. And I think this is, again, I think something that folks are training to be religious leaders can really, it’s not just like, oh, How’s the weather or whatever. It’s sharing, getting vulnerable, going a little deeper. Lots of lovely work by this researcher at University of Chicago, Nick Epley, on the power of deep questions. Just like kind of take one step deeper. Why does that matter to you? What’s something you’re grateful for? What’s the last time you cried? These kinds of questions where you see people as more than just whatever identity you happen to see, you kind of see them as people, right? And I think, again, this is the kind of thing that comes out of Christian faith traditions, of seeing people for a little bit deeper than you would have otherwise.
So those are big ones for social connection. I think for doing kind things for others, it’s partly just recognizing that that matters. And I think that’s pushing back on a current cultural narrative of like, Don’t do for others, do for yourself. I get so angry when I see articles about self-care or treat yourself, because the best way to treat yourself is to do something nice for somebody else. There are these funny studies where you just hand people money on the street and you say, hey, Here’s some money. Either use this money to do something nice for yourself and treat yourself, or use this money to do something good for the world or good for somebody else. When you call people later that day and later that week, the people who use the money to do something nice for somebody else are happier than those who spent the equivalent amount of money to do something nice for themselves. And knowing that factoid just changes how you exist in the world, right?
B: Oh, I’m wondering if we could maybe take the elevator down in this rabbit hole, because thank you for sort of naming from your perspective as a researcher, what I’ve sort of intuitively been feeling sort of surfing around social media is this call for self-care. I mean, certainly it comes from an important place. And especially as it’s being preached to and embraced by women, I think it’s really spoken to this way in which women have been socialized to maybe over-give, deprioritize themselves to the point of burnout, right? So I think there’s something really happening there. And I’ve always felt that perhaps we’re in the midst of an over-correction or we’ve lacked a lot of nuance around this.
And it’s also been, you know, my sort of armchair psychologist perspective that like this narcissism, this kind of collective narcissism is really kind of rotting us from the inside. So it sounds like there’s some science behind it.
L: The research lines up, yeah. Research totally lines up with that. And I think a couple of things there, right? One is, you know, especially if you look at the specific kind of advice people are getting about this on the internet, it’s like, you know, “If you don’t feel like going out, like, you know, just don’t show up,” right? It’s almost explicit advice about stopping social connection, canceling plans at the last minute. You know, “If somebody else has drama, like don’t participate in it.” When we know that one of the best things you can do for a sense of belonging, for a sense of connection is to help somebody. Sometimes that’s how you get out of your own loneliness crisis, or you figure out your own advice is to give advice to someone else, right? And these suggestions on the internet are literally telling people, like, don’t do that. Like, you’ll feel happier. And I’m always like, no, that’s exactly the opposite thing.
B: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, social media is not built for nuance, but I have to, I don’t know, be hopeful and long for maybe a moment when the pendulum finds it’s … it’s sort of middle ground. I mean, maybe this is like a good prompt to ask, like, do you have certain pet peeves that tend to come up if this is one of them around sort of exaggerated self-care? What do you find yourself having to correct most often with your students or just, you know, when you bump into folks in popular culture? Because like going grocery shopping must be terrible for you, like everyone must be coming up to you.
L: Walked by the magazines and stuff. Yeah, no, I, yeah, I think, I mean, there’s so many of them, right, you know, a lot of these misconceptions that we have around like money and success, you know, the fast version of this connection between money and happiness is like, yeah, more money will make you happier if you don’t have any, you know, if you’re living below the poverty line, if you can’t put food on the table, you know, I think there is something, there’s a science-based version of something like universal income where it’s like, get people to a certain level, but once you hit a certain level, more money doesn’t make you that much happier. And that level isn’t high, like in a very famous paper from 2010, it was, happiness seemed to level off at an income around $75,000, which is like around $100,000 in, you know, today’s money, like that’s … you know, a lot of people aren’t there yet, but a lot of people who are there are playing the lottery, trying to work more at work, like striving for the next promotion. And it’s like the research really shows it’s just not going to move the needle.
