← Raising Good Humans
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- [00:01]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
The following podcast is a dear media production.
- [00:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Like, ultimately what you want is to produce a kid that remembers their water bottle, that understands algebra. Right. And if you intervene this one time, you're kind of parenting for the present. You're parenting for like Thursday's soccer game. What you want to be parenting for is like, you know, when your kid's 35 and I don't know if they're still playing soccer, but they're able to remember stuff that they need to take to work and so on.
- [00:30]
Podcast Host
Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm your host, Dr. Eliza Pressman, and I'm so excited for today's conversation with Yale professor and host of the Happiness Lab podcast, Dr. Laurie Santos. Dr. Santos created the most popular course at Yale, the Science of well Being, and it's now available on Coursera for free. And she has one that's just for parents, the Science of well Being for parents.
- [01:00]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Her goal is to teach others how.
- [01:01]
Podcast Host
To use science backed strategies to live happier, more fulfilling lives. Who doesn't want to explore the science of happiness, how to get happier as parents, and how to raise happier kids.
- [01:15]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I'm going to start with a very basic question that I think probably informs a lot of our conversation, which is just your definition of happiness.
- [01:25]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, we get to have a very long podcast episode where we talked about that because there's lots of ways to define it. I kind of tend to use the social scientist definition of happiness, which is sort of thinking about being happy in your life and with your life. I've taken this from Sonja Lubomirsky, who kind of describes happiness this way. So kind of being happy in your life is the fact that you experience lots of positive emotion. Right. You have joy and contentment and moments of contemplation, and you probably have a decent ratio of those positive emotions to negative emotions. Being happy doesn't mean getting rid of the negative emotions, as I bet we might talk about, but it means having a decent ratio of the positive to negative stuff that's kind of being happy in your life. But there's also a component of happiness that's being happy with your life.
- [02:04]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Right.
- [02:05]
Dr. Laurie Santos
This is your the extent to which you're satisfied with your life. All things considered, how happy are you with your life? Right. And this can kind of loosely be separated into the sort of affective and cognitive parts of happiness, how you feel your life is going and how you think your life is going. And from my perspective with this definition, it's like what we want to do is make people feel like their Life is going better and. And kind of think overall that things are going better, too. And many of the strategies I talk about in my podcast and in my courses, like, are aimed at boosting both of those at the same time.
- [02:35]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I want to get into, like, the. The strategies that you have and, you know, the science behind them. But first, and I love that anybody can take these courses. Can you explain kind of what you saw as a mom who's about to send a daughter off to college? I was so riveted by some of your observations and research. What? You're a professor at Yale, and you see and interact with and live amongst students 24 7. Maybe you have a break at night.
- [03:08]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Short break. Short break.
- [03:10]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Right. What are your concerns?
- [03:12]
Podcast Host
And.
- [03:13]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
And have you seen any trends, like, should we be as concerned as we are?
- [03:19]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, yeah, I think we should be as concerned as we are. I think if we're not concerned, we should be very concerned. Because, you know, what I was seeing on my own campus at Yale, and this is not exclusive to Yale, there's statistics on this sort of thing, is that the college student mental health crisis is just skyrocketing right now. So right now, Nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% of college students nationally, so that they feel overwhelmingly anxious most of the time. Right now, Nationally, more than 1 in 10 college students has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. Right. You know, this is not a couple snowflakes who are having a tough time. This is really a widespread issue that a lot of students are really struggling. And that was how I got interested in the science of happiness, particularly kind of teaching these courses is I was part of this community at Yale. I was what's called the head of college. So I was a faculty member living on campus. And I was just watching my students just experiencing tremendous depression, having panic attacks. Right. You know, students being on suicide watch and these things. And I said, this is not what I remember college being like back in the late 90s. And this is not, I think, what so many American young people are promised when they go to college. Right. And I think it's really unfortunate because as psychologists, as you know, we have these strategies that we can use to feel better so that we're not feeling so depressed and anxious and burned out and so on. And so the classes were really my attempt to say, like, okay, how can I synthesize everything that we know in our field, kind of make it really understandable at the college level and just give this to students so that they could wind up feeling better.
- [04:50]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
So let's talk about some of that science and these strategies. But also, can you help us figure out how to implement it? Because.
- [04:58]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, that's the tough part, right? Yeah.
- [05:00]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
So hard.
