The Psychology of Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos

Summary

Podcast Summary: Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais

Episode: The Psychology of Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos
Date: April 15, 2026
Host: Dr. Michael Gervais
Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale, creator of "The Science of Well-Being," and host of The Happiness Lab podcast

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the science of happiness, psychological wellbeing, and the mental health crisis facing young people, especially college students. Dr. Gervais and Dr. Santos dissect why happiness is elusive for many—even high achievers—and share evidence-based strategies for cultivating happiness in individuals, workplaces, and families. The discussion weaves in research insights, practical tools, and reflections from Dr. Santos’s work at Yale and in the broader field of positive psychology.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. The College Student Mental Health Crisis

Timestamps: 00:00–06:00

• Dr. Santos opens with sobering statistics: 40% of college students are too depressed to function, and 1 in 10 have seriously considered suicide in the past six months.
• Despite external achievement (e.g., Ivy League status), many students are deeply unhappy and lack critical psychological skillsets.
• Factors contributing to the crisis include academic/social pressures, uncertainty about the future, technology’s impact on sleep and social connection, and "lawnmower parenting" reducing opportunities for independent skill-building.

Quote:
"These kids are 19. They're in the Ivy League. They've made it, right? ...But so many of them were struggling and needed these strategies to do better—it was eye opening for everyone."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (00:16)

2. How We Define and Misunderstand Happiness

Timestamps: 11:23–15:50

• Dr. Santos distinguishes social scientists’ definition of happiness as both affective (emotional, in your life) and cognitive (evaluative, with your life).
• Emotional experience is richer than just “feeling good”—meaningful lives include discomfort and struggle.
• Reframing experiences is key: “Any experience can be any experience as thinking makes it so.” (14:20)

Quote:
"We process nothing objectively. We process everything relatively... This is really the power of our expectations. It's the power of our comparisons."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (14:59)

3. The Power (and Peril) of Social Comparisons

Timestamps: 18:23–24:42

• Our minds default to reference points that make us feel "crappiest" (Steph Curry example with pro athletes).
• Research shows even Olympians are subject to emotionally fraught comparisons: Silver medalists often feel worse than bronze medalists, due to different reference points.
• The antidote is "bronze lining"—focusing on what could have been worse instead of better.

Quote:
"Our brain often goes to the framing or the comparison that makes us feel crappiest."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (20:07)

4. What Actually Drives Happiness

Timestamps: 24:50–32:39

• The things we chase—money, success, attractiveness—don't deliver lasting happiness.
• Mindset and behaviors matter most; happiness is “feeling good in your life and with your life” (25:20).
• Toxic positivity is a trap; we want a healthy “ratio” of positive to negative emotions.

5. Navigating Negative Emotions

Timestamps: 28:18–35:02

• Negative feelings serve as important signals (“engine lights”)—suppression is maladaptive.
• Acceptance and mindfulness allow us to process emotions non-judgmentally, which can naturally diminish their intensity.

Quote:
"A meaningful life is going to have some rich combination of all kinds of emotions, some of which are going to have positive elements and some of which are going to have negative elements."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (13:36)

6. Mindfulness, Meditation, and Self-Compassion

Timestamps: 35:02–43:29

• Non-judgmental awareness and acceptance are foundational (not just for major issues but for everyday irritations).
• Dr. Santos emphasizes the power of changing self-talk (second/third-person address à la Ethan Cross), and Kristin Neff’s self-compassion framework:
  1. Mindfulness—notice your state
  2. Normalization—acknowledge common humanity
  3. Self-kindness—respond as you would to a friend
• Self-compassion is linked to reduced PTSD, less procrastination, greater resilience.

Quote:
"The way we push ourselves is I scream at myself in my head like a drill instructor all the time. When all the research shows that we'd be better off engaging in a little self compassion, which I think we confuse with self indulgence."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (39:30)

7. Overwhelm & Building Resilience

Timestamps: 43:05–47:36

• Overwhelm is a defining experience of modern life.
• Acceptance, mindfulness, and diagnosing what you “know you need” are key tools for handling overwhelm.
• Asking softer questions (“What do I know about what I might need right now?”) can reveal the next right step.

8. Genetics, Environment, and the Possibility of Change

Timestamps: 47:36–52:32

• Genetics explain only a modest portion (30–40%) of happiness variance; environment, choices, and habits play a larger role.
• Both biology and learned skills influence one’s capacity for happiness.

9. Evidence-Based Habits for Happiness

Timestamps: 52:32–57:27 Dr. Santos’s main recommendations:

1. Social Connection:
   • Most robust predictor of happiness; includes brief interactions with acquaintances.
   • True for introverts and extroverts alike.
2. Other-Oriented Action:
   • Helping, donating, volunteering enhances happiness more than self-indulgence.
3. Physical Health:
   • Cardio exercise (~30 min/day) equals the effect of antidepressants for some.
   • Sleep is critical—every hour less increases negative emotion risk.
4. Healthy Technology Habits:
   • Phones/social media undermine happiness via reduced attention, sleep, and connection.

10. Happiness, AI, and the Future

Timestamps: 57:27–59:58

• AI’s frictionless ease may rob us of productive discomfort and authentic connection.
• AI can reduce loneliness in the short term, but may threaten deeper, longer-term happiness if it substitutes for human connection and learning.

11. Better Parenting, Leadership, and Organizational Culture

Timestamps: 59:58–76:09

For Parents:

• Prioritize "future parenting" over "right now" parenting—let kids fail safely and develop independence.
• Collaborative troubleshooting and curious questioning (not just supplying solutions) foster problem-solving.

For Leaders:

• Your mood sets the tone; happier employees = more productive and profitable companies (see Denev’s research).
• Key predictors of workplace happiness:
  1. "What I do at work matters."
  2. "The organization cares about what I do."
  3. "I have a best friend at work."
• Show, don’t just tell—personal gestures, noticing individuals, and fostering authentic connection matter most.

12. Loving-Kindness and Everyday Happiness Practices

Timestamps: 76:54–79:08

• Loving-kindness meditation (directing goodwill to others) can be an easy, practical daily practice—even while brushing teeth.
• Starting with the easy targets (friends, pets) and extending to difficult people yields big personal benefits.

Quote:
"It's not a gift to the other person, it's just a gift to yourself of reducing your own frustration and anger about whatever's going on."
— Dr. Laurie Santos (78:24)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Social Comparison:
  "You give participants a LinkedIn profile...some things they're better at and some things they're worse at...They notice the ones they're doing worse at."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos (21:00)

• On Emotional Signals:
  "Negative emotions are like the alert signal on your car. ... They're really useful signals for something."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos (28:18)

• On Organizational Culture:
  "If you combine this and aggregate, of course it's going to be the case that people who are happier are higher performing."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos (66:17)

• On Parenting:
  "You don't even care if your kid gets that math homework done as long as they figure out the best way to figure out homework in the future. That's what you're parenting for."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos (63:58)

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Practical Tools & Takeaways

1. Practice self-compassion and positive self-talk:

   • Use second/third person perspective, catch self-criticism, and treat oneself like a friend.

2. Shift social comparisons:

   • Notice when your reference point is making you feel worse; actively cultivate a “bronze lining.”

3. Prioritize basic wellbeing behaviors:

   • Social interaction, acts of kindness, regular exercise, good sleep, digital hygiene.

4. Mindfully accept and name emotions:

   • Don’t suppress; notice, name, and observe how emotions move through your body.

5. Invest in authentic connection at work and home:

   • Notice people, personalize appreciation, and foster a culture of belonging.

6. Begin loving-kindness meditation:

   • Offer goodwill to others routinely, even for those you find challenging.

7. Parent and lead with questions, not answers:

   • Enable self-discovery and problem-solving in others.

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Conclusion

Dr. Santos and Dr. Gervais deliver an insightful, practical conversation on happiness for individuals, teams, and leaders. The key theme: happiness is complex, but small, intentional shifts in our mindset, habits, and social connection can yield substantial improvements. Social comparison, acceptance of discomfort, self-compassion, and prioritizing relationships are central—and achievable for anyone.

Dr. Santos:
"We need to build our own counterfactuals in. ... The good life includes the full range of human emotions." (24:19, 29:53)

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This summary is designed to provide a standalone, detailed reference for listeners and non-listeners alike, highlighting all major discussion points, timestamps for easy navigation, and the original tone and insights from Dr. Gervais and Dr. Santos.