Maybe probably– not all, but even in some nuanced studies, like, you know, there was one more recent study that showed that like, oh, maybe that happiness doesn’t fully flatline at a certain income, maybe it still continues to go up, but the slope is so tiny that quadrupling your income, if you’re already earning multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, so going from like $200,000 a year to like $800,000 a year, that’s about like a two point increase on like a hundred point happiness scale. It’s equivalent to having a mild headache get a little bit better, but like, what work do you have to put in to like quintuple your income– that’s so much work. That’s so much less social connection, that’s so much selfishness, that’s so much time you’re not spending in contemplation or giving back or resting. And so it’s, I think what we forget is the opportunity cost. So yes, money and happiness is a big one. Another one that I think, you know, fits with a lot of interesting Christian tradition is this idea of really focusing on compassion. You know, we talked about compassion for other people, at least in terms of doing nice things for other people, but there’s just a lot of work on compassion for the self.
Modern social media doesn’t talk a lot about words like grace, but if you look in the literature, you find that giving other people grace, but also giving yourself grace is just incredibly important for happiness. A lot of really interesting work from Kristin Neff. Yeah, some of my favorites, right? On the power of this stuff, but you know, it matters and it matters not just for happiness, it matters for people who experience more self-compassion, save more for retirement, they eat more healthily, right? You know, maybe we need these weight loss medications that are being advertised on the Super Bowl if we could just like give ourselves some self-compassion.
She also finds it reduces rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and combat veterans, right? You know, so you go and see really terrible combat, go through this terrible experience, but if you’re just nice to yourself and not screaming at yourself in your head, you don’t show the negative psychological benefits for it. And I feel like that comes out of a whole host of, you know, much earlier traditions that have been telling us that for a long time, but we need to find ways to put it into practice in our own lives.
B: Yeah, her book on self-compassion is just so beautiful. And one of the simple practices that I discovered in that book is just bringing the hand to the heart.
L: Yes, self–you know, giving yourself a little stroke, a self-love, right?
B: And so sometimes like when I’m, you know, feeling maybe a little stressed and my kids see me just like walking around for hours with my hand, I feel like … Okay, we’re gonna leave dad alone.
L: He needs a break, he needs a break.
B: I wanna come back to this idea of cost. This is something that actually is really important. I mean, in all spiritual traditions, but literally that word is used in Christian theology, we call it the cost of discipleship, but there’s a cost to everything in life. And sometimes the most beautiful things have a pretty large cost. And so, you know, we live in a culture that wants everything immediately and for a very low cost, right? We want our happiness on sale. Can you talk a little bit more about what you see as the cost that we have to be willing to invest in some way? Like there’s … maybe not so much a free ride here.
L: Yeah, well, I think this is, you know, a big message from the work in happiness is that happiness takes some work. Sonia Lubomirsky, who’s a big player in this field of positive psychology, has this idea that like, you know, the good news is that happiness isn’t based in your circumstances and it’s not based in your genes. The bad news is like, it takes some work, you know, like all good things, if you want to learn a language, if you want to get fit, whatever it is, like you got to put in consistent time and effort, and flourishing also takes consistent time and effort. And that effort is sometimes overcoming the little frictions. You know, we talked about social connection, right? Like it can be hard to go a little deep on a question with someone. It can be hard to make that move and call a friend and set up a time to hang out, right?
It can be hard to overcome the urge to, you know, spend your money on yourself, and donate it to a good cause, right? Sometimes the things that you need to do are really, you know, presence involves looking at your negative emotions, looking at the bad things happening in the world, sitting with that with acceptance, right? These are hard, but those things have a real benefit. And this is another spot where I think our minds are getting things wrong.
It’s like a nerdy deep dive into brain science, but there’s this interesting distinction in our brains between sort of wanting and liking. We talked before about dopamine, which people often think about as the liking, like, oh, the dopamine you get when you get, when you drink … that delicious ice cream cone or something. But the dopamine system is really much more about the wanting, it’s the craving, it’s the what we go after, it’s that urge to go on social media. It’s that like, you know, I really should get that perfect grade or that perfect job or something like that. And those systems are distinct from what we actually like. To the point that there’s a lot of stuff that we want, that we have these really largely built up dopamine systems to make us go after and spend all this time and energy on, that when we get those things, we’re not really gonna like them that much.