- [05:02]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And in fact, we spend. You know, the course is kind of divided into three parts. Right. The final whole part is about, okay, now you know what to do. How do you put this into practice? Right. Because forming new habits is hard. It's one thing to know what you're supposed to do, but it's another to put these things into practice. But the first part of the class is also not on the specific strategies that make us happier. It's about the misconceptions we have. Because one of the interesting things about our own happiness is that a lot of students come to this class not as a blank slate. Right. We all have hypotheses about the kinds of things that you can do to pursue happiness. It just happens that a lot of those strategies that we think are going to work, these kind of behaviors that we think will feel better or circumstances we should be going for if we want to have an awesome life, Turns out those things don't necessarily work in the way that we think. And so for college students, this is disabusing them of the notion that getting the perfect grades and getting into the perfect job and getting the perfect relationship will make you happier. When I'm talking to more adult audiences and parents, it's about having more money won't necessarily make you happier. Having good material possessions won't make you happier. The perfect house, the perfect car. This stuff just doesn't make us as happy as we think. You know, with the caveat that if you, you know, can't put food on your table or get a roof over your head, yes, then getting more money, changing your circumstances will work. But my guess is for most of the people listening right now, changing your circumstances, getting more money, getting a new job, getting the perfect partner, it's actually just not going to move the needle as much as you think. And so we kind of start there and say, okay, let's. Let's get rid of what you think is going to work, because it turns out that's not going to work. And here's some of the evidence that shows it doesn't. But then what kinds of things really will move the needle will really improve your wellbeing?
- [06:37]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
So how many of these students and, like, how much of this conversation, I just think it's very cool that you also have. Are rooted in both animal and human research, I imagine that there's the view of what can we, the adults do to increase our happiness, to make healthier habits. And I just want to keep emphasizing that like neither you nor I nor anybody in the field of psychology is saying that you're supposed to be like happy feeling all the time. This is not what we're talking about. But how much of that is the work that we do? How much of it is. We're looking at our kids, we're worried, we're anxious, we're trying to figure out how to do right by them. But we feel like some of the kids came into this world maybe with a particular temperament that's making it more difficult and maybe that's feeding itself. Who knows how much of this is like baked into the environment that we can set up at home before we launch? Everybody.
- [07:39]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, with the caveat that like happiness is multi determined. Right. It's not just nature or nurture, it's some very complicated combination of both. Right. What we know is that there are features of our well being that are heritable, meaning at least some variants that we see in the population of who's happy and who's not. That's kind of due to our genes. Right. It's probably not that much. Right. It's probably less heritable than something like height or weight, which we know, especially with weight is something that we can move around a lot just by eating differently, going to the gym and so on. Happiness kind of works like that. So there's probably some part of it that seems to be baked in, but it's relatively little, percentage wise. And that means that there's a lot of environmental movement on it. Right. And so then that raises a question of like here know, what's the environmental movement like? Is it about what a parent's doing, what are parents teaching and so on? I think less good data at that point. Right. My guess is that a lot of these college students who are coming in experiencing depression, anxiety and so on, a lot of those mental health issues were happening to them in high school. Right. You know, when I present the statistics for college students, I'll often be presenting these to like high school audiences. And they're nodding and they're like, yeah, that's exactly what we're experiencing in my school, you know, a few years earlier. And so I think these problems are coming up for individuals when they're younger and younger. And that's all the more reason that we need to kind of find ways to teach young people these strategies so that they can protect themselves and also so that parents are armed with these strategies. You know, I think it is the case unfortunately, that incredibly well intentioned parents might be engaging in habits and strategies that aren't necessarily positively impacting their kids. Well, being as much as parents think.
- [09:18]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Right.
- [09:18]
Dr. Laurie Santos
And we might talk about some of these, but I think that that means parents who are trying really hard can, out of incredible amounts of love, might be doing things that inadvertently at least aren't helping. Right. And so what as parents can we do to do better? Yeah, and I think it's, you know, and I think, you know, we like folks have gone out and studied heritability and folks have gone out and done these heritability analyses for people's body weight. Right. And it is true, you know, the Santos is I come from a big bodied set of people. Really good stock for like having big bodies. Right. But you know, when I'm hitting the gym, you know, getting out for my morning walks, doing my yoga, eating a little healthier, things are better than when I'm not. Right. And so I know I have an enormous impact on that weight. Even though there might be a set point. And I think this is what we know from happiness too. For sure there's a set point, but the range on that set point is just enormous. And we can move it around a lot by changing our behaviors, changing our mindsets, just changing our patterns of interacting with the world. You can have a huge impact on our happiness.
