When are you happiest?

Yeah.

What makes you happy?

Yeah. I mean, there are so many things that make me happy. Honestly, I'm happiest when I'm not, like, striving to do stuff. I find those kind of moments of contentment where I'm just being and noticing. Like, those are some of the moments of my greatest happiness. Also see, like, I have great moments of happiness when I'm kind of goofing off and having fun with people I care about. I'm big into kind of karaoke and singing and those kind of moments of like, belting out a bad 80s tune can be like the moments that I'm like, this is what life was meant to live for. Like, this feels really good.

That's Laurie Santos. Now, you may recognize her voice if you've listen to her podcast, The Happiness Lab. She's a cognitive scientist, and she's a professor at Yale University, where she teaches college students all about the science behind what it really means to be happy. So we thought she would be the perfect guest to kick off our new season of Chasing Life. And right away, I wasn't disappointed because she told me something intriguing. That happiness isn't something that necessarily comes naturally to us humans.

Natural selection doesn't really care about our happiness that much. I mean, natural selection's job is just to keep us alive and keep us around to reproduce. And I think it does that not by kind of making us feel these kind of moments of contentment, but maybe just the opposite. It does that by building in the negativity bias. So we're just a little bit worried that there could be a tiger around the corner, that we could get shunned at work, and we're kind of constantly on the alert for that.

'Professor Santos says you probably have a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be truly happy, and sometimes as a result, we go about it in exactly the wrong way. That's why she spends time on her podcast and in the classroom, looking into the building blocks of happiness. Today, we're embarking on an all new season of Chasing Life. It's a really special one. It's our 10th season so far. We started back during the pandemic at a time when it's fair to say that being happy could be challenging. But now I've decided to go on my own journey of self-discovery to uncover the secrets to happiness. You know, as a starting point, I do like to think of myself as a pretty happy guy, but I'm not exactly sure what that means sometimes. I have a wife, three daughters, a career that I'm grateful for. But still, like most people, I think I wonder at times, could I be happier? Should I be happier? It's fair to say that happiness probably looks different for everyone, but there are some time tested steps that we can all take to achieve it. And some of the ways to get there might surprise you.

I have this worry list that hits me right before I'm going to go to sleep. And so what do I do? I turn that what if list into a to do list. Neurologically, we are wired from very early on. And what we're doing in therapy is we're changing the wiring. I always say that exercise is like an intravenous dose of hope.

I'm Doctor Sanjay Gupta, and this is chasing life. Do you think that those things that you're describing, the karaoke nights and those moments of contentment would make you as happy if you didn't have as much professional success?

One way to look at it is, I think, you know, material success can often help us get towards those moments of contentment and get towards those moments of presence in theory. Right. I think people who struggle with kind of material success, you know, at the really most extreme levels, right? You can't put food on your table. You can't, you know, kind of keep a roof over your head. It becomes harder to have contentment. So I think at the extremes, yes, material success matters. But what I often find, especially since I spend a lot of my time talking to people who are pretty materially successful, is that material success doesn't count for a lot of it, right? There are a lot of times when my material success comes at the expense of social connection with my friends, right? Because I'm so booked up. I have so many kind of talks and things to do. I'm so busy with papers and students that I don't have time to just take a break and kind of wander around. And so I think this is also something that our minds can get wrong. We assume like, well, you know, you got to get the material success first. And I think that's true to a certain extent. Right? If you don't have the basics kind of taken care of, like food and shelter, obviously that's a problem. But I think all too often our accomplishments wind up being at an opportunity cost of the stuff that really makes us happy.

Do people fundamentally get that, that it only matters at the extremes, the material part of life?

Well, I think I think people get it in the moments that count right tomorrow, if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, my guess is you wouldn't be like y, you know, wish my my podcasts had been at number one for a little bit longer. You'd be like, the heck with my podcast. I want to have time with my kids. I wouldn't have time with my wife. I want to have time just being present. Right? You know, you interview people who are, you know, on their deathbed and they don't say, oh, if only I'd had another, you know, material accomplishment. Often they say, you know, I wish I had more time to live out my dreams. I wish I had more time to tell the people I loved. I loved them, and to really connect with them. I wish I spent more time, you know, smelling the roses and smelling my coffee. And my understanding from that research is that that's independent of people's material success. You kind of go back to the basics when things really count.