Transcript

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Right now. Nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. And 1 in 10 students has seriously considered suicide in the last six months.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Those stats are staggering.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

They're scary.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Why do so many of us chase happiness and then still feel like something's missing?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

These kids are 19. They're in the Ivy League. They've made it right? I would switch with them in a heartbeat. But looking that so many of them were struggling and needed these strategies to do better was, I think, eye opening for everyone.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Welcome back. Or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I AM your host, Dr. Michael Gervais.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

A high performance psychologist named Michael Gervais,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

who Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks, famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos project. Olympic athletes depend on something more than

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Today's guest is Dr. Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, where she created the most popular course and in the university's history on the science of wellbeing. She's also the host of the Happiness Lab podcast. In this conversation, we explore how our minds are wired to compare, often in ways that leave us feeling worse.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I had done this brief work with a professional basketball team and I said, well, who's your comparison for, like, the best, you know, three pointer? And they were like, Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison for, like, you know, who was making the most money at the time? It was Steph. Steph Curry. I was like, who's your comparison for, like, what's the appropriate height to be in basketball at the time? They said, oh, taco fail. And I was like, okay, why isn't it Steph Curry for height? And they're like, we wouldn't. Like, he's sure. Like, I was like, why is it Steph for everything else, like, if you compared yourself with Steph now, all of a sudden you'd be like, well, I'm much better, right? And so this is the problem with what's called reference points, these social comparisons. We pick the one that makes us feel crappiest.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And she also shares a handful of simple tools that can meaningfully change the way we live our life.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Notice how self critical you're being. I gotta push myself. And the way I push myself is I scream at myself in my head like a drill instructor all the time. When all the research shows that we'd be better off engaging in a little self compassion, which I think we confuse with self indulgence.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos. Lori, this has been a long time coming. You have held space for the science of happiness and well being, and you're making a real dent in the community about how people can live better. So this has been a long time coming. And for a while, I wasn't sure what to think about happiness. And the reason being is because the aspiration to just be happy seemed flat to me. It seemed too narrow. Yes, I want to be happy. I think we all probably do. But there's so much more to life that I didn't want to just narrow in on being able to align with just one emotion, if you will. And then I came to learn that it's not quite that simple. And you've had a big hand in that. So I'm really delighted to have you here.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Why did you want to study happiness?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, it started when I took on a new role. I'd been teaching psychology for forever, but for a long time I was really focused on sort of studying the origins of the mind, how we evolved to be the kind of smart species that we are. And I got interested in happiness when I took on this new role on campus where I became what's called the head of college. So this is a faculty member who lives with students on campus. I'm like, living in the dorm. I'm eating in the student's dining hall. And I thought college was like what college was going to be like when I was in college, which was, you know, last year. No, it was back in the 90s, right. When, like, folks were stressed. But, you know, it was fine. We were really thriving and flourishing and having fun and so on. And that just was not what I saw with my college students.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

How long ago?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I started this role in 2016. Right, right. So, you know, like 10 years ago, but not.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And this was at Yale.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

This was at Yale. I mean, I was seeing what is not just at Yale, but across the country is this college student mental health crisis. Right. Like right now. Nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Right now. Nationally, more than 60% of college students report being overwhelmingly anxious, which is like the highest level they can tick on most surveys. And one in ten students has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And so. And this was what I was seeing in my Community, right? Like these things were popping up. And I said, you know, we as college professors are not doing our job unless we're addressing this. We think we're teaching students, I don't know, computer science and how to use AI. And here, read Shakespeare. When that many of them are suffering, I'm like, we gotta do something different. Because I'm an early psychologist, I was like, well, I should figure out how to help students develop better strategies, develop better skills, really focus on happiness. And the happiness word was a little tricky. It could have been like, let's protect your mental health. But that's kind of stigmatized, especially in very type A students, like, at Yale. And so it was like, oh, how can you be happier? How can you promote your wellbeing? How can you live a better life? And so I thought, let me teach a class on this. And that was how it all got started.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's awesome. Those stats are staggering.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

They're scary, right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

One in 10 in the last six months have been suicidal or had tendencies

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

or has seriously considered taking their own Life is the way it's framed.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What is the general population? Do you know, that much lower than that. It's gotta be, right?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Like, it's not 10%, right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I think we have 47,000 suicides last year in the U.S. somewhere in that range.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And thinking about it doesn't mean that you're gonna take action towards it. But, you know, I mean, when those rates are that high, right? That means that even if it's not you that's experiencing a mental health situation, it's your teammate, it's your roommate, it's your sibling, right? And I think hearing these stats, I think even though most of the folks listening might not be in that population, like, that's your kids, right? You know, the new employee that you just hired, that's in this generation. Like, so many communities are being affected by those numbers, but we don't talk about them a lot.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And when you studied it, is it have to do with the pressures of school? Does it have to do with the social pressures? Does it have to do with the way that they got to the school? Like, what. What would you say are the contributing factors?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It would be so much easier if there was, like, one. It's social media. They're like, all right, we get rid of Facebook and everybody's fine. No, it's. It's probably all the things that you mentioned. This is a generation that cares tremendously about their human capital, especially at a place like Yale, where they're putting so much Time into their studies. There's this sense that there's a sort of winner take all sort of effect. That was true when I first started. It's even more true now with AI and so many of these tools coming up. There's this sense of uncertainty about the future, I think, both economically and politically and just in terms of our existence, like what's happening with the climate and so on. But I think there's other things too. Right. I think I joked about social media, but I think our technology is a big factor. Right. It's affecting students sleep. It's affecting their ability to connect one on one with other people. Even just the kind of thing that you and I are doing right now is more foreign to students who are in college right now because they're used to connecting, you know, and I text you and you text me back and so on. And so all these things contribute to not feeling as happy as they could be.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So what I really like about your approach is that you one, I think your class. Tell me if I could be radically wrong here, but. Is one of the most popular classes on campus.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It is the most popular. It's not to do that. Okay.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

There you go. Good job.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. In 300 years. So, yeah. So students. Students flocked to get this.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so you knew you were onto something. And that pull to your science, the application of your science, not yours, but the community science is. People want a better way.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And I think that's pretty universal.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. It was shocking for people that so many students at Yale wanted this. Right. I think, again, our sense is like, you know, these kids are 19, they're in the Ivy League. They've made it right. That's the best. I would switch with them in a. But looking that so many of them were struggling and needed these strategies to do better was, I think, eye opening for everyone.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

There's this analogy that someone shared with me, and I like thinking about it. Let's call it the last five years. Certainly during the pandemic, it was heightened. It was as if the tide went out. And we realized that so many of us have been swimming naked. And the way that I liken that analogy here is that when the tide is up and you're swimming, it looks like you're okay. You know, it looks. But underneath the surface, like you're not prepared to deal with the shifting tide. And the shifting tide is not that there's more stress. It's just that we're not equipped to deal with the rapid nature of change. There's all like, the Dark Ages were stressful.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I wouldn't want to trade our timing for the Dark Ages. That was really a brutal time. So just as a comparison, we'd lose track of a couple hundred years ago, what it was like. That being said, when we are not properly equipped, I think psychologically equipped to deal with kind of some of the modern changes. So can you sharpen that idea or take it further?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of thing I talk with the Yale alums about all the time. Right. You know, I'm constantly in these situations where I'm talking about my class and the strategies we build to these folks who graduated in the 1930s and the 1940s and 50s, and they're like, we went to war. It was like a massive war that we, like, left college and went to war and came back like. Like we went through some really tricky times. Like, how is this worse? And I think you're exactly right. All times are bad and they kind of go up and down. Every era has its stresses, but I think the particular ones we're facing right now are about our young people not developing the skill sets that they need to navigate this stuff.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Psychological skill sets.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Psychological skill sets.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

You know, these days, folks talk a lot about things like helicopter parenting, where the new term is actually lawnmower parenting, where it's not like you're in a helicopter that swoops in to save your teen. You're actually lawnmowering. Mowing, Mowing the lawn so that everything's flat and perfect, so that as they walk, nothing could make them trip in advance. Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, so I've heard it. Zamboni parenting.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Zamboni, similar concept.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And, you know, we see this in the parents that I work with at Yale who are, you know, constantly calling in to check on things, doing things that even five, 10 years ago, you'd never see a parent doing a big one. That I was so shocked by is many parents are their students. Alarm clock. Like, if you have a big midterm, I, as your parent, I'm gonna make sure I call you in the morning to make sure you get up. And I'm like, this is a 20 year old student who made it into an Ivy League university. Like, they should be able to set their own alarm clock. So folks like the scholar Julie Lythcott Haymes and others have talked about how we're really not giving kids the opportunity to screw up in little ways that we have historically, and that means that they're not building up These skill sets to navigate, like, big challenges as they come through. For example, for example, what would happen if you didn't get up in the morning? Right. You know what would happen if you leave your backpack at home? You know, as a parent and you're in third grade, I rush to bring it to you. You know what would happen if you don't get the trophy in soccer and you do a little bit worse? You know, I'm trying to pave things so that everyone gets a trophy. Right. You know what would happen if you struggle with your math homework? I'm going to jump in and do it for you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And where does that come from? The parents in the community. Why are we doing that?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I think it's for a few reasons. First of all, to say it's not out of malice. Right. Obviously, this attempt at helping and smoothing and parents putting in so much work, so that is easy for their kids. That's out of love. But I think it's really misplaced love. It's trying to solve for the right now. So you get your backpack today or you make sure you wake up for this midterm. It's not building skill sets for the future so that if you as a parent, you know, something happens to you and you're dead and gone, your kid can do it on their own.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Let's talk about happiness. Let's talk about wellbeing, your definitions, the way you're thinking about those two. And let's also talk about the skill sets that you know are. But let's get to that one in just a moment so we can set the frame properly. When you talk about happiness, how do you think about it?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, I think about it differently than many folks think about. I use the social scientist definition, which isn't the one that a lot of lay people think. Even when you were talking about kind of being down on happiness, you mentioned it as an emotion. And I think happiness, joy, pleasure, these things are emotions. But the way social scientists tend to think about happiness is a little bit bigger than that. They think about happiness as being in two different ways. Right. One is kind of being happy in your life, which is sort of the emotion part. Things feel good to you. But another is being happy with your life, which is the sense that, all things considered, you're satisfied with your life. Researchers call this the affective idea of happiness and the cognitive idea of happiness, how you feel your life is going and how you think your life is going. The emotion part is just like how you feel it's going. And that's one good part of it. Right. We want a life that has more of the, like, happy, pleasure, humor parts than the sadness, anxious, angry parts. Right. But we also want a life that we think is going well. And to do that, you have to balance the emotions out a little bit. Right. If you're really pursuing something of purpose, something that's hard, something that's difficult but meaningful, like those are going to come normatively with some negative emotions.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I'm nodding my head to all of it.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And then on the. Just. Let's just go back to the affective piece for just a moment. Is your position or is your understanding that the way that we make sense of an experience, any experience, is the primary mover for the experience of that experience?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Not necessarily. Right. Because I think it's naive to think of emotions as purely positive or negative. Like, take an emotion like awe. Right. Something that you and I are having this lovely conversation. I get to come to Southern California. I'm staying at the beach. Last night, I sat out at the sunset. Right. Beautiful. Lots of positive emotions, but made me feel kind of tiny.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Like, that's what the awe does. That's what the awe does.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Right. So awe is not purely physiologically. It looks a lot more like fear. Your hair stands up, you get goosebumps. Right. Those are things that are associated with fear, which is typically thought of as a negative emotion. Like a tiger is going to pop out to get you. Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Called piloerection. Just for the remaining nerds in our community.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. I mean, a phenomena like moral elevation. Right. Where you see the goodness of others, that also feels great, but kind of can make you feel tiny. Right. Nostalgia, another one I think about a lot. You know, it's a bittersweet emotion. You're having these wonderful, positive memories of the past, but it's gone. And so I think it's naive to think of emotions as, like, they're good or bad. Right. A meaningful life is going to have some rich combination of all kinds of emotions, some of which are going to have positive elements and some of which