- [10:18]
Podcast Host
And now for a quick break. I think we all know there is a problem right now with an over saturation of content about the news and really biased information. And it's hard to teach critical thinking skills to our kids when the adults in the world are having trouble themselves. There's burnout, news fatigue, there's a real tremendous focus on negativity because that is what gets people people sticking with the news. There is a declining trust in media. There's polarization and echo chambers. We have a real problem and ground news is doing a wonderful job trying to solve this. Basically, they take news stories and they offer them from wildly different perspectives. So you're getting whether or not there's a left leaning media, a right leaning media, and, and all of the ways that you can spot disparity and discrepancies in delivering the news so that you can help figure out what to believe, how biased news actually is, and what we can do about it to educate ourselves. Honestly. You could take virtually any topic, put it into ground news and find out that there might be very different facts being reported and the way it's being reported creates a real bias. So go to groundnews.com humans to get 40% off the ground News Vantage plan, which is the plan that I use to stay informed. I think Ground News is doing such important work, it's going to benefit our kids to be able to look at the news and consume it in this way. And I hope you'll check them out. That's groundnews.com humans this episode is brought to you in part by by Better Help. Well May is Mental Health Awareness month and we need to care for our mental health, particularly as caregivers, because we know that the mental health of the caregiver is necessary for the mental health of our children. So I want to encourage you if you've considered or been interested in or needed to find a therapist and you're having trouble or you're feeling like you don't have time or there's no bandwidth. Better Help is a very easy way for you to find the help and support you need at the convenient time that you're looking for. Better help has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapists from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. Better Help is fully online, which makes therapy affordable and convenient, particularly for caregivers who are absolutely convinced that they do not have time for themselves. They're serving over 5 million people worldwide. We're all better with help. So visit betterhelp.com humans to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com humans so if a.
- [13:31]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Child or a teenager or an adult is feeling like I just feel like this is my body just to continue along that how what like we want to make behavior changes and habits that can help facilitate well being. But what if we're finding that we have some kids or adults that are just stuck with this is I just have a bad metabolism. Like how do you support while also not undermining that. Like everybody can't just like eat exactly this and exercise exactly this way and all of a sudden become a live muscular person.
- [14:14]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I think the key is to remember that everybody can do better. You know, one of the things we find in our class is we are I. We're like nerds, right? So we kind of give folks these pre and post measures of like these standard happiness scales. The one we use is called perma and it's a kind of 10 point wellbeing scale. And what we find is there's tons of variants when people come in. Some people start out at a 7 or 8, they're doing pretty well. Some people start out at a four, you know, or three. Right. But what we find on average is that people tend to, on average, after kind of engaging with this material, taking the course, they go up about a whole point on the scale between a point and a point and a half. And that might mean that if you start at a three, you're going to get to a four and a half. You know, you're not necessarily going to go from zero to a hundred, but oh my gosh, it's better to be a four and a half than it is to be a three, Right. It's better to be at eight than it is to be a seven. And so I think that's what we can remember, you know, from, from the Santos jeans. I'm never going to go to like, you know, ballerina or marathon runner. I'm just not going to have that body type. Right. But I can live a life that's healthy and free of inflammation and, you know, fit in my pants that I bought and so on. And, and I think that's kind of the way we should think about happiness. It's unlikely that these interventions are going to take you from zero to a hundred. But as our mutual friend Dan Harris is fond of saying, we know that these interventions can make you at least 10% happier. That's about what the movement is on a lot of these things. But that 10% can make a huge difference. Right. It can often mean the difference between, you know, a mental health situation that's kind of debilitating and you can't get out of bed to one where you're functioning again. Right. And I think that's really critical.
- [15:49]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
So how important is sort of a realistic appraisal versus, like, this is going to make you so, you know, so much happier? Like, how do you distinguish between optimism and, you know, what it. I guess what Seligman's. I can't remember the language around it, so I'm going to just lean on you right now. But I often struggle with the, you know, we want to motivate, we want to engage in optimistic thinking, but also it feels like having a realistic appraisal of the world does tend to make you generally happier.