Your course that you teach at Yale, you started back in 2018. It's called psychology and the Good Life, I guess, of course, basically, and How to be happy. In some ways, it became the most successful course in Yale's more than 300 year history, which is pretty remarkable. Did you expect that?

Definitely not. I mean, I was really humbled, but, you know, upon reflection, I kind of get it. You know, what we're seeing, especially in the United States, is a generation of young people that are more unhappy than we've ever seen in any previous generation since we've been collecting data. Right. And this is a generation that is perhaps at least in the US, right, perhaps more materially successful than we've seen. Right. This is a generation that has technology and so many gadgets and cool things at their fingertips, more information than our species could have ever imagined before. Yet they're more depressed, more anxious, more stressed out, and more unhappy than we've ever really seen. 40% of college students today or more are too depressed to function most days, or over 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year, right when I when I reflect on numbers like that, that extreme, I kind of get it. I mean, I think our young people are really voting with their feet. They want strategies they can use to feel better, to not be so stressed out, to not be so depressed. And one of the things I was impressed with with the course, which kind of, you know, fits with your podcast, is I think the students weren't looking for a bunch of platitudes. I think they really wanted to take an evidence based approach to the kinds of things they could do to feel better, and that that really kind of impressed me as well.

What do your students learn? What is it that you're really trying to convey?

Yeah, well, the first big topic that we explore is just the kind of misconceptions that we have about happiness, you know? And we were just talking about one of them. You know what big one is just I want to be objectively better off. That's what's going to matter for our happiness. A different misconception we have about happiness is just that it's kind of not really that much under our control, right? It's due to our genes or it's due to our circumstances. And I think one of the big messages of a lot of the work in this field of positive psychology is from studying the science of happiness. Is really that like now, there's so many ways we can change our behaviors and our mindsets to feel better. And so I think a different misconception is like, well, you know, if you're not feeling that happy, you're kind of just screwed. But I think what the data show is like, no, there's so much agency we have when it comes to our own mental health.

This may sound like a simplistic question, but what is the opposite of happiness? I think there are times when I wouldn't necessarily rated myself as being happy, but I was also highly productive during those times. I think maybe I'm entangling happiness and satisfaction like a constructive dissatisfaction. Yeah, I would say, you know, like I'm constructively dissatisfied. Is that unhappiness?

I think that's an interesting idea. I mean, in the kind of social scientist framework, it probably matters a little bit the nuance, but. You can imagine a world where you know you're working hard towards a particular goal, right? And that journey in the abstract, you kind of think is going well. You feel like it's moving towards your goal. You feel like it's important, you feel like you have some purpose, but sometimes the moments of doing that in your life can lead to some things like frustration, or maybe sleepless nights. Or maybe you don't feel good, right? I think the kind of antidote to that would be to think about, okay, well, what are ways that I could be on that important, purposeful journey, but also bring a few more moments of true happiness into my life, right? You know, maybe I need a little bit more laughter or some breaks, or I need to engage in that purposeful pursuit with a bit more social connection or something like that. Right? And the reason I think this question is important is sometimes I'll run into students who worry that the practices that we're talking about. So things like changing your behaviors, getting more social connection and changing your mindsets to be a little bit more present or grateful or compassionate, right. You might think that like, well, that's pretty good. If what you're dealing with is assigned a low baseline, right. You're just not feeling so happy. But you're you're not like experiencing true depression or panic attacks or suicidality or something like that. If the problem is like you're feeling a little flat, maybe a little unhappy, or just kind of not as content as you could be, not as satisfied with life as you could be. Whole host of strategies you can engage in.

Do you think that you need a certain amount of unhappiness to have the higher peaks of happiness?