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

are going to have negative elements on the affective side? One more piece, though. I want to just get your framing. Is it your understanding that the way that we frame a situation, an experience, in and of itself is the primary driver for the experience? So are you coming at this more as a cognitive approach?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, for sure. Right. Any experience can be any experience as thinking makes it so. Right. Take for example, which is a really important.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Sorry to interrupt you. It's a really important position to.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Oh, My gosh.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I think that I forget that that is a first principle for me. I forget how important that is when I'm working with somebody else to remind them. Wait, hold on. You're making that so? No, no, no. That person hit me and. Or that. Or in a. I was just in a car crash, so I was imagining that this happened. What do you mean, hold on? Your interpretation of it, what you bring to make that so is actually the first most important thing that you can work on.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So one of the most important fundamental principles of the mind, which kind of maybe sucks. I don't know if I want the mind to be organized like this, but this is how the mind is organized, is that we process nothing objectively. We process everything relatively. You and I are having this conversation in the studio. There's these big bright lights. As soon as we walk out into the main room, I'm gonna be like, oh man, everything's dark. And it's just because my brain isn't processing objectively how much light there is. It's saying, oh, and here's really bright. And I'll go outside and suddenly it's really dark. Right. I can't try. But that's true for all of our experiences, you know. Is this a nice conversation? Well, if I had an expectation, that would have been better. Maybe I'll meet Michael and he's so cool, you know, it's going to be worse, right? Is this a good sunset? Right. I can make it much better than it could have been in my mind and then see it as not as good anymore. And so this is really the power of our expectations. It's the power of our comparisons.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

One of the things that I think my Yale students really struggle with is that they've always been awesome, right? To get into Yale, they've always had to have the perfect grades and the perfect extracurriculars. And for the first time, they're surrounded by comparison points that are just as good as they are. And what does that make them feel? That makes them feel crappy all the time. When I first started teaching the class, that song by DJ Khaled was out. All I do is win. All I do is win, win, win no matter what. And I think that that's an awful psychologically, that would be an awful Way to live. Because after the first, second, third win, you don't notice the wins anymore.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

The Midas touch.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

The Midas touch.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. And what you said, something really important is that. And this shows up in pro sport. So in high school, bigger, faster, stronger than everyone else, you're doing really good. You get a lot of attention from their community. You move up into the college ranks. You're like, oh, whoa, okay, but there's still some separators. And then if you're fortunate enough to get to the pros, you were one of the good ones in college. You get to the pros and you're like, whoa, everyone's the margins. Now, for those that have the framing, go back to the first principle. The way that the mind works when they frame it like, this is so exciting. Like, I'm around the best in the world. Iron sharpens iron. Like, this is what makes people great. And I'm going to put in the work to try to figure this thing out. They walk into the pros like sponges. Now, those that look around and go, whoa, my identity is connected to this thing. And, like, everyone's good and, like, I'm not special anymore. And like, man, I don't know if I have a system and a structure to keep up. What do I do? And so that anxious framing or comparison framing. So it's not necessarily that you arrive in a highly competitive environment and it's a problem. It's the way that you're framing it.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Wrapped around identity, wrapped around kind of, you know, your mindset, if you will.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And the one challenge is like, our brains often go to the framing that makes us feel crappiest.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, wait, say that again. I don't. I don't know this.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Our brain often goes to the framing that makes us. Or the comparison at least, that makes us feel crappiest. I did very little work with sports teams, unlike you, but I had done this brief work with a professional basketball team. We were talking about social comparisons, and I was making this point, and I said, well, who's your comparison for? Like, the best, you know, three pointer. And they were like, Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison for? Like, you know, who was making the most money at the time? It was Steph. Steph Curry. I was like, who's your comparison for? Like, what's the appropriate height to be in basketball at the time? They saw Taco fail, and I was like, okay, why isn't it Steph Curry for height? And they're like, we wouldn't like, he's sure. Like, I was like, why is it Steph for everything else? Like, if you compared yourself with Steph now, all of a sudden you'd be like, well, how much better? Right. And so this is the problem with what's called reference points, these social comparisons. We pick the one that makes us feel crappiest.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I'm assuming this is research backed.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, for sure.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I don't know this. Oh, I am so excited right now.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, yeah. You give people, for example, you give participants like, say like something like a LinkedIn profile, which has different things, and you rig it so that some of the things they're better at and some of the things they're worse at. The participant. Right. Which ones do they notice? They notice spontaneously the ones that they're doing worse at.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, so this is. If this is a automatic bias, it's kind of built in. It must be connected somewhere to survival.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, I think it's kind of like a negativity bias. Right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Like, you know, for that that's different negativity. And a negativity bias is, well, negativity

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

in the sense that you're doing worse than someone else. I see.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Because if you're doing worse, you're more likely to get relegated.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Oh, that's relegated. Oh, that's a threat, right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's a threat. Yeah. Okay.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Again, another stupid feature of the mind. We don't need any mechanisms to pat ourselves on the back and be like, I'm doing so much better. Like, that's not useful if evolutionarily, but oh my God, when I foraged, I got less nuts than that guy or I mated fewer times than this other person. Those are very salient to us. We notice those quickly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

When I get asked often about what does it take to be a high performer or fill in the blanks around that type of question, I don't have a clean answer because it's so messy. The path to becoming is really so varied. But one thing I do embrace is that reference points are really important. And so you've got me down this path. Like, wait, the way I've been thinking about reference points is unique life experiences or unique, let's say downhill skiing, having as many angles on varied terrain so that when I approach this one corner that I need to get to really lock in on, I've got all these wild reference points to draw on. And you're saying that those reference points. I think I'm not including this first principle bias that you're suggesting is, I