- [16:25]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Right? Yeah. So I think, I think the, the key is that we want to be hopeful but not beat ourselves up if we don't reach the high standards that we hold for ourselves. One of my favorite strategies that I talk about in, in my course and in my podcast a lot is Kristin Neff's idea of engaging in more self compassion, right? Which is kind of mindfully recognizing where you are and recogniz not going to be perfect and that it's a common human experience to screw up or to not, you know, jump from 0 to 100 on a happiness scale or whatever it is. This is our idea of sort of common humanity, right? Like it's, I'm just human, like I'm going to have some faults. I'm not going to be perfect all the time, right? So I think you want to be optimistic, but realistically optimistic. And I think that's kind of where hope comes in. I often tend. Marty uses the term optimism a lot. I tend to focus on hope because I think sometimes at least the lay notion of optimism is like, everything's just going to be fine, right? Whereas hope is more like everything might not be fine, but I have faith that I can kind of do my best, that with my attitudes and my behaviors I can make the best out of a bad situation. And that's a kind of more realistic approach to sort of optimistic thinking. Another thing that I think folks get wrong a lot with optimism, and this is something I see in my college students a lot because it's so prevalent on social media these days, is this kind of idea of like optimistic sort of manifesting, right? If I just like imagine the world is perfect, if, you know, just like kind of, I will attract this good stuff to me. And it's not even so much that these notions of manifesting are just like incorrect, that the research actually shows that they're actively harmful in some cases. Because often what we do when we're manifesting is we just think like the good thing is coming to me, right? You know, so my students will like try to manifest about grades of like, I'll just get good grades. What they're not trying to manifest is like, I'm a good student, I'm going to study a lot, right? And research by Gabrielle Oettingen and her colleagues finds that if you just kind of imagine these positive futures with no work, like you actually put in less time and energy to get those good positive futures than you would otherwise. So I think optimism has to come with this sort of hopeful version where there's like some realism about what's going on. You know, I'm optimistic about getting fitter, but I gotta take into account that my schedule's really busy and you Know, I don't have any time in the mornings to hit the gym and like I, you know, I'm prone to hit the snooze button. Right. When you recognize the obstacles that are in your path, you can put in some good planning to kind of get through those obstacles. Right.
- [18:49]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
And that's kind of whole thing is like don't just plan it, but like plan the obstacles.
- [18:55]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Exactly, yeah. So I teach my students, if you're going to manifest, that's fine. Think of the positive outcome. But then immediately ask what's preventing that positive outcome. Use that same kind of imagination that you would use to manifest to come up with, okay, what do I actually need to put in place to do this a little bit better?
- [19:11]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I'm just remembering when I first embarked on like having a mindfulness practice and I was so, I was, I mean it now it's many, many years have gone by, but I was like so mad at myself for being bad at meditating and I was just thinking about the, like it was the same thinking around like, okay, well how do I get my score?
- [19:37]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I'm going to do this better. I'm going to be the best meditator ever, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, so many of us fall prey to this, right? We want to, we want to do good at the things, you know, we're trying to engage in. Right. We want to kind of succeed at our goals. But I think we get it wrong, right. We assume that like pushing ourselves, being self critical, like I'm the worst meditator ever, what the heck is wrong with you? We assume that kind of self talk is going to help us. And again, study after study just seems to show that it's not helping us. If you look, those kinds of self critical thoughts promote things like procrastination, avoiding kind of working on the thing that you need to go at. They promote lots of negative emotions which is just not generally good for innovative thinking or achieving our goals. And so a better approach is a little self kindness. Right. This is tough right now. I'm just gonna be nice to myself and try to get through it. That's not letting ourselves off the hook. It's a thought pattern that really allows us to succeed better.
- [20:33]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Okay, so let's dive into some of these strategies.
- [20:37]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, well, I like to break the strategies down into what I often call the sort of cognitive triad which I steal from cognitive behavior therapy. The idea is that you can affect your, your, your psychology by changing how you behave, changing how you think and changing what you Feel. So it's kind of like think, act, feel, right? And on the act side, in terms of changing your behaviors, a huge one for feeling happier is just to get a little bit more socially connected. Right. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social, right? They spend time with friends and family members, they talk to strangers, you know, the barista at the coffee shop. And they just really kind of put time in to be around other people. Similar studies show that happier people tend to be focused on others more than themselves. So it's kind of a second way that other people can make you happier is that you tend to be more other oriented. And this one is another one that I think, you know, the social media folks get wrong. Like watch every TikTok video and it's about self care, treat yourself. But you know, if you look at the research, happier people aren't self focused. They're not doing self care. They're doing a lot of other care voluntarily. And that's the kind of thing that makes them happier. And so that's kind of social connection. I think, you know, behaviorally, we also need to focus on our bodies, Right.
- [21:50]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
You know, can I ask you, I want to go to behaviorally, but I have a social connection question, please. Yeah, what are some. Because when you mentioned, you know, the barista, I was thinking, what are the solves for. For the folks who feel like I'm longing for social connection, I can't figure out how to get it.