Yeah, I think, you know, there have been some interesting experiments on the right ratio to kind of feel satisfied with your life. And I think a misconception is like, we want that ratio to be like perfect happiness all the time. Like that'll make me what's most satisfied. But but a few things there. One is I think it's really hard to be perfectly happy all the time if you're also being satisfied with your life, right? If you're also pushing towards things that are hard and purposeful and that require challenge, right? Those things come with a lot of failure and frustration. That's just kind of how they work. I think another kind of reason we don't want perfect happiness all the time is that we get into the territory of sort of toxic positivity, right? That the right way to react to all situations is like, you know, super smiling, like you're like you're, you know, emoji all the time. I'm just like this are teeth, you know, smiling and beaming. And what we know is that like situations normatively require some negative emotion sometimes. Right. There are situations in which is normative to be sad, normative to be anxious, normative to be frustrated or pissed off. Right. These emotions don't feel good. Right. And so I think we can have this idea of like, oh, let's just get rid of them. But I think that wouldn't lead to a satisfying life and ultimately wouldn't lead towards a happier life, too. Because again, these emotions are there to prevent us from experiencing negative emotions that are even worse. They're like the alert system on our car, which, you know, you can ignore the tire light or the engine light for a while, but eventually your car is going to break down. And I think the same is true both for our mental health and our physical health.

I think that I'm imagining a Venn diagram of happiness, satisfaction and complacency. And I think there's there's the Venn diagram. They all overlap in certain areas, but they're distinct as well in other areas. And I you know, I struggle with this. I think just to be totally candid, I mean, I think there's a distinction in my mind, certainly maybe bigger than others between happiness and satisfaction. And I think wanting to be happy but also being constructively dissatisfied has worked for me.

Yeah.

I think it's work for me. I don't know, I don't have anything to compare it to. I guess it's just me, but but I think it's kept me from becoming complacent.

Totally. Yeah.

You know, I'm in my mid 50s now and I don't know. By the way, is there an age where people are the happiest?

'Well, if you're in your mid 50s, you're in a good part of the swing because historically, researchers have found that happiness has a U-shaped function. Young individuals. When you're 1890, in your early 20s, you're pretty happy. And then it starts going kind of down, down, down until, you know, 30s, mid 40s, right. The nadir is around like 48.6. That's where this is going to get. And then after that your happiness starts to rise and to rise and rise. And another misconception happiness into our elderly years is actually both pretty high and also rising. You know, I think, you know, fast forward to like, what's life going to be like when I'm in my 70s and 80s and I'm thinking, oh, you know, terrible health diagnoses. I can't do as much. You know, my friends are passing away and things. But in fact, that's a period of life where you have deep contentment, deep joy, deep satisfaction with life historically, a lot of social connection, although I think that's changing a little bit for elderly individuals today, which is one of the reason unhappiness is increasing. But yeah, usually midlife, the kind of where you and I are at right now, it's not so good. But then it kind of gets better. I just I'm about to turn 49, so I just passed like 48.6. I'm like, yes, I'm on the upswing. It's happening.

Did you have it marked on you? I shouldn't, I should.

Have done and throw a like a neater party, you know.

Like I need a party. That's funny. Well that's that's good to hear.

But kind of getting back to the kind of, you know, constructive dissatisfaction point I think that's in. And I think the key, though, is kind of what it's doing to your emotions in the moment. Like, it strikes me that you've kind of gotten something out of the journey, getting something out of that struggle. Right. You've been able to either frame it as sort of being really important to your sense of purpose, or to kind of make sure it doesn't kind of go down the path of making you feel negative all the time.

You know, it's interesting. I interviewed a loneliness researcher and you've had podcasts on this as well. It was it was interesting. She she gave me this piece of advice. I was it was my parents are both living and they're in their 80s and we're close and we we talk a lot. And I found Doctor Santos that our conversations were frequent, but not very deep. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. How are you doing? I'm also doing fine. And, you know, just. And she said to me, the next time you talk to them in some way or another, some small way, ask for help. Ask for help in some way. My parents are both automotive engineers. So I was talking to them when we were having one of these sort of cursory conversations, and I happened to mention that the car had smoke coming out from underneath the hood. And right away they had their reading glasses on face. Okay, point the camera at the engine, you know, do that, you know, pulling out their manuals. And the fact of the matter is that I'm not even sure that they they helped with the smoke coming out of the car, but it was a connection. But it was a stronger connection. And I'm not sure if it was me being vulnerable with them that that sort of solidified or strengthened the connection, or them having an opportunity to help, maybe some combination of both, you know, things. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable around people is frightening and it can be uncomfortable. But I came out of that feeling pretty darn good. Like, wow, I just had a really good sort of interaction with my parents.