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

guess all of those are Possible. Maybe that's what the mastery is about. Right. It's about kind of moving your brain towards those other kinds of reference points, ones that take your identity in new ways or developing more of a growth mindset and so on. My point is more that our tendency, if we're not careful, if we don't put any work in, is we're going to lock onto the stuff that makes us feel pretty crappy.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right? Yes. I'm like really appreciative of that insight. Where can I learn more about it or where can we learn more about that?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, well, there's some great work by, you know, lots of psychologists who've looked at this. One of my favorite papers, early papers on the kind of power of reference points and using your intentions to switch was actually in the context of athletes. They're looking at Olympians who've made the medal stand and what emotions they're experiencing. So you look at the gold medalist and they're obviously quite happy. You look at the silver medalist and here's where surprise number one comes in. They're not showing a little less happiness or a little less joy than the gold medalist. They're showing emotions like contempt, anger, deep sadness. If you analyze their facial expressions, that's what you see. Your second best in the world and all you're paying attention to is the one person who just lost.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Cool.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Beat you. Yeah. But the second surprise in that same study is what happens to the bronze medalist. Right. They should be. Maybe if you know, the silver medalist who gets second is experiencing contempt and all this stuff, they should be even more upset. But no, in some of the studies, their expressions are even happier than the gold medalist. Why? Their comparison point isn't gold. Like they are 2 points or 2 seconds or whatever, you know, 0.2 seconds or whatever it is away from the gold, they're thinking, oh my gosh. But by the grace of God, did I not like Ms. I could have gone going home completely empty handed.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right, that's it.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And so I often joke when you're intentionally trying to figure out your comparisons, don't go with the silver lining, which we always say. I say go with the bronze lining. So bronze means you're really looking to what the possibilities could have been. So that's a situation that kind of happens naturally. Right. Because it's so salient what the counterfactual is in those cases. But I think the key is that we need to build our own counterfactuals in. Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Big question. I think that most people want to know Is like, okay, great, great, great. How do we become happier in our lives?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It's not the stuff we normally think. It's not getting richer, getting more accolades at work, being more successful, being more attractive. Those things that we predict make us happier don't make us as happy as we think or for as long as we think. So the boost we get from achieving those things isn't as big as we think and doesn't last for as long as we think. What really matters is, honestly, all the stuff you talk about on this podcast. Right. It's changing your behaviors and more changing your mindset. Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So let's go back up one level to come back to some practical approaches. Happiness is.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Happiness is feeling good in your life and with your life.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Clean.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Very clean.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Happiness is feeling good in your life and with your life. So the affect and cognitive.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, and the affect one, I think is important because my students often come in with these ideas of toxic positivity. Right. Like, if you have any anxiety or sadness or whatever, something's wrong. Right. They want to be like a big, smiling emoji all the time. That's wrong. What you want is a decent ratio of your positive to negative emotions. Right. I think if you're going through tough times, you want to build in these positive moments of moral elevation, awe, humor, connection, compassion. Right. You want to build in the positive to match the negative, but it's not getting rid of the negative. It's making sure that ratio is pretty healthy.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So let's think about an equalizer and, like, a sound equalizer. And you've got a bunch of knobs or dials. Let's go. 1 to 10 is above the line. 0 is kind of like a baseline.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Okay.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Like a neutral state. And then minus 1 to minus 10. Okay. So are you trying to set it at a. I don't know, plus five for everything? Like, how are you thinking about this?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I kind of want to set as high. Maybe a better analogy is you have the bass and the treble. When I was a little kid, I would always put both of them up.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But I think that's what you're trying to work on. I think it's helpful to think of the positive emotions and the negative emotions as different dials, and we can move them both up.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay. So you want to experience the most joy you can do. You want to experience the most sadness that a human can.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Probably doesn't feel great. Right. But you might want to experience the kinds of meaning and purpose that come out of experiencing sadness.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I've thought A lot about this. I don't want to be muted. I don't want to have, like, I do want. I don't want to be stuck. I don't want to feel like, okay, so what is depression? Depression is like two weeks or longer where you're really struggling with, you know, five of the nine symptoms, you know, of depression for major depression, I should say. And that feels like I can't get out of that space. I don't want that. But I want to know the depths of that feeling. I don't want to be so afraid that I don't go there because I might not get out of there. So I think I'm dancing around a few things here. I want the fullness of life's experience. I also don't want to spend an exorbitant amount of time and feel like I am stuck in that depth of those more prickly difficulties, emotions. Because to your other point about comparison, I mean, the best nap I've ever had when I was like, 36 hours exhausted and it was on a hammock that was somebody else's that I didn't care who, and I fell asleep like you wouldn't believe, right? And it sounds dramatic. There's a whole backstory about why I was that tired. And I've got, like, a really nice bed that in comparison, I don't appreciate as much as that one time that. Okay, so it's this comparison bit between knowing sadness, that I can feel joy, knowing nighttime. I can feel, you know, the joys of daytime, if you will.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I think the right way to think about negative emotions is like the alert signal on your car, right? You know, and your car has this dashboard. It's like tire light, like engine light and so on. One reason you don't want to shut off negative emotions is the thing you're saying, right? Which is like, we just want to experience the fullness of life. But another reason you don't want to shut off your negative emotions is like, they're really useful signals for something, right? When I experience a level of sadness or loneliness, a big one, that I think your listeners will relate to. When you experience overwhelm, that's a really essential signal that's telling you something's off. It's like your engine lights on, and you're like, ooh, that doesn't mean you have to drop everything and deal with your car. When the engine light comes on your car, you don't have to drop everything and deal with it right that very second. But at some point, you Got to put some time in to like check on it and see what's going on. I think our negative emotions are like that. And what that means is we want to experience them cleanly, fully. We definitely don't want to suppress them. We want to see them and notice them. But we also want some strategies to do. The second thing you said, which is we don't want to live with the engine light on forever. Like, whoa, it's me, my engine light. This is terrible. We want to have our way to psychologically take ourselves to the mechanic. And that's where I think so many skills of emotion regulation, finding more positive emotion. Come in.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I like how cleanly you're able to articulate something that is pretty messy for most people. Like the inner life is pretty complicated because it's so invisible and so I've really appreciated how concretely and cleanly you've used some analogies here. That being said, why didn't you name the course Joy? Why did you go for happiness?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, the course is actually called.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Is it?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, Being psychology and the good life. A cleaner way to think about all this stuff is the way that, you know, the ancient Greeks thought about this. What we're going for is eudaimonia. We're going for is a good life overall. And that's going to include some negative emotions normatively. I don't think you could live a good life without having some sadness or anger or fear or whatever. Right. You need that stuff to live a meaningful good life.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so is part of your skill set that you're. And tools that you're helping people develop is to manage the more prickly, scratchy emotions. I'm avoiding positive and negative.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I often use the term like comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. Right. The uncomfortable ones, they're important. You want to see them. If you don't see them, you will not be living a good life. Right. You'll make things worse. But you do want some strategies for regulating them. And a big one and a surprising one is just this practice of acceptance. It's like noticing and let me sit with this non judgmentally. I want to see it. And that gets to something you mentioned you gave me this nice compliment that I'm able to explain our inner lives, which many of us don't understand very well. I think one of the reasons we don't understand it very well is we don't let ourselves see it. It's like, nope, can't. Can't deal with that right now. Just running around. Right. But the practice of acceptance is like, all right, let me look at this. What is going on? What's going in my body? Right? Say when I say I'm feeling anxious about something, I'm scared about this podcast interview. What's happening? Well, my chest is tight, my brow is furrowed. What's going on? Where did that come from? What's the history of this? When have I also felt this emotion? Oh, it's because I have a value. I want to communicate this stuff well. Or because I care about this. Right. You can kind of, when you look at things and look at them carefully, you start to gain some really rich insights. And what a lot of the work on radical acceptance practices finds is that when you really sit with your emotions, they kind of just chill out. Like, one of the reasons really intense emotions stick around is that we don't, like, sit with, like, all right, let me look at you. But, like, you sit with sadness or anger or fear, whatever, for a while, and it's going to go back to basis. We just never give it a chance to do that.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, it's remarkable, the findings around just naming an emotion, that it dissipates it, you know, and then if you can sit and watch how it, I don't know, works in your body, that just watching the traveling nature of emotions has been a radical. To use to second your word, a radical commitment to me, understanding, like, how it works for me. And then now it's no longer a mystery. Now I can greet it. I'm being like, oh, there you are. Actually, you know what? Let's play. And that. Or, you know what? Right now is not a nice time. It's, you know, like, I don't. So. But I'm going to come back to you. I promise I'm going to come back.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So that kind of volitional ability to, like, work with and decide when and how has become a pretty massive asset, I think, in the way that I personally live.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's so great to hear. And you probably had the same thing I had when I first started using these techniques, too, which is that, at least at first, I didn't believe it was going to work in the way all the science thought it was going to work. I remember one time I was experiencing, you know, really strong sadness about something that was happening in my life. I'm like, all right, the research says I should sit with this. So let me sit with this. I'm like, in the back of my mind, I was like, this is never going away. This is always going to feel just as intense. And I remember like, you know, a few minutes into the practice where I'm like, what am I going to have for dinner tonight? I was like, oh my God. Brain all of a sudden isn't thinking about the sad thing. So I think you really need to play with these techniques and try them. It's one thing to hear, oh, if you radically accept your emotions, like you'll be able to regulate them. And it's another to walk. Watch the magic of how quickly emotions become boring and uninteresting to your brain if you just give yourself the chance to pay attention to them.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Let's remember the origin of emotions, which is a signal to mobilize. And okay, if you can follow that thing through and you're like, oh wait, but I don't actually need to mobilize right now. Yes, that's basically the emotions, like, I've done my job. You got the signal. We've actually hung out a little bit. I think you got the message. I'm good. Where are we going to dinner? Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And this way I think of our emotions are better than at least modern cars where it's like, beep, I'm beeping at you. I'm beeping at you. It's like, yes, I've heard the beeping. Please stop. Our old evolved emotions are better designed.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