And the flip side is there’s all this stuff we’re really gonna like, you know, that’s truly gonna move the needle on our happiness, that we don’t crave, that we don’t have systems that are like, I need to go out there and get that every day, you know? Like think of the, you know, if you’re a little addicted to your phone and social media, the like, the wanting that you have, the craving that you have to like, you know, I don’t know, jump on Reddit or look at your email or something, I, at least, don’t have that same kind of craving for like, let me do my meditation practice today. Or I don’t have that craving for like, let me like call a friend. It doesn’t, you know, so the stuff that really moves the needle on happiness, the sad thing is that we don’t have these deeply innate systems to like crave and want. The craving and the wanting is like leading us towards the not great stuff, you know? And if you’re in other faith traditions like Buddhism, the craving and the wanting is like the part that’s bad, right, that’s what’s leading us really away from flourishing writ large.
I mean, you know, take it full circle, we were talking about our Yale students, right? That they work so hard to get into a place like this and get here and then experience this arrival fallacy. I saw this really clearly in my class, just– it illustrates this point. I go online and grab these videos from our college students today who when they, you know, click on the little link to find out if they get into a place like Yale are filming it, right? So there are these videos of like, did you get in? And it’s like, Oh my God, I got in, and they celebrate. And you know, they scream and their parents scream as these cute videos.
But the students watch those videos with a certain sense of horror. And they’re like, yeah, that moment was great. But like three minutes after that, when I realized, Oh my God, the race begins again, and I didn’t, you know, what did I get out of it? It’s like, it was miserable.
B: Yeah. So meditation has been really important to me in my life. You know, my own writing and research has been at the intersection of Zen and the Christian tradition. And so I’ve taken John Kabat-Zinn course and trained and taught mindfulness for a long, long time. So I’m really thankful and intrigued about the work around presence. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit around why presence matters and, you know, do you encourage folks to embrace a mindfulness practice? Meditation may not be for everyone, but there’s many ways of being present to life. So how does that sort of intersect with your happiness work?
L: Yeah, well, in the more traditional mindfulness meditation traditions, I think it has a couple important ingredients, right? One is just being present, noticing. For whatever reason, this just makes our brains happier. There’s a very famous paper in this journal, Science, which is like the big academic journal across fields. It’s called, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” right? Where they do these studies where they just ping people and say, hey, are you paying attention to what you’re doing? And people say yes or no. And they say, you know, how are you feeling? And what you find is no matter what you’re doing, if you’re just being present with it, it feels okay. Whether that’s, you know, eating a delicious ice cream cone or just like doing some annoying spreadsheet, if you’re just in the inflow, in the zone, paying attention, it just feels good. So one part is just like the in the zone.
But in at least some traditions of meditation, you’re supposed to be in the zone in a particular way, which is nonjudgmentally, which is not being in the zone and be like, this sucks right now, I hate this, I hate, I hate, I hate. It’s like, you’re in the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. You’re out of the situation, my former colleague, Hedy Cobra likes to call the do not want, like do not want, do not want.
B: Yes, yes.
L: You kind of get out of that, right? And so probably it’s both of those ingredients that wind up helping. It’s the presence, which we know in some contexts is probably really important for just like changing the way our brains are responding. Like there’s some really interesting example, for example, that, you know, we’re typically can kind of be in our fight or flight mode, which is this part of our sympathetic nervous system that’s turning on and being alert and worried about things versus what’s called our rest and digest system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. That’s like the chill, relax, go back to normal function. But some forms of meditation, interesting, this has been studied in Catholic nuns, so some forms of prayer, allow you to do this interesting thing where you can turn on the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems at the same time. So you are relaxed, but alert. You’re relaxed, but you’re paying attention, but in an intentional way, you’re not sleepy and falling asleep. And that we’re only now starting to understand what interesting benefits that can have to do that. And it only exists in these interesting contemplative states, which is neat.
But yeah, so I think it’s kind of both this being present part, but it’s also the not being present in a way that everything sucks part. And I think a lot of the research suggests that the particulars on how you do that, as long as you do both of those things, don’t really matter that much. There’s not really much difference, at least in my read in the scientific literature on meditation, on the difference between if you’re following your breath, or if you’re thinking of a mantra, if you’re saying the rosary, whatever it is, as long as you have those kind of parts, it seems to work, it seems to do something beneficial.
B: Oh, that’s great to hear. I mean, there’s this wonderful profusion of interest right now in various contemplative practices across traditions. And we like to encourage our students as much as we can to find a practice, to try it, because people will be seeking you as a teacher to share some of these practices. It’s not, you know, I often tell my students, it’s not just enough to invite people to think about God. In the same way that I presume thinking about happiness might be lovely, but probably doesn’t move the dial as much as a practice of gratitude, and being present and doing something kind, right? I wonder, I was changing gears a little bit, I wonder about two things. I’m wondering about trauma and happiness, and I’m wondering about the experience of discrimination, the intersection of race and happiness.