Yeah, we forget that this act of asking for help and being vulnerable and all these different ways winds up feeling better than we expect. It's better than we expect because we allow the people, hopefully the people that really care for us to do something nice for us, right? You know, I imagine your parents probably I mean, you're a super successful doctor, amazing podcast. They probably can't help you with a lot of stuff. Right? So the moment that you give them some vulnerability and they can actually feel some urgency to do something that feels awesome, you know, think about the last time you get some agency with one of your teen kids like they never. And you're like, yes, I can actually help you. You asked for advice. This feels amazing, right? And so we're giving this gift to another person. And whatever we do that, that feels awesome for us. But the data also suggests that it kind of feels nice when people react in ways that help us, right? When we express vulnerability. And people are there for us that people connect with us. And and this is another misconception we have, I think we think that for people to like us, we have to be this kind of perfect, strong, objective, you know, people that never need help but never ask for anything. And there's lots of lovely data from social psychologists on what's known as the beautiful Mass Effect. We think if we're kind of messy and a little bit needy or vulnerable, that it will be like yucky will be annoying to people. But actually people, people like that even more, and not just our friends and family members. One of the quickest ways to kind of make friends with people, you know, a stranger or kind of a new colleague at work or, you know, somebody that moved into your neighborhood is just to ask for help. You know, like, I like, you know, fall apart with all your problems, just a little help that you know, they can achieve for you. It turns out it's a quick way to strengthen relationships. It makes people like us more rather than kind of think we're a little bit needy or weird.

Go ask for that cup of sugar from the new neighbor or.

Exactly.

We're going to take a short break. But when we come back, we're going to the classroom. Professor Santos tells us the work assignment she gives her students to feel happier.

We do a different kind of homework that I christened requirements. So, you know, there's like the course requirements, but then the course requirements are there to sort of rewire your habits.

Stick with us. In those times when you've been unhappy. Is it important for you to know why you're unhappy? I guess if you put a medical lens on this, sometimes somebody comes in with an issue, you know, whatever it might be a headache or something like that. You treat the headache. Obviously, you'd also want to find the root cause of what was driving the headache as well. But sometimes you just give Advil, you know, just just take care of the headache. Is it important to think about what's making you unhappy and can you overthink that? Is it is it important?

'Yeah. I mean, I actually think about this question a lot when it comes to sort of thinking about questions about happiness at work. You know, I'm often called into companies to talk about, you know, what can workers do to feel happy. And sometimes I'm kind of taking the the sort of Advil approach where I'm like, well, one thing you could do, you can offer a workers a wellness app and they could meditate more, or they could sleep more. They could, you know, kind of get more social connection or write in their gratitude journal. Right. I'm kind of offering these strategies that we know are ways that you can boost your happiness as individuals. But sometimes when I'm at those corporations in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about the other thing you just raise, which is like, why are folks so unhappy at your organization and thinking of like, oh my gosh, what are the structural issues that we need to fix to make people happier, right? While there are great individual strategies we can use to feel happier. I do worry that we don't want to get into the position of kind of putting a Band-Aid on something and ignoring the kind of root cause that if we just fix that, everyone would be happier. And this is also something I think about a lot when I'm focused on, you know, my own unhappiness. Right? Sometimes it can be hard to take that, you know, really radical candor. Look at the things that are making you really unhappy. For me, it's sometimes like the choices that I've made about my schedule are just unsustainable, right? Like, and and I could become happier, but that's going to involve saying no to a lot more stuff than I expected. Right. And those kind of looking at the root cause of these things can sometimes be really hard. So both with my students and when I'm kind of giving talks, I like to encourage people to do both. And I think, again, it's similar to what a medical doctor might do. Right? You don't want people to, like, have the headache. You might give them aspirin, but you also might do the MRI to check, you know, and make sure they're not that of a tumor or something terrible. Right? You kind of want to do both. And I think if we think of our happiness that way, that's in some ways the best way to respond to it. Right? It's like, what are these individual strategies you can do to kind of get yourself out of not feeling so great, but also what are the bigger issues that led you to feel that? Right? What are the some of the structural issues in your own life that you might need to, again, take that radical candor, look at and make some big changes?