For sure. I think, I mean there are lots of different practices, but that's one that should be in the toolkit for sure.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And for you, is that more about awareness or is that more about understanding how to work with the emotion? And of course it's probably both at some level, but which one has a greater valiance?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Maybe you mean this by understanding, but it's really about the non judgment and the awareness. So it's noticing like, oh, that's sadness. That's how it feels in my body. This is not some strange thing. It's like, oh, sadness has shown up again. That's the kind of attention part. But then I think it's. And because I understand it, I don't have to freak out about it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, I think for me the non judgment piece is the tactic.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So I can do a lot of things once I notice an emotion. And if I can just observe. Now I'm with awareness. Awareness is that it's like the sky. It's always there. If I am with it, if I'm tuned to it, then I can do some stuff with whatever I'm aware of. So for me, non judgmentally is the tactic to stay with it longer. If I'm judging, critiquing, trying to fix, shift, move. Those are all tactics too, you know, but they lead to different places. Sometimes we're muting the very thing we want to be better at. But I will say not to get too confusing. There's a time and place. If I'm on the edge of the cliff and I'm hanging in, my fingernails are barely holding me together, my legs are shaking. This is a, you know, I'm using a physical analogy. But of course it doesn't have to be. But it's the feeling of like, like I've got to fix this thing now. Awareness alone is not enough.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right. It's like, no, no, no, no. I need to put all of my attention to the next finger hold that I'm looking for. And so awareness is like, wow, I'm a mess right now. Wow, I'm really scared. It's not enough. Because if we stay ruminating in that awareness, which is a radically powerful process, it's just not in the right moment as I'm describing. So I need to build in moments of deep awareness. I need to build in when I'm doing that tactics, the non judgmental tactic so that I can be more familiar with the inner experience. And that sounds like what you're doing as well.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's exactly right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. And how frequently and what's the duration of time that you're spending under this type of tension?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Me personally?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Oh my gosh. I think inner life is always under this. Maybe I have stronger and more varied emotions than most. But. But no, I mean these are techniques I'm using all the time.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So you're not traditionally it's like 10 minutes on a pillow, 20 minutes on a pillow. Like formal meditation. You're saying it's more the air that you're breathing, it's the way that you're working.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I think it's more organic. I'm going grocery shopping and someone takes a parking space. I'm like, oh, that jerk. It's like, oh, that's anger, that's frustration. I don't need to waste this energy right now. I go into the grocery and I realize like, oh God, do I know what we're gonna eat tonight? I haven't even figured out and my mother in law's coming over, blah, blah, blah, like, oh wait, that's anxiety. Let's feel that. You know, I'm slamming the stuff on the counter and I realize, oh, what is that? That's when Laurie experiences overwhelm. What else is going on? Like, oh, I have 14 things on my plate this afternoon. Maybe I should make a less intense dinner. Right. It's an organic process of trying to notice in all these moments. And I think the powerful ones are the stupid ones. Like that's where you practice. You know, it's one thing, you know, if you have like some sort of terrible medical diagnosis or you have a real grief in your family or like, you know, you're fired at work unfairly. Like they're the big things that happen. But I think the good practice points are the teeny things.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Can you provide a couple really concrete ways to train? I'm going to say sitting on a pillow. Meditating training.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So that you can move through the world more aware.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. So one of my favorite ones is to monitor and maybe change around your self talk in a few different ways. Right. Forget if you had Ethan Cross on the show.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Ethan's great.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. So Ethan's best strategy, which is this idea of psychological distancing is a simple change in your self talk strategy where instead of using the same the type of talk that we normally do, which is very self focused. Oh my God, I suck. I need to do this better. I, I, me, me, me. You switch into a Third or second person, you say, lauri, you've got this, you got to do it. Right. Why is this dumb linguistic change so powerful? Well, when we usually talk in the second and third person, what we're doing is talking to somebody else. We're just much more rational and distanced from our emotions when we're talking to somebody else. The other thing is that we kind of censor ourselves when we're talking to somebody else. So we're really like you, you know, effing idiot, like, whatever. Like we usually like reasonable. And that makes us more reasonable when we're talking to ourselves.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Is that how you sound to yourself sometimes?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

You know, before I start using these strategies for sure. And that gets to my second self talk point. That can be powerful, which is to notice how self critical you're being. And this is when I've worked with leaders and the types of folks that you work with, that's the one that I find that folks mess up a lot, which is they confuse self criticism with effectiveness. Right. I gotta push myself. And the way I push myself is I scream at myself in my head like a drill instructor all the time. When all the research shows that we'd be better off engaging in a little self compassion, which I think we confuse with self indulgence.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Can you make that more concrete?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes. So this comes from the lovely work of Kristin Neff, where she defines self compassion as having these three steps. First step is one that we've just been talking about a lot. She calls it mindfulness. It's really just like, I'm pissed right now. I'm having a hard time right now. You're noticing ideally non judgmentally your emotions. Right. But then you take step number two, which is the hard step for leaders, which is you say, and that is a common human experience. It makes sense that I'm experiencing pissed offedness right now because X, Y and Z common human experience, normative. It's okay, makes sense that I'm going through this. Right. The third step is what she calls self kindness, where you just say, how would I talk to a friend that was going through this? How can I take something off my plate? How can I be nice to myself? And that's the part that we mistake for self indulgence. We think, if I'm kind to myself, I would never get off the couch. I'd just like be eating bonbons on the couch and never get anything done. But if you use this framework of how you would talk to a friend and you had a friend that you cared about that was really screwing up. I hope you wouldn't scream at that person like a drill instructor, but I hope you wouldn't let them off the hook either. I hope you'd get like curious, coachy, like all the people you work with. Like, I'm worried about you, what's going on? How can we fix this? Let's get problem solvy and proactive, but not from a mean perspective. And that's what you're doing in self compassion. That's the voice that you want to harness. And she has these lovely data just like how powerful this shift. She finds, for example, that in the military a self compassionate voice can decrease rates of ptsd. So you go through the same terrible traumatic experience, but because you talk to yourself without beating yourself up, now all of a sudden you're better. She finds in the work context it can decrease procrastination. And it's a really great way of developing compassion for other people too. Because when you practice not screaming at yourself in your head, it makes it a lot easier not to do the same thing, maybe more mildly to your spouse or to someone on your team and so on.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

We give what we have, we give

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

what we have, and we sometimes give ourselves the least of all that we have to give. Which is sad.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. Which is why oftentimes, I think without an investment in training to better understand who you are and how to take care of yourself, you never really become a great teammate.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Because life can feel like we're like a duck swimming underwater, like almost in that overwhelmed space. And when we're feeling that, how do we. We give compassion and kindness and support without, I don't know, being kind of really thin or like, I just gave you everything I have. But it wasn't all that much. It was just, you know, like, because I don't have that much to give because I'm struggling. And so I do think that getting to know yourself is really important so that you can fill your buckets, whatever that is, joy, happiness, kindness, whatever it might be, so you can give that. And let's go back to the overwhelming piece, is that you mentioned it, I kind of hit on it quickly, is that I do think it's a great word for capturing how many people are experiencing life. It's just overwhelming how much noise, how much shifting that we're aware of. You know, that's happening kind of under toe here. So how do you help people with that feeling of overwhelm as well?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, well, one that I use for myself is this strategy of self compassion. Right. Like when I. When I noticed that, oh, my God, I'm overwhelmed. I'm slamming things on the Trader Joe's counter. What am I doing? And I'll say, oh, that's overwhelm. That's the mindfulness piece. And that makes sense. Everybody's overwhelmed right now. I'm overwhelmed right now because I'm traveling this much this week. I have X, Y and Z on my plate. What do I need right now? What can I help with? And that practice can be powerful.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And what if the next piece is. I don't know, because I just can't get a break.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. Here's a question I love. What do you know about what you need right now? What do you need right now is too hard. But do I have any inklings about what I need right now? Softer. And for me, that can be like, oh, I need a break. I need an hour. I need whatever. And what's shocking, and this comes up a lot is like, there's a lot of talk out there about self care. And by that, people usually mean, like, I'll have a Pilates workout or I'll take a bubble bath. That's never what I need when I'm overwhelmed. What I need is like, I need help, right? I need to ask, you know, someone in my office or my team to, like, take something off my plate. Like, I need to make the hard decision to say no to this thing that I was looking forward to, but is really just one too many things on my schedule that what I know about what I really need right now can sometimes give you a glimpse into that thing that you don't want to look at.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What do I know I need right now?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

What do I know about what I might need right now?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What do I know about what I might need?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It's again, it's psychological distance. It's like if you set up those,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

it's just a little buffering.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

What might I glimpse about what I might see?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What could possibly if we.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But it works. It's powerful. It works.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I really like the normative piece, which is like, wait, this is overwhelmed. This is normal. Especially for people. This is what I'll say to myself. For the types of folks that really want to live a full life, this is gonna happen. You know, the imposter syndrome. I'm like, oh, this is totally normal. Because you're going a little. If we're skiing together and you're going just a little bit faster than you feel comfortable doing, like, that's how it works. You know, you're Just a little over your skis. Wait, hold on. This is normal. Great. It's an indicator, actually, that I need to pay attention to two things. One is, yeah, this thing's happening faster than I feel that I'm capable of. Okay, well, I gotta get some skills. Second is, whoa, why am I paying so much attention to what they think of me? Like, that second piece is such a lightning bolt. Okay, so you are the preeminent professor of happiness. How are you working with. With that? You're supposed to have it all together. You know all the best practices. Your students are counting on you. Your peers are counting on you. Our community, no pressure, is counting on you.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Everyone is counting on you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, because you understand something that we desperately want to enhance. So how do you work with your private life that you are not all buttoned up? Nobody is. So how do you work between those two conditions?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, it's tricky, right? It sucks to be the person that's supposed to have it all together. You know, one of the. When I first got interested in this work, I think there are these interesting individual differences and how easy you find some of these practices that we talk about. How easy is it for you to have self knowledge and regulate your emotions and so on? I think before I get into this, my natural individual difference was like, I was really bad at some of these things before. Like, I was not a naturally very happy person. I'm not naturally good at regulating or knowing my emotions or knowing myself. So this was like a real education slope for me when I first got into it. And that means that because this stuff doesn't come naturally to me, I'm constantly trying to remember to practice what I preach. And in some ways the pressure has been helpful. Right? Because I know these strategies. You know, the people I work with know these strategies. Um, I have a wonderful podcast producer for my podcast, the Happiness Lab. And I can't tell you how many times I've been like, complaining about something or just like, you know, like expressing my overwhelm. And he'll say something like, like, you know, if only we had a strategy

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

to deal with your negative emotion.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