- [22:08]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And I think this, you know, let's just like be honest about that, right? A lot of us kind of go through that, right. We are in a lonely time in our country. We are in a lonely time in civilization. And I think so many of the folks listening to this are parents. And there's evidence from the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, that parents are lonelier than they've ever been. Since we've been measuring loneliness in parents, right? So this is like a real phenomena. I think what we forget though, is the way to break out of loneliness is just to connect with people, right. You know, grab your phone right now, scroll through the contacts list and just text someone that's in there that you haven't talked to in a while. A simple, hey, just thinking of you, thinking of this fun memory together. Maybe we should kind of find time to connect. You'd be surprised how just that simple action winds up making you feel more connected. And the barista at the coffee shop's a great example because research by folks like Nick Epley and others find that our social connection doesn't necessarily have to be with people that we experience close ties with. Right. That kind of quick conversation with, you know, the folk that the guy that works at the coffee shop or the woman in the bank that you see all the time when you walk in to, you know, deposit your check, like whatever it is. Those kind of quick conversations wind up boosting your positive mood and wind up making you feel more connected. The strange thing is that the way out of loneliness is actually not to have people reach out to us. It's for us to reach out and connect with other people. It happens faster than you think.
- [23:30]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
It's just good to know and to remember that it doesn't have to be with the people that you feel like are your people. Because I think especially with young, like teenagers or middle schoolers who are going through these moments of that probably new mothers are going through, which is just like I don't have people to reach out to or like I'm not being included. And so like if I say, hey, I was just wanting to connect, I might not hear anything on the other end of it. But, but if any social connection at all is going to help, then maybe it's finding, like being a detective about where to find social connection.
- [24:05]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And it's also just not being sad to be the first one to reach out.
- [24:09]
Podcast Host
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- [27:28]
Dr. Laurie Santos
A social psychologist, study his connection on my podcast, he had this great quote where he says, you know, not everybody says hi. Not everybody waves. But everybody waves back, right? You know, not everybody might. Not every one of your friends might be reaching out to you on the phone texting you right now. But if you text them, my guess is most of them will text back. Or if you call them on the phone, kind of surprisingly, most of them will probably give you a call back, right? We forget that sometimes we have a lot of agency in reducing our own loneliness. This is a kind of funny, like, you know, mind screwing with you that loneliness does, which is like we assume when we're lonely that they're kind of no one wants to talk to us. But the problem is because we're not reaching out to other people. That's what other people might be thinking about us. And so the act of just kind of reaching out winds up doing two things. It just kind of makes you more hopeful about social connection. You're like, oh, I guess I can reach out to other people. I can take agency, I can change things around. But also usually when you do that, somebody waves back and they'll contact you and then you'll wind up feeling a little bit more connected.
- [28:28]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Great. Okay. Behavior.
- [28:30]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. So other behaviors that are really helpful for happiness are just behaviors that make our bodies feel good. So working out studies show that a half hour of cardio can be as good as taking an antidepressant medication for reducing symptoms of depression. Similar positive evidence from things like sleep, you know, something I know new parents are struggling with, but something that we know is so crucial for mental health. Sometimes we have actual work things are actually family things that are preventing our sleep. You know, like no, no judgment of the new moms out there. But sometimes we're just not engaging in proper sleep hygiene in ways that mess with our sleep. Right. You know, sometimes I have stuff going on, either biologically or, you know, like stress wise that's keeping me up. But sometimes it's because I have my phone there and you know, when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, then I like click through and look at my email and if I just have my phone in the other room, you just bought one of those old school alarm clocks, that wouldn't happen. So prioritizing your sleep, prioritizing movement again, not running a marathon, but just kind of getting your body moving a little bit can be huge for your mental health.
- [29:30]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I take my kids phones.
- [29:33]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So oh so smart. So smart.
- [29:36]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
So I take the girls phones from their rooms at night and I'm like, oh my God, I hope this habit stays with my daughter once she goes off to college. But it's going to be in her room because she'll be in a dorm room. But at least like the habit of not picking it up in the middle of the night. But what I think is so insane of me is that I then half the time put my phone next to my bed.
- [29:58]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You have their phones and your phone like sitting next to your idea things.
- [30:02]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
And I'm like, and I'm of, you know, like biologically I'm at an era where 3am is calling and I am so aware of how important it is to not pick up that phone when I get up to go to the bathroom or whatever. And it takes so much effort. Yes, it takes so much effort and it makes such a massive difference. When I remember I'm putting them all in the other room together, I guarantee.