Can you just give us a little bit of you talked about this earlier, but a little bit of a insight into your class that you teach for the students? It is there homework? How do you how do you structure this as a professor?

'So we actually do have both the kind of regular homework that we have to give college students, you know, their reading papers and things like that. But we do a different kind of homework that I christened requirements. So, you know, there's like the course requirements, but then the course requirements are there to sort of rewire your habits. And it's assignments where I have students do all the behaviors and mindset shifts that we know matter for happiness. So they're asked to make sure they're getting in touch with a friend or doing nice things for other people. They're engaging in behaviors like improving their sleep and getting some exercise in to kind of, you know, healthy habits, like, you know, medical health habits that we think of as being for our physical bodies, but are so good for our brains, too. They're also asked to do some mindset practices. So they have to do practices like meditation, which get you to be a little bit more present or kind of scribbling in a gratitude journal, doing some expressive writing where they're forced to kind of talk to themselves a little bit more self compassionately, like they have these weekly exercises. So they're not just learning, you know, some study about why say self-compassion is good for improving happiness. They're also kind of like forced to actually do it. And it's been hard. We've been doing some studies on, especially the online versions of our class, to see if these habits really work. In other words, do students move the needle in terms of their happiness from before taking the class to after? And so far, we're finding that on a relative to a controlled, just regular psychology class, students on a ten point happiness survey end up going up about a point somewhere between a point and a point and a half. But what we don't know yet is that just learning about all these kind of strategies, or is that really have somebody holding your hand and giving you this homework where you have to put these strategies into effect? And my guess is that it's more the latter. You know, it's one thing to know about all this stuff, but it's another to kind of put it into effect. And again, this is, I think, something you see in the medical profession all the time. You probably have patients who could list, you know, every food that messes with their cholesterol, but that doesn't mean they're like not eating that stuff anymore. And so the same is true with these happiness habits. You got to put them into practice for them to work.

You've had this incredible career, and you've now taken a lot of your time and energy to explain so many things to to the lay audience. Has there been something like you went from comparative cognition and now really focus on happiness? Did something surprise you about this? We're there in. Sites that that that surprised you?

Yeah. I mean, I think that the biggest one that maybe I should have known, but really surprised me is just how bad we are at this stuff, right? I mean, I think what's striking to me is that even having studied this stuff now for, you know, almost a decade since I've really been kind of diving into that happiness work, I'm still really bad at it. Right. My instinct when I'm having a tough day is not to, like, call a friend or scribble in my gratitude app or like, do a hard Pilates workout. It's to just like, plop down and eat a cupcake and watch Netflix with a glass of wine. Right? But like, I know the studies show that that's not the right strategy. And so what's striking to me is the frustration that even when you know this stuff, it's really hard to make yourself do it. Behavior change is a hack that we as social scientists and maybe medical doctors do still have not figured out, right? You can know how to do this stuff without putting it into effect. And that's, you know, maybe to be the surprise is not the right word, but it's definitely the thing I find most frustrating about this line of work. But the good news is that I think for me at least, knowing this, knowing the the studies has really helped. And my students say the same thing too. They'll say, you know, I know the benefits of sleep. But when I saw that graph about what happens when you haven't got a good night's sleep, I know I don't want to be, you know, at the bottom of that graph, I want to be at the top. And that's kind of helped me put it into practice a little bit more. So I do think while knowledge is not everything, knowledge is power. And it can really help us kind of do what we know we need to do a little bit more easily.

As I mentioned, Doctor Santos, I have a kid in college. I have two more on the way a ninth grader, an 11th grader. And, you know, a lot of our discussions that we have are around current events. That's what we like to talk about. We try to eat dinner together, or at least a meal together every day. But a lot of the discussions around current events, are challenging. They were born into two wars. They were born into significant economic ups and downs, a pandemic, climate change. And when they say climate change, I mean, it's like the world may end. Yeah. I never contemplated the end of the world when I was their age. That wasn't it didn't even cross my mind to think that way. And now they they think that way, or sometimes they think that way. I don't want to overstate it. And yet I would say that I think my girls are still happy. Does that surprise you and and are you optimistic about the future. You talked to lots of students. When you think about the future in the United States, maybe in other countries as well. Are you optimistic about our happiness?