If only we knew what I feel like.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's not funny.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It's not funny. You're right, but. Shut up. You know, but. But it means that I feel like I gotta do this. Right? And that's super helpful, right? It's not. It. These things don't come naturally and they don't come easily. Right. As you mentioned, they're practice, like, it's kind of like working out every day, you just. It's not like you go once and you're good. You have to keep doing it. And so recognizing that it takes work and that I'm supposed to be putting in that work has been for me, a real game changer.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Do you think that you are. I don't have a genetic predisposition to. I don't know, I don't want to give you a word, but non happy, non happy, or do you think you earned your way into it? You spoke your way into it?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah. So that's a deep question about where we think these things come from. And what the evidence really shows is it's probably a lot of both. So there is some evidence that happiness is heritable, by which we don't mean there's like a gene for it, by which we mean if you look out at the population, there's some variance in who's happy and who's not. And some of that variance can be attributed to something that's going on inside. If you look at identical twins, they're much more likely to be similar in their levels of happiness than say, fraternal twins who aren't 100% genetically related. But that level of heritability is pretty low. It's about the same heritability as other psychological factors like risk taking or religiosity. Right. You know, probably lots of religious people that don't have the same religion as their parents. That's about how much happiness is getting filtered through your biology and your genes. We also know that there's a lot of your happiness that's based on the skills you build up, the values you set, the rewards you experience what you're practicing. Right. And it's true that I've long been a very driven person and a person that pushed myself. And I'm not sure I developed the health, healthiest strategies for doing that. Lots of perfectionism and that kind of stuff. So I think both based on my biology and based on my kind of environmental history, in terms of what I was rewarding myself with, probably wasn't set up for this stuff before I got into this work.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And remind me, I think that number is about 10%.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Is that the heritability. Heritability estimates are around between 30 and 40%. But that doesn't mean 30% of your happiness is built into your. Your genes. It means 30% of the variance that we see in the population could be

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

potentially explained by 30% of the variance in the population.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

It's not like. Yeah, so the way I describe this in Class is, let's say you ran into somebody that had their finger chopped off and their finger was like this. Is that biological? Well, there's some genetic thing that could be that, but probably the variance that you see in like large variants in finger length that you see in the population is actually because somebody like chopped it off. Most of the variance in finger length length is due to environmental problems, which is crazy because it's like the length of your fingers, which we know has a biological component. Right. Happiness is similar. Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Well done. Super clean. Again. Finding Mastery is brought to you by our flagship mindset training course, Finding your best. Anytime you feel the pull to reset, to zoom out, to refocus and ask, am I moving toward the person I want to become? It helps to remember this lasting change comes from training. Not resolutions, not short term sprints, but deliberate practice of the skills that shape how we show up in work, in relationships, and in the moments of great intensity as well. That's what finding your best is all about. It's a science backed framework for training your mind. And it's the same set of tools that we've taught to Olympic athletes, top executives, elite military teams and artists at the peak of their craft. In this course, you'll learn the foundational psychological skills to be your very best, full stop. And the best part is you can start anytime. To get started, head to findingmastery.com course and use the code MASTERY. To get $50 off your registration again, go to findingmastery.com Course and use the Code Mastery. Because your future isn't shaped by what you intend, it is shaped by what you train. Finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Spring is. It's just a natural time to reset. You know, the days are getting longer, at least for the northern hemisphere, and there's just an energy in the air that shifts. There's a kind of pull to simplify for me, to recalibrate what's working, what isn't. And one area I come back to regularly is my daily routine. It's not about overhauling it, but it is about scrubbing the material of it to really making sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I look at it all and I reexamine it. AG1. It's been one of those foundations for me for over a decade now. I'm still using it. I like what they're doing. What I appreciate most is how much it simplifies the equation. One scoop covers a lot of ground. They've got some multivitamins in there. And more than anything, it's the pre and probiotics that I appreciate that they've done. It's all in one glass of water. So if you're taking a bunch of supplements, you don't have that pill fatigue that so many people talk about. I'm traveling a lot right now for our corporate clients, and that means shifting time zones and schedules. That's when consistency really helps. The AG1 travel packs, they've been a game changer for me. I throw a few in my bag and I don't have to think twice about it. I'm giving my body what it needs. Needs to keep showing up for work, for the people I care about. For the long game, really. Visit drinkag1.com findingmastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's a $72 value for free. Again, that's drinkag1.com finding ma okay, let's go. Wherever your set point is, let's go to the daily habits or practices. If you were to be so prescriptive to say wherever you are in your adventure, I would suggest you reinvest or make sure that these are rock solid for you.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yep. Huge one is social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Right? And that includes prioritizing the people you care about. Your spouse, your best friend. It also means chatting with the barista at the coffee shop, chatting with the guy who's sitting next to you on the plane. These tiny little social interactions really kind of like fill up our happiness tanks in ways that we don't expect. And interestingly, the data suggests this is true for extroverts just as much as is true for introverts, which is something that I always get. You know, my students are always really surprised by. If you're an introvert, you get as much happiness boost out of social connection as an extrovert. Not necessarily going to a huge party or do an improv show or whatever, but just calling your best friend and chatting with them on the phone, you get as much of a boost.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I think that's an important distinction because introvert does not mean socially awkward. Introvert means that one on one or one to two a triad in a conversation is necessary. It just means that in the social settings we need to recover a little bit more.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Exactly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You know, it's how you gather energy from an introverted processing style or an extroverted processing style and so it doesn't mean that one on one isn't good for introvert extroverts.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, so that's a huge one. Another one is really focusing on other people's happiness. Again, so much talk about self care, which I think we get wrong. But really, if you look at happy people, happy people tend to be a lot more other oriented. So controlled for income. Happier people tend to donate more money to charity than not. So I think happy people. And if you force people to do nice stuff for others, as they do in some of these lovely kind of little bit ridiculous experiments where you force people to do a nice thing or you force people to donate money or spend money on others, you wind up feeling happier. So it really seems to be that doing for others, even doing the same thing that you would have done for yourself but for somebody else winds up making you happier than you expect.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Volunteerism has been a best practice for mental health, depression included.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Totally.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so you're drawing on that.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Another one is the connection between your mind and your body. So exercising, moving your body a little bit. This is not like running, you know, four ultramarathons this month. This is just like moving your body a half hour a day. There's meta analyses, which are these big studies of studies that show that moving your body a half hour a day can be as good as a prescription of antidepressant medication for reducing symptoms of depression.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And when you say moving, what do you mean by it?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I mean like half hour of cardio. Like, you know, whatever your cardio level is like, do that. That's good enough. The folks who listen to your show don't need that tip, but the tip that they do need, another physical habit that matters is sleep. There's this lovely study that kind of titrates like every hour of sleep you get less and every like negative emotion, whether it's overwhelm or sadness and anxiety, it just like ticks differently. Right. So just an hour of extra sleep a day can be really powerful. That like, I'll sleep when I'm dead vibe, it's like really not great for mental health and as you know, really not great for performance.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

No, it's a problem. I think that it's starting to.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

People are getting it now.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I think, yeah, I can't go into a room now and be like, hey, does anyone here know that sleep is important? Everyone raises their hand. Yeah, I know.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

This is the problem with all this happiness advice. We can know that all this stuff is important, but that does not translate into doing it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's why I wanted to, like, really drill down. Like, what are some practices that, that people can do? Because just like with the sleep thing, I know, but like, how, you know, like, Mike, how. How do I get more sleep in? Because I can't figure out how to get it all in. You know, I want to be a good parent. I want to be, you know, great at what I'm doing. I want to have some fitness in my life. Like how I'm at six hours. I want eight, Trust me. Yeah, but then that means I don't know my kids, or that means I'm late on my projects, or that means I have zero fitness in my life.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Sometimes the right way is. Is to really look at what's getting at it. Right. Sometimes it's like because I get up at five in the morning and I run six miles. Sometimes it's because you get up in the middle of the night and you're looking at your phone and you're scrolling through a Reddit thread. Right. And so I think with some of these things, when we look at what's really preventing us from achieving these things, it's kind of not what we think. Right. And sleep, I think, is a big one. If I ask my students, yeah, they have homework and, yeah, they have early hockey practice or whatever it is, but also, like, they're not engaging in very healthy sleep hygiene.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It was like two or three years ago. I think it was maybe two years ago. My son is 17 and his school decided not to have phones on campus. Great. I said, what do you think about it? And he said, you know, Dad, I think we all know. I think we all know this is a good thing. Some people have a harder time with it. But he was like, you know, it's fine.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And this is interesting. You said he's 17. I think when it was just OG social media, maybe early Instagram, we didn't know. We're like, wow, this can't be messing us up. Up. But the kids today who experience TikTok, they watch their attention being sucked in to this thing that they don't like. They know the, like, grossness that they feel afterwards. So I think we get it now in a different way because it's just so palpable how bad these things are for our attention.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Let's do your take on happiness and AI. Yeah. So what was pulling your attention between that interaction?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, well, I think, you know, there's lots of stuff going on. I mean, to be fair, I wished when I thought about AI Back in the day, I thought it would be a robot that does my laundry or shovels of snow. I didn't think it would be writing poetry and doing podcasts better than we do. It's frustrating that the tools we've created, especially these large language models, are really good at stealing the stuff that gives us a sense of productivity and joy and so on. So that's a bummer. Another bummer, because I sit in the college space is thinking about how AI is stealing my students ability to learn. Right? It's one thing if you're a leader or professor for me to get a quick tip from an LLM about how to, I don't know, write a letter, write an email. It's a completely different thing for them to get a tip about how to think about reading Shakespeare for the first time or to send their papers through a tool that's going to give them an executive summary. I think we're really not. There's a lot of talk about, well, how can we grade students, we can't have essays anymore, blah blah, blah. I think we haven't thought about what that means for their learning. Not the assessment part, but the learning part. But another big one is the fact that these tools are really frictionless. Right? It's frictionless to have it write my essay. I don't get the discomfort that comes with having to work on it, but I also don't get the good happy feeling of having made it through that discomfort. And a big spot where I think that friction is going to mess us up is on the social connection piece. Right now we're seeing a lot of young people and almost a lot of people who aren't so young using these LLM tools to get advice, to get therapy, not talking to a real person. And the data are mixed on this. The data really show that it genuinely decreases loneliness. In other words, it's genuinely a good thing for our short term happiness, but it might be a really bad thing for our long term happiness. I think we need to figure out how we balance that because it's always going to be the case that a chatbot is less frictiony than picking up the phone and calling your friend who's a real human.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And a lot of these chatbots are designed to please.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Exactly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