- [30:30]
Dr. Laurie Santos
It'S easier effort if they're just out of sight, right? They're just kind of not calling to you in the same way, you know, and at least, at least I'm lazy enough to like, I'm not going to walk all the way down the stairs to the kitchen to get this right, like in the pajamas. It's not happening, right? So, yeah, this is just simple ways that you can achieve better sleep hygiene, as some researchers call it, right? To just kind of make your sleep space a little bit more prone to sleep. And we're all going to have those things that interfere with it. That's fine. But don't make it worse, right? Don't make it worse just because your technology is nearby. Final behavior that I think is useful to bring up is what social scientists these days are calling time affluence, which is this subjective sense that we have some free time. It's the opposite of what a lot of us experience, which we might call time famine, where we're literally starving for time. But it turns out if you self report experiencing lots of time famine, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self report experiencing unexpected unemployment. So most of you who are listening right now who have a job, imagine losing your job and what that would do to your happiness. Just not having any free time is, is that much of a hit on your well being too. So the advice is that we need to find ways to either get more free time or even just to subjectively feel like we have more free time. One of my favorite strategies there comes from the Harvard Business School professor Ashley Willins, where she talks about making good use of this idea of time confetti. Time confettis are these little pieces of time that we have floating around like confetti. You know, the five minutes when your kid falls asleep or the 10 minutes when that zoom meeting ends early or something. We just think those are stupid pieces of time, like little pieces of confetti. And so we just kind of blow them. You know, we just kind of check our email or scroll through Instagram or something. But if we really put that amount of time together, it turns out that it really adds up. And so finding positive uses of your time confetti can be really important, right? Maybe that's when you actually text that friend that you haven't talked to in a while. You know, maybe that's. You got seven minutes. You could do the seven minute workout, right? Just like jump away from your zoom screen and you know, do some jumping jacks or Something. These things sound silly, but when we invest those spare minutes into things that improve our wellbeing, we not only get that wellbeing boost that comes from that investment, but we also feel a little bit more like we have some free time that we need.
- [32:46]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
How long is the course? Like, over what time period is this course where you can see change?
- [32:53]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, so we do it at different timescales. You know, the one that we teach here at Yale is over a whole semester, the online Coursera class. It kind of varies depending on how quickly people binge it, but for many people it's usually a couple weeks, about a month or so. And so we're often seeing kind of improvements, you know, usually over two months or so. So it's not, it's not long. Right. And we've done a few follow ups to try to look at how long these kinds of effects last. The longest running collaboration we have looking at it is with Bruce Hood, who's a professor at the University of Bristol, who's been teaching a similar, a similar class over in the uk and he's actually tested students about six to eight months out and is finding that a lot of these kind of positive benefits seem to last at least that long. I think, sadly, these benefits last as long as you're kind of putting the time in to do them. But hopefully understanding the science behind them and why these things are so causally relevant can help you kind of get the motivation you need to put these habits in and have them stick.
- [33:47]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I was thinking about how during, like, early adolescence and also during the transition to parenthood, the brain is just, I mean, obviously much more so during adolescence, but certainly during the transition to parenthood, the brain is just sort of more ripe for growth. And those might be such incredible opportunities. There are so many cool opportunities in these moments when we're sort of motivated to make change. And I was curious, like, I'm curious if the students in your who sign up for your course. Although isn't it something like it's one in four? How many is it?
- [34:29]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, the first time we taught the class, one out of every four students at Yale took the class. That was amazing. But it was also a logistical nightmare. And so these days we sort of cap the class. We're down to only 150 students that are taking it right now because we keep the class capped and that's a more manageable number. But yeah, we do have students who kind of reach out and really want to take it. I mean, I think, you know, it's kind of Remarkable to me and sort of humbling. But, you know, the class has gotten so viral. You know, people hear about it, it's been in the New York Times and stuff. And that means students often come to Yale having heard about the class. Like, I'll, I'll hear it. Enrollment time. You know, like, my, my middle school guidance counselor told me I needed to take this class if I ever get to Yale or, you know, and so, you know, this was the reason I applied to Yale as I wanted to hear about this class. And so I think students are kind of hearing about it. And so again, the hope is, like, if you're choosing it, if you're actively picking, like, hey, I'm going to take this time to learn this stuff and focus on my well being, I think that can help you get these habits to stick a little bit better.
- [35:25]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Are you finding that the students who choose that class, does their overall score start lower than the average overall score? Is this a cry for help or is this just curiosity?
- [35:42]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, we haven't been able to test that systematically at Yale, but we have on our Coursera class, we have the online version that anyone can take, and we compare our learners in the happiness class on Coursera, starting happiness rating on a happiness survey to a control class. We use our intro psych class that we have at Yale, which is again, another class that lots of folks take online. And we don't actually see any differences in starting happiness. So it doesn't seem like people are coming to the class, you know, because they're experiencing, you know, a massive mental health issue and so on. It seems like we get the kind of, at least on Coursera, the sort of regular distribution of folks who are taking online classes in terms of their own happiness. Yeah, okay, that's cool.
- [36:22]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I was curious because I was thinking, it's also very beautiful, the thought that students would say, I'm going to take an active role in thriving.