'Well, I'd say, you know, your kids are lucky and they have a pretty smart dad who thinks about this stuff. So maybe that, you know, that helps too. But a lot of young people are not happy right now, right? You know, the statistics just show that in rates of 40 to 60%, students are experiencing depression and anxiety and so on. But yet I'm still optimistic. I'm optimistic because I've seen that there are strategies that work. Right. We have a cure for this stuff, right? It's the set of behavior changes and the mindset changes that I teach my students. They really can matter. And these things wind up snowballing, right? The kind of one point boost you get, like by doing a little bit of social connection, that kind of gives you the bandwidth to engage in the one point boost that might come from changing your mindset about self-compassion and so on. And so I am actually hopeful. I think it's one of these situations where, like, we know what we can do to feel better. And also the data really show that we're not at the mercy of our circumstances. You can be happy in the midst of some of these challenging things. And the data also show that we might want to focus on happiness in the midst of these challenging things. There's lots of data coming out of Constantine Kushlev's lab that if you want to look at who's taking action to prevent climate change, you know who's going out there and fighting for these social justice causes. If you kind of compare students who report symptoms of depression and anxiety versus, say, they're feeling happy, it's the students who are happier, who have the bandwidth to kind of do that stuff. And so I actually think that happiness winds up being a way to fight against some of these big, scary things that we need to fight against. We all kind of need the emotional bandwidth to jump in and take on some of these fights. And that includes our young people, too.

'You know, I just want to say I don't because I don't want to, make it sound like my last question was Pollyanna-ish. Like I asked my girls if they're happy. You know, we do talk about that. And they tell me that they are. Should I be going deeper? Do you think?

'I think my advice for parents is, in lots of ways, your kids will often be as vulnerable with you as you are with them, you know. So if you can admit to them, you know, dad's had a bad day and he's feeling really frustrated today. Or dad's like, looking at this climate news and feeling really anxious, you kind of open up the possibility for them to be a little bit more vulnerable with you. And so I think if you've been doing that as a parent, I'd be having those conversations, probably the self-reports that you're getting from your kids are a little bit more honest, but it's kind of a kind of call to arms for parents to be honest about their emotions, to not be kind of toxically positive themselves, and to kind of admit when things are sort of tough. It's a way to sort of ask for help from your kids, which I think can also be really critical and important too.

What a pleasure to talk to you.

Thanks so much. Ditto, ditto. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

I learned a lot from you and I've been studying this, but I learned a lot from you and dare I say, I feel a little bit happier.

Then my job is done. My job is done.

'You know, Professor Santos spends a whole semester teaching her students about the building blocks of happiness. So I feel kind of lucky that I got a crash course of sorts. And I got to tell you, I was encouraged to hear that happiness is a side effect of gratitude. I've suspected that for some time, which is why my family tries to practice gratitude regularly. We sit around the dinner table and we ask each other what we are grateful for. Sometimes it's hard to get that conversation going, but once it does, it's magical and it leads to a lot of happiness all around the table. And speaking of the keys to happiness this season, we're going to try something a little different. I'm going to ask the listeners you an important question. How do you chase life? I want you to think about this, and we're going to revisit the question and your answers throughout the season. Please give us a call (470) 396-0832 and leave a voicemail. How do you chase life? Your call could be featured on an upcoming episode of the podcast. And coming up next week, we're going to talk about a feeling some of us, most of us maybe know all too well. Anxiety. NYU neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki is going to join us, and she calls anxiety the most misunderstood emotion.

The general feeling is I just want to get rid of it, and the misunderstanding is that it is valuable.

We'll see you next Tuesday. Chasing Life is a production of CNN audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer, Dan Dzula is our technical director. And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. With support from James Andress, John Dionar, Haley Thomas, Alex Manesseri, Robert Mathers, Leni Steinhart, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy, and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.