For affirmative responses. You know, there's a well understood principle in high performance is time under tension. Same with academia, same with the love life, that we need tension to really work out what is honest. And whether that is expressing an idea or working a problem with a loved one like I said, or figuring out how to get faster or stronger. You need time under tension. So I appreciate that you bring that forward. If we knew what you knew, how would we be better parents?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I think we'd think a lot more about future parenting than right now parenting. Right. I think a constant tension for parents is like there's something you often have to do. Right now we gotta get to the bus and you haven't tied your shoes yet. And I want you to learn how to tie your shoes. I want you to get good at them. This I don't want you to be frustrated, but the shoes need to be damp tied right now. And so parents often intervene in these situations where there's something that has to happen. You know, you're about to take a math midterm that I'm worried you don't know the answers for. So let me just like force feed you this stuff so you can get through the homework so you can get it right. And this is not parents fault. Right? Parents are overwhelmed. They're really time famished. Another thing that matters a lot for happiness is just kind of feeling like this sense that you have some time and that you're not temporarily overwhelmed all the time. And I think that causes parents to parent for the here and now as opposed to the future. I think a different thing that you do better as a parent is that you see your kid, even very young kids, as a little more agentive than they are. Some of the work I really love here comes from David Yeager, who's a professor at UT Austin who does a lot of work on what he calls collaborative troubleshooting. Right. Which is the idea that you assume that your kid is like a member of your team, as agentive and as smart as you. And if they're having a problem, they've reasonably tried a lot of stuff first. So we're going to kind of collaboratively figure out what you didn't get to and troubleshoot. I'm not going to figure it out for you. I'm definitely not going to tell you what to do, but I'm going to be there like a teammate who's going to help you troubleshoot this stuff. And it turns out that treating your kids like that is a really effective way of getting them to learn better. So your teenage son, you find out you went to a party and he was drunk and you're like, comes home, your instinct is screaming, what are you going to do? I'm going to ground you. You shouldn't do that. Collaborative troubleshooting says Okay. I know you're a smart person who I've taught really well. I just want to understand, why did you do that? I'm sure there was a good reason why. And you find out, like, oh, he was trying to make friends with the folks on his team and he didn't realize and he didn't want to be left out. And you start with like, oh, those are good instincts. Like, those are values that I've taught you that you want a sense of belonging and so on. But like, let's figure out how we can do that a little bit better. You see how that's so different than telling you how to do something. You know, your kid's struggling with their math homework. You don't come in and be like, well, let me just tell you how to do the. Like, you're smart. You're the one who's taking the class. I want to figure out what you've tried so far. So, like, I'm sure you've tried some smart things so far. So I just want to figure out. Right. Totally different attitude.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You're pointing to a best practice of mastery coaches, coaches that are true masters of graduation is that they ask more questions than high performing coaches.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

If you think about the stack, mastery would be higher than high performance. Right. So high performance coaches, they'll ask questions and they'll also say a lot. Amateur coaches say the most.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And they're inaccurate.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Performance coaches, they are still talking out of ratio to the questions. And they're more likely to be inaccurate, but a little bit better. High performance coaches are more accurate, but they're talking. And mastery questions are, let's say a quarter of a back comes off the field. They say, what'd you see? You know, what'd you notice? Yeah. Any unlocks? Okay, what do we do with that? Like, like, hey, listen, they'll say, that's not good enough. How do we get this fixed though? You know? Or hey, that's not good enough. Make. I told. I've told you ten times, it's this. Yes. So sometimes it's super direct, but it's accurate when it is. But they so value the information from the doer.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Because they're uniquely the one in the experience. So the art of asking great questions, I think is. Is one of the great contributions to being a great teammate, a great partner in life, period.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And the studies show to being a great parent. And it's a problem when you're a parent because, I mean, it's true, of course, for a mastery coach and like, you know, a quarterback, but it's really true for a parent and a third grader. You know more math than that third grader. So you know the answer and you really want to show off that you know the answer. But that's not your job. Your job is to generate insights. It's to get them to come up with the answer themselves and to see what they've already and to see what the process is like. Like, this is another strategy that folks talk about as sort of parenting for the process as opposed to parenting for the product. You don't even care if your kid gets that math homework done as long as they figure out the best way to figure out homework in the future. That's what you're parenting for.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Where are you with iPhones and social media? And, you know, John Height's work has been amazing and like. But how are you thinking about it relative to happiness?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, there's so many things that technology steals from our happiness. Right. You know the list I just gave you? Social connection, paying attention to. Attention to your sleep. Right. Experiencing other things we haven't talked about yet. Things like gratitude, presence. Right. All these things are so much harder when you have your phone around you. And we've known that for a long time. And so I agree with a lot of Haidt's work. One of the nice things about his work is he's pushing us towards these kind of cooperative strategies at the system level. It's really hard. You mentioned your son, who was 17. It's really hard for him alone to decide not to have a phone when all his friends have it. But if his whole school decides not to do it, just makes it much easier. And so I think these structural level changes for dealing with technology are important and helpful whenever we can figure them out.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