- [36:33]
Dr. Laurie Santos
That pulls really hard. I mean, I think that was what was so exciting when I taught the class for the first time and it broke all these records at Yale and one out of four students take it. It really felt like students are voting with their feet. These young people don't like this culture of just feeling so overwhelmed and so busy and so stressed and depressed and anxious. And I think they really want to take action to figure it out. And I admired the fact that the action they want to take is evidence based. You know, I think, you know, we've been kind of making fun of TikTok and these kinds of things. But I think students are really trying to reach out and get some answers about what they can do better. And a cool thing about a course like this, I think, is that we're giving them answers that are evidence based. Right. We're kind of giving them strategies that are backed by the science.
- [37:13]
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- [40:20]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I want to be sensitive about this, but with what you said before, with so much love and compassion and understanding that parents are doing everything, you know, to the best of their ability, with so much love and good intention, what are some of the. Some of the things that we might inadvertently do lovingly that could undermine these goals?
- [40:44]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, and I'm glad you started out with the sensitivity because, you know, I'm going to explain some of these things, but none of this is meant to be bashing parents, right? Like, parents have an impossible job and it's just gotten more impossible. You know, this. The former surgeon general just wrote this big report of kind of public health advisory which he does for like the opioid crisis or, you know, smoking or something like that. And it was about stress in parents. Right. He had to put a whole public health advisory that, like, you know, parenting is harmful to your stress levels. Right. And that was in part because, you know, parenting has gotten even harder. In the report, he notes that these days, people, overall, parents are spending more time at work, but they're also spending more time on childcare. And that's not even just the hours that you're around your kid. Those are the hours that you specifically deem, like, this is childcare. This is doing stuff for them, cooking for them, or helping them with their homework or whatever. Right. And if both of those are going up, like something needs to give, like, this is time that parents aren't using to sleep or hang out with their friends or engage with their partners. Right. Like, this is just a lot of work that parents are going into. So utter, utter compassion for, like, what parents are going through. But hopefully parents would be helped if the time that they're putting in is best serving their kids. And I think there's some spots where parents are putting tremendous time in, but it might not be helping kids as much as it could be. And I think a big domain of that is this sort of overhelp that we see a lot in parents. Right. Well intentioned parents want their kids to be happy. They want their kids to succeed. And I think one of the tendencies that parents fall into when they want that is to kind of help kids along. You know, if they forgot their water bottle for soccer, you go back to the house and bring it for them struggling with their homework. You try to kind of explain it to them, do it for them. They're struggling with sort of a problem. You try to swoop in and intervene and help them with these things. But the research really shows that that kind of parental intervention is bad. It's bad. And that you're preventing these really important learning opportunities for your child. But also there's some work by Julia Leonard and her colleague, she's a colleague of mine at Yale who, who finds that this act of sort of swooping in is teaching your kids something not so great about their own beliefs. The idea is like, you know, if you're swooping in and say, getting your water bottle for your kid who forgot their water bottle for soccer, your child is thinking, gosh, this soccer game must be so important that my mom, with her whole busy schedule and work and so on, is taking time out of her day to go get this water bottle. Wow, this is a really stressful situation, right? Wow. The stakes are really high, right. And you could see if there's a lot of those, wow, this is like really a more intense thing than I expected going on that could exaggerate tendencies for anxiety and so on. You take another case that Julia studies more directly. These cases of changing kids beliefs about their own capacity, right? So your kid's doing their math homework, they're struggling a little bit, and you swoop in and say, let me just show you how to do it. Right. What does that teach a kid about their own ability? Well, Julia finds that in situations like this, kids start to learn. Well, I guess I can't do it. I guess there's no way I could figure this out without help, right? So the next time they find themselves struggling in math, they start to believe that they're not good at it. They're not capable of figuring this out without help. Now of course, that's none of the parents intentions, right? You just want to make this easier. And sometimes you're timestrapped, you know, to be frank, you just got to get this problem solved. But the act of sort of solving things for kids means that we're preventing these important learning opportunities that honestly come from screwing up, that come from failure, that come from like banging your head against the wall for a while on that math homework till you finally sort it out. And so one of the big suggestions that I talk about for parents in this course is to try to fight back against that and to have some strategies at the ready for regulating your emotions when you do that, because you're going to feel, you know, if you know that water bottle sitting on the kitchen table and your kid doesn't have it, you're going to feel a lot of guilt. Not because your child's going to die on the soccer field, but just because like, oh my God, I'm such a bad mother, I'm leaving. What can you do to kind of regulate that anxiety? Or when your child's struggling with their math homework, you have to sit there watching them struggle, which sucks. That is painful for a parent, but it's still not so painful that you should prevent them from having really important opportunities to learn.