Since the murder of George Floyd, we’ve been thinking much more intentionally about the way in which our society has been organized, and the way in which oppression against black and brown folks have really taken a toll on wellbeing, and how traumatizing this can be to show up and just on a daily basis in black and brown bodies. And so I’m wondering if your research has explored those questions, right? I presume there’s some things that are just universally true for us around happiness and humanity, but some folks move through the world and have different experiences. What are you discovering in that sense?
L: Yeah, so I think on the discrimination front, as you might guess, you know, living as an oppressed person, in oppressed situations, not great for happiness overall. And I think sometimes the hit is not in the domains we expect, right? So the hit will be in something like, you know, subtle sense of belonging that gets hurt, you know, if somebody asks you about your hair at your workplace or something like that. A big one for individuals who are more low income, researchers are realizing it’s not necessarily not having that much money that’s a hit on happiness, it’s actually not having much time. And I mentioned this notion of time affluence, this subjective sense that you have some free time. If you’re living below the poverty line, you’re driving Uber, taking the bus to work really far away, right? You’re existing in a world where you also have no free time. And so researchers like Ashley Willens at Harvard Business School have been exploring, what if we solve for time for individuals who are existing in these situations? Will that actually move the needle on happiness? So sometimes the ingredients and why those situations are awful are kind of ones that we don’t, we’re only now starting to understand, I think in different ways.
But a different thing I’ll say is that, you know, the mind is really interesting that if we have a certain relationship to the bad things that are going on in our lives, that can change things around. And one of the most interesting domains of new research on some of these topics is in this field of what’s called post-traumatic growth. I mentioned post-traumatic stress, this is, you know, what combat veterans often go through when they go through a bad situation and then you come out of it and you have all these kind of hits on your psychology later on, right? Extra fear and things like that.
But post-traumatic growth is going through an awful situation and coming out on the other side as psychologically stronger in a few different ways. One is you’re socially more connected. You know, you go through, and maybe kind of resonate with this, so you go through a really bad time, you know who the people are that you can rely on, right? You might’ve forged some connections that got you through it that matter for you. Second thing about post-traumatic growth is it often teaches you what really matters in life. You see this a lot, for example, in people who go through some traumatic medical situation, you know, you survive cancer or whatever, it’s like you are appreciating life in a very different way. You are ignoring the BS in a very different, like I ain’t got time for that, right? These become real when you go through an awful situation. And then finally, awful situations have this interesting way of building resilience because you’re like, I went through that, you know, the traffic, the snow, whatever, like, it was not as bad. Like, I know what I can get through and that can kind of … And so studies are now looking at what are the kinds of mindsets that can pop us into a post-traumatic growth situation as opposed to a post-traumatic stress situation.
And part of it honestly is kind of getting back to this idea of purpose and kindness, right? If you can translate the awful thing into helping someone else, into kind of growing over time and what it’s taught you, learning from things, meaning and sense-making, right? These are the kinds of things that can let an awful situation hit you in a different way. And I think it’s important with the post-traumatic growth stuff to not be like, well, if you’ve gone through trauma and you have bad effects, like it’s your fault, you know, you didn’t do, like, that’s not what we mean. But what we mean is that there might be strategies you can use when you’re facing a bad situation to get through it in a healthy way. And if we can harness those kinds of things, then maybe we can help people who are, I’m going through this to do better.
And I also say, help people to go through this to do better. We also want to like fix the horrible things that are going on. A thing that I don’t love about the science of happiness work is sometimes it gets me construed as saying, well, here’s what to do to be happy. You know, focus on your behaviors and mindsets, but like fix all the structures of racism and sexism and all the terrible isms and no, don’t do that. Just like, you know,
get your meditation and you’ll be fine. And what I want to say is like, no, no, no, those can exist together. Like we can actually do both. And in fact, there are studies showing that doing both, having those things in harmony is helpful.