If we knew what you knew, how would we be better leaders?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, the first one is I think leaders should be more focused on their happiness and their positive emotion, which is a shocking one. I think leaders talk a lot about performance on their teams. Are their teams feeling happier and. And so on. But there's just so much evidence that your positive mood affects your performance. One of my favorite studies on this was with medical doctors. You bring medical doctors into the lab and give them a tough medical diagnosis problem. Like back I used to watch a TV show, House, or like Quincy M.D. i think there's one now called, like, Pitt or something I don't forget. But like, you know, the, like, TV show, tough medical things. Half the doctors get to be in a good mood first. They Just watch some stupid cat videos, right? So they're laughing for a couple seconds. What happens, doctor? Doctors who are in the good mood come up with the more innovative solution, the accurate but hard one that you wouldn't see. And again, you don't need the study to know that everyone listening right now remembers back to a time when they were just feeling overwhelmed, when there was too much on their plate. That was not your moment. Of all your best ideas, you were not coming up with the innovative solution. You were triaging. You were just getting stuff off your plate. To feel expansive, we need a sense of positive mood. And more and more studies are showing that this doesn't just happen at the individual level. It happens at the organization. My favorite study of 2025 is like, nerds. Like, nerds have our favorite studies. My favorite study of the last year was one by Jan Emanuel Denev, this professor at the University of Oxford, where he asked the question, well, if there's all these individual data, individuals are more productive. If they're happier, it should be the case that happier companies are more productive, ergo, they make more money. And so how can he test this? Well, he partners up with the job website in deep, where they allow people from thousands of different companies to rate all these things about their workplace. But one of the things you rate is your happiness. And he says, okay, we'll take all those 15 million data points from thousands of different companies in all different sectors, and we'll just plot for the publicly traded companies the average happiness of the worker and the stock price. And he gets this super strong significant correlation that winds up outperforming. If you were just to invest in the happiest company, you would outperform the s and P500 in terms of your investment strategies. And basically what he says is, we've known this at the individual level for forever, but if you combine this and aggregate, of course it's going to be the case that people who are happier are higher performing. What does that mean? That means if you're a leader, it's not just all the other tools that we know you need to pay attention to to make your business successful. It matters that workers are happy, too, and that you're happy, too.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, I mean, this is a full circle piece, which is, you said, okay, our students were unhappy at Yale. Right. They're struggling, and you were ringing the bell that as professors, we need to do something to address that or we're going to have a population of students that are a little bit smarter on a tactic, whatever, or coding this, but they are really struggling in life and we'll never really be able to access the knowledge that they know because it feels like the ship is sinking on a regular basis or semi regular basis. Okay, I want to take a quick minute here to talk about Finding Mastery. If you are leading a team right now, you already know that strategy, execution, priorities, accountability, those matter. And what I've seen time and time again is that organizations don't rise or fall to the plan alone. Of course not. They rise and fall to the internal conditions of the people that are carrying the plan. That's the inner game that I'm pointing to. And the teams that invest in their psychological skills, they're the ones that are best prepared to navigate dynamic environments like the one we're all living in right now. At Finding Mastery, we help leaders and teams build the mindsets and psychological skills that support sustainable high performance. And we do it inside the rhythm of business, not as one more thing, but as a practical way to operate when pressure is real and the stakes are high. We have partnered with teams at Microsoft and Salesforce, LinkedIn, New York Life, Maersk, Adidas, AIT, Waymo, and so many more, helping leaders lead through change, strengthen culture, and perform more consistently in high stress and high stakes environments. And you're not just getting me, you're getting a whole team that includes high performance psychologists, performance strategists, and Olympians who know how to bring this work to life. So if you want to really unlock the edges of your team's potential, Simply go to findingmastery.com innergame to learn more. Again, that's findingmastery.com inner game. Let's keep pushing, let's keep exploring. So what have you figured out to install or to democratize the best practices across an organization?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, a different way of framing that question is to ask, okay, I just told you that happier workplaces perform better, but what do I mean by happier workplaces? What's that metric made of? And in the indeed data, Denev was able to look at that, like, what are the things he put together or what predicts happiness at work from ratings? And one of the things he finds is one of the best predictors of happiness at work is a sense of what he calls belonging. But it's the answer on indeed to three different questions. One, what I do at work matters. Two, the organization cares about what I do at work. So the first one is, like me personally, I feel like what I'm doing matters. Second, I matter to the place I'm working in and the Third question, which is just a yes or no answer. Do you have a best friend at work? And those three questions predict people's happiness at work, which then predicts people's. Which then predicts company stock prices and so on. So I think the answer to your question is like, well, we need to promote. Are those things. We need to make people feel like they're doing. Doing meaningful work, feel like whatever the organization is cares about what they're doing. And we need to promote social connection at work. Those are the ingredients, it seems like, for happiness. You know, those things are hard to build in, but they're easier than some of the other stuff. Like, it's not like how well the company's doing, how much you can pay people past, you know, a certain extent. It's not how well you train their managers. It's really about how they're feeling about their sense of purpose and connection at work.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, we give what we have again. And one of the things I've noticed, let's say it's. Let's just go back to sport for another moment, is I'll see a head coach or the assistant coaches do a great job of coaching a room of athletes or an individual or the whole organization about how to think about something. A loss or win or an upcoming competition. And so they're framing. This is a framing conversation. Framing matters. I mean, it's a big frame mindset. And again, mindset is something that you can build. It's a skill that we develop. So they're helping frame a situation to give ourselves the best chance to compete at the highest level. And then you'll see the room, like, athletes are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Assistant coaches, you know, if it's a head coach at the front of the room, like, yeah, yeah, that's it. Great. Okay. On it. Yeah. And then they go home. Now, no work has been done, just framing. Then they go home and let's say the agent calls or their spouse or their parents. Parent has a conversation, and they say the exact opposite.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yep.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay. So now it's reframing. And they either feel tension because they're trying to defend this other framing. No, that's not how we're thinking about a dad. Okay. Or they get overwhelmed with the mix between the two, and they ascribe to the way that the agent or parent or spouse is. Okay? So my point is that helping people understand that they have value in this organization is a framework.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Dreaming. Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And then you can point to it like what you do matters because of a B and C. But then when the person leaves, they're left to their own devices, their own psychology and their community.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay, so two parts to that. What I'm most interested in, what we spend a lot of time at, finding mastery, is helping individuals in organizations develop the mental skills so that they can navigate well.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right. So that when they go, for example, the distance from the team meeting room to the living room is if you're stressed or anxious or sleep deprived or whatever, when you get that second bit of information, it's more likely to be disruptive as opposed to that you can navigate it well. So if we install is another. I don't know why I'm using that word right now, but a set of psychological skills so that you can buffer all these things. So you go home and you're buoyant and you've got bright eyes and you can see that the other person actually is trying to help, but they just are misinformed. Or the way that they see it is not the way you see it. That type of buoyancy requires psychological skill investment. And that's why I was wondering if you've got any of those best practices to help the individuals buffer the way they're working with a high speed environment and misaligned people, perhaps?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Well, I think all the things we've been talking about, from social connection to sleep to these kinds of things matter. Right. They matter because they change your mood levels. And if you're in a positive mood, you're just much better able to kind of deal with this stuff. I think about this all the time. One of the things that comes up a lot in university settings right now is how much political polarization we have and how hard it is to have these tough conversations. And I think, well, if 40% of these kids are too depressed to function most days and 1 in 10 is seriously concerned considering suicide, like, yeah, they're not going to have a hard conversation with somebody who's like politically not aligned with them. Right. Just paying attention to mood and making people feel better.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Lord, that is awesome. That's a light bulb moment for me. 40% are overwhelmed.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And somebody says to them, hey, you know that person that you are aligned to politically, let's say, I totally see it differently. They're like, yeah, get out of here.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Like, I can't even, I can't even, I can't even.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Like, either you're with it or you're not. And I don't have the time.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

To argue with you. Oh, that makes so much sense to me.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I think the same things are true for anything that's like, that's tough, right? You know, we can do hard things but it helps if we do hard things for a perspective like feeling okay and not being at the end of our rope and not at our wits end. And so I think that's really huge. I think another thing too though is where these mindsets come from, right? I'm thinking that the particular, this belonging mindset that we just mentioned of like hey, the company cares about, you know, leader can come and be like hey, the company cares about you, but that's not the same as a person in the organization really feeling like a company cares about you, you know. So I think one thing we might should be asking is like what can we do to not say it but show it, right? And I think there's just all kinds of strategies they need to be authentic to the leader. You know, I've been in cases where this work is talked about and I heard a strategy of one leader who said, you know, every day I start the mornings, this is a large 5000 person organization with a list of everyone in the organization's birthdays. And some mornings I have to send 10 emails, but I send emails to that person and say, hey, I'm the CEO, Joe just want to wish you a happy birthday. And it takes 15 minutes of their day or maybe they have this but then Joe writes back and says, oh my God, I feel like you noticed it was my birthday. I could say, and not just hey, happy birthday but one, one thing from their manager that they notice. Like notice your sales are up this time or like I noticed your manager mentioned this, like, you know, just pay attention. He's like, yeah, it's a little bit of time but the effect that it has much more so than me sending out, you know, a company wide email that says you all matter and stuff like that. And so I think this is the thing for leaders to be thinking about is like what's the thing that authentically shows you're paying attention, that people matter and so on. Those are going to end up impacting people's mindsets much more than what you tell people.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love that. It's one of our best practices here at finding mastery for ourselves and something that we'll teach on is like before you arrive at work, be clear about at least one person. If you can do more, great how you're going to be there for them today. Yeah, and some people need a hug, some people need a handshake, some people need a little, you Know, like, hey,

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

yeah, you know, like, we're gonna have the hard conversation.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right? Like. Like, you let me down on that last thing. Like, I gotta bring. Bring it forward and, you know, like, but work it. And if you arrive at work and you're just kind of taking care of yourself, I feel like, okay, that's good. No problems. But if you can take another step and contemplate, think, muse, open your heart to what another person in the organization needs. Now we're starting to be better teammates to each other, so I wanted to share that with you because I think it's pretty practical.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Totally. And if you need some hacks to do that. When getting back to meditation, which you talked about earlier, or. One of my favorite practices is what's known as loving kindness meditation. Bad marketing. It should be called, like, you know, teamwork enhancement medication. But it's a practice where you just think about the people in your life and you say, you know, may you be happy. You know, to the, you know, the janitor who works on the floor, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you have what you need. Whatever phrases feel comfortable to you, and you just kind of point to the people in your life or in your organization and your family, and you just think that. And so many steps, studies show it can really increase the compassion that we naturally feel, the way our brain naturally goes to, oh, let me help that person. As opposed to being about ourselves.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I've got a good one for you. Are you a student of Thich Nhat Hanh?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

A little bit, yeah. Okay.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I recognize, yeah. That approach to loving kindness. So once a week, once every other week, somewhere in that range, I'll do acupuncture. And so call it 40 minutes on the table. For those 40 minutes, that is my kind of big, heavy lift of loving kindness. And so settle in through the breathing. And then instead of using the words, I wish you well, or what I do is open my heart to their heart. So I pour in from my heart to their heart. So it's more visceral in that way. And how many people you think you can do without racing through it, but actually have a meaningful connection in 45 minutes?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I bet a lot.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

A lot.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

This is a lot.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You're surprised how many people.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

You know, I've heard people do a practice like that, that while brushing their teeth.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, that's good. That's a great.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

You can get through four or five.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You know, it's really.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's helpful. In my experience, it's helpful to have One that's, pick one that's super easy, like whether it's your dog or your spouse, like whoever is super easy to extend this kind of kindness to. And then pick one that's really hard if you buffer it that way. But it makes such a difference. Makes such a difference. I remember I had a coworker who I really struggled with and could almost get in. You know, if you struggle for a while, you can accidentally start getting into like, like adjacent contempt space where you're like, and, and it just like, may you be safe, may you be happy. You're like, oh my God, this person's a pain in the butt. But they're still a human too. And they're still, they're just like working through their own stuff. Like they're just like me. And it just makes dealing with them so much easier. It's not a gift to the other person, it's just a gift to yourself of reducing your own frustration and anger about whatever's going on.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Laurie, what a great conversation. I see why your class is so successful and it's just a lovely way way you have of delivering the best practices that are evidence based and making it practical for, for me and for us.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So I hope it was helpful. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Awesome.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by entrepreneur and Impact Theory founder Tom Bilyeu. In this conversation, he makes a bold

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

claim that many of us are working

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

hard inside a system we don't fully understand and one that may be quite quietly working against us. He breaks down why some people keep getting ahead while others feel stuck and how your beliefs, values and perspectives might be shaping more of your reality than you realize. So join us Wednesday, April 22nd at 9am Pacific only on Finding Mastery.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

All right, thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest, no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Hunch over to finding mastery.com to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those [e-mail] sponsors and remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional, so seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, Keep exploring.