Really lovely work by this guy, Kostadin Kushlev about the question of like, well, who’s out there fighting the structural problems of the world? Like who’s going to a protest or, you know, trying to deal with the climate crisis or whatever. And he finds that it’s people who experience the most positive mood, which kind of makes sense. In the climate domain, I find this interesting. He looks at who’s engaging in climate action. Not who’s like really worried about it and saying dumb stuff on, so like, who’s like going to a protest or donating money or getting people to sign up for solar panels? And he finds it’s the people who aren’t experiencing a lot of anxiety. It’s the people who are finding joy in other parts of their lives.
And I love his work because it’s like, we can get in this sort of Pollyanna mode of like, the only way to exist in unjust society is in grief and in anger and in negative mood all the time. And his work shows like, we might have more bandwidth if we, you know, got to the sort of positive joy side of things, if we took time to savor the good things that are still there, like that might make us more effective in this fight.
And I think, you know, just thinking about your listeners, like this, I think is an important message because it can feel like, like how can we experience joy in the face of all the terrible stuff out there when you’re really looking at it head on? And the idea is like, you might need to find ways to do that, to be effective in fighting against it.
B: Yeah, yeah, we just, we’re talking recently with students around what’s beautiful, what have they found beautiful recently as a way of just counterbalancing the real kind of brokenness and ugliness and violence. And they’re studying, you know, like many people do, therapists and physicians and to run into the burning building, right? In some ways to not listen to the evolutionary instinct to run away from the bad things, but to actually run toward it. And it seems especially important that they find beauty and delight amid all the burning buildings they’re running into.
I’m curious, what other things are you working on these days? I mean, teaching is just a really small slice, but tell us about the research and the current research questions that are kind of keeping you up at night and putting you to work during the day.
L: Yeah, yeah, well, I think a lot about, you know, many, many problems of the world, but one of the problems, you know, I think a lot about as a scientist is just the fact that nobody’s really that into academics and scientists anymore. And there’s a lot of scientific misinformation about that there. And I worry that that is a little bit the scientist’s fault, right? And a little bit the academic’s fault. Like we don’t do such a hot job of giving back. It’s kind of like, Well, we know it, we discovered it. And like, we have lost a lot of the great science communicators that we’ve had. If you think about people in the past, like a Carl Sagan or something like that, we just don’t have great figures who are like that anymore. And so these days I’ve been thinking a lot about what can scientists do to communicate better with the public about topics on happiness, but it’s about all kinds of topics about how to live a better life and what counts as health and so on. And what can we do to kind of train those scientists? And so I’ve been looking a lot at like how we form the parasocial relationships with the people that we listen to, right?
You know, we’ve been talking about these influencers who are aligned who are telling us all this stuff, but they’ve done something to forge a relationship with the people who watch their TikTok videos and listen to them. And I think that as scientists, we need to get better at figuring out how to master the attention economy and how to figure out how to do that well. And I bring that up in part because like, really, that’s the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
But also like, I think it resonates with the folks who are listening to be a preacher, to be a person who’s spreading the word of religion right now, like you have to do that in a different zone than you did it before. It’s not just like once a week, I get on the pulpit and I talk up like, there’s a whole attention economy now, right? And there really are religious figures who are using that in interesting different ways, right?
And so the thing I’m thinking about a lot is what does it really mean to be a scientist right now? Can we just communicate in the ways that we’ve done before, maybe at the front of a tiny classroom or in some published paper? We might need to think about communicating in a really different way given the situation we’re in. And I think that there’s a real parallel there in religious training to ask the question, how are we thinking about this? Do we need to think about it differently?
And yeah, this has taken me to some strange places. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of the World Wrestling Federation, in part because they’re really good at this. They have characters that people resonate with, they have good versus evil, they have catch phrases, they get people to come back week after week and feel entertained, but also moved, moved by the stories and so on. And so I want scientists to figure out how to do that better, but I think there’s a world where folks who are telling people other important stuff that they need to do to live a better life need to think about that in different ways too.
B: This is the second time that the WWE has come up in the last three podcasts. I love it, as someone who grew up with this. Well, from a Christian perspective, something really fascinating happens theologically when we say that we believe that God is a Trinity. Because what we’re really saying is that God is relationship and therefore to be made in the image of that God is to be made in the image of a relationship and therefore to be God-like in the world is to be expert, to be skillful in relationship. And so relationship is everything. And this is a conversation we’re having a lot of hope as a faculty, but also with sort of emerging religious leaders is how do we bridge communities? Because every discipline learns its own vernacular, which creates a sense of competency, right? That vernacular exists, these special words exist so that we can be really, really precise. But if you haven’t been trained in that vernacular and you don’t know that special language, it can feel really othering. And if the influencers have anything to teach us, they’ve learned to bridge, they’ve learned to connect, they’ve learned to speak a more common language.
And I was speaking recently with a theologian at the Div school who will remain anonymous, and we were really expressing a great degree of frustration that we train our theologians and our religious leaders, for that matter, to use very specific language. And then we send them out into the world and no one knows what the heck they’re saying. And I wonder, is this part of the challenge that you’re seeing in the scientific community? And maybe we’re seeing the not so pleasant fruits of it in terms of the erosion of trust in science, right?
L: I think that’s true. I mean, I think, and I’ll expand it out, the erosion of trust in all kinds of institutions, right? If you look at the people who are self-identifying as nones and yes, in the religious domain, that’s in part because many of them will say not necessarily that they don’t feel a relationship with something divine or they want something bigger, but it’s like, I don’t trust the institutions anymore, right? And so, yeah, so I think finding ways that we can connect across these things can be helpful. It’s in part the language, it’s in part the iconography, it’s in part the like, you know, I think these things need a revamp in interesting ways, and there becomes an interesting question of like, how can you hold on to the parts that really matter for precision, for tradition, for whatever reason? And then allow yourself to be a little creative on the stuff that doesn’t. It’s a tricky challenge.
B: Oh, it’s such a paradox.
It’s our custom to close with a segment we call Holy Cow, as folks are amazed at what they learn about.
L: Is that the Holy Cow?
B: That’s our Holy Cow, Lucas. What do folks most misunderstand about you, about the work, about the research on happiness?
L: Yeah, I’ll pick me, which is that because I’m an expert on happiness, I know what I’m doing, I’m like good on this, and I’ll say that I’m not, like it’s constant work to be doing this stuff, and the happiness expert also gets it wrong all the time. I have the benefit of people checking in on me, and you know, I have to practice what I preach, no pun intended, but it takes some work. So that’s the biggest misconception for me. And not just about me, it is if you know this stuff, it’ll just come naturally, but you can know this stuff, and it still takes work to put it into practice. That’ll be a great relief to so many of our listeners who are preaching and sometimes struggling to practice what they hear from their own mouths.
B: What’s your go-to comfort food?
L: Go-to comfort food, anything sweet, anything chocolatey. Those these days, although these days I’ve been really getting to paying a little extra money for the jumbo blueberries, just to pick something that’s a little healthier. They’re like really big and they’re very sweet. And that I can kind of, it’s a comfort food that also feels good in my body and feels good emotionally when I think about what I’ve just eaten.
B: Those are a favorite in our house, and I don’t want to know how they get so big.
L: Yeah, there’s some wrong, there’s some … We don’t need to look into it. We don’t need to look into it.
B: A bad habit that you’re willing to share.
L: I do a lot of picking of my fingernails, yeah, little mild OCD stuff that I’ve been working on, but it drives my husband crazy, but yes.
B: What life lesson are you still learning?
L: Mm, for me the biggest one, the thing that I preach that I have the most trouble practicing myself is paying attention to my time and getting some time affluence. This sort of interesting change and journey that I’ve been on has been incredible. I have so many opportunities to talk to so many interesting people and do so much interesting stuff. And I have to say no to a lot of it, even though it’s important and good, because I need to protect my bandwidth. And that sometimes means feeling like I’m not helping people I could help just because if I burn out, then that’s not great. And that’s a really hard one, but that’s what I’m still trying to learn and figure out myself, get the right balance on that. Thank you.
B: And finally, what keeps you going when your inner critic tells you to stop? I don’t know what your inner critic tells you, but for many of us, it’s like cease and desist, none of this matters.
L: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
B: Go eat blueberries for the rest of your, blueberries and chocolate for the rest of your days.
L: Yes, yes. What keeps me going is not my own personal emotional regulation, but social emotional regulation, which is just the practice of having other help people help you get through the tough times. I’m big on seeking advice from friends or talking to my husband, but airing it out when things feel like a lot is really helpful for me. Great emotional regulation practice.
B: Professor Lori Santos, it’s a great blessing to have you here. Thank you for all the work you do. Thank you for what you do for Yale and for so, so many of us beyond. It’s a pleasure to have you here on the Leader’s Way podcast.
L: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leader’s Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events.
Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom and compassion.