- [44:46]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
When the kids are little, like you put them in a car seat and if they're mad about it, you're not like, oh, okay, you can roll around in the backseat because you feel so awful watching them struggle and be upset. You feel confident because you're like, this is my job. You have to have a car seat on to protect your life if it's uncomfortable. This is like, this is just kind of part of the deal. But then as kids get older, that discomfort that we have so much trouble figuring out how to self regulate over, like we are so. And even when they're babies, like, I think makes it very confusing whether or not the distress of our child that we could fix is somehow insensitive if we don't fix it. And so I think that's how the well meaningness comes in, is that sense of I could fix this. And I just think we have to remember it's the same thing as the seat belt, the car seat. Like, we know this is better for them. It doesn't feel as extreme because their lives are going to be fine. And like, if you decide to bring the, you know, the water bottle, fine, next time, you won't. And like, all is not lost. It's not, it's not as extreme. But I just think remembering, like, if we have an intention and we're struggling to keep it, just remembering those times that are super certain help us kind of with the confidence that like, and we get through it, like, that distress is tolerable. It's just uncomfortable.
- [46:20]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I think also that another strategy I've found that parents really resonate with this is the idea for parenting for the future. Right. Like ultimately what you want is to produce a kid that remembers their water bottle, that understands algebra. Right. And if you intervene this one time, you're kind of parenting for the present. You're parenting for like Thursday's soccer game. What you want to be parenting for is like, you know, when your kid's 35 and I don't know if they're still playing soccer, but they're able to remember stuff that they need to take to work and so on. The other thing is that I think we need to remember the times in our lives that we've learned the best, right? Or that we've had the most growth. And usually they're not in the times that went swimmingly well and they were fine. They were times in which we screwed something up. And we were like, whoa, now I learn it. I'll never do that again. And so many parents that we talked to for this class had these stories of moments where they didn't kind of parent for the present, right? They kind of let their kids screw up, and then all of a sudden, like, now their kid has learned what to do and whatever. One of the parents that we talked to had this lovely story about she's got a teenager and the teenager has to ride the bus home. And they're always, like, fighting about, you gotta make sure your cell phone's charged. Cause I wanna make sure you have it when you're on the bus home. Like, what if you don't have the cell phone? Every day there's a fight about the cell phone charging. One day, kid gets, you know, taking the bus home from school. Cell phone's not charged, gets off at the wrong spot, right? Doesn't have the cell phone charged. You know, not a great situation. And what the parent said was, you know, if my kid had had enough charge to call me at that point, I would have, of course, swooped in, driven wherever they were, and rescued them. What happened? They don't have their cell phone charged at all. So they have to, like, talk to the bus driver who, like, sorts it out, tells them the other thing to get on. They figured it out, you know, had enough change to go, and they sort it out. And they got home and you know what the mom said? She's like, I've never had to remind him to turn his. To charge his cell phone at all. Because now he's learned it and he has the story. Yeah. And he has the story that, like, he sorted it out, right? He figured this out. He feels very adult, right? And I think this is something we forget, especially with teenage kids that, like, what they really want to be is agentive, right? They really want to feel like you trust them. And they're kind of old enough to do kind of what they need to do. You know, if you can think back to when you were a teenager, what did you want most? To just, like, be the adult, right. You kind of wanted adults to kind of take you seriously and trust you. And so often we inadvertently kind of violate that trust by, without realizing it, telling our kids, like, we don't think we can trust you. But when they have these moments of screwing up, that's when they get to show their adult chops. Usually it's not a life or death situation. Right. In this case, kid got home fine, maybe a little discomfort, but that discomfort sucks. But it's useful. It's like allowing your kids to learn stuff.
- [49:08]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
I'm just laughing because I am a developmental psychologist and like I have so much content in my head and then I, my kids make fun of me all the time for being such a hypocrite. But we were where we live in California and it was spring break, we went to Miami to see my grandfather and my 18 year old, 18, I mean, she's an adult by law. My 18 year old is sunbathing, which I'm like, I can't believe people still sunbathe. Like, I'm so called. And her friend came with her and they were, they were sitting there and I came over with sunblock as if she was a toddler. And I was like, I'm putting sunblock on you. And she's like, mom, honestly, like, look in the mirror. You are.
- [49:55]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [49:58]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
And she's like, I live in California, I'm fine, I got this. And so they also like are old enough to hear my stuff and they know they supportive parenting ad nauseam. So she definitely called me out and I like walked away with my head.
- [50:15]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Hanging sunblock and your head hanging down, you know? Yeah.
- [50:19]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
And then she came inside at the end of the day as burnt to Chris. Yes, burnt your crisp. Which I knew would happen, but like, I could not do anything about it. And she came inside and she was like, well, if you are wondering if all these times when you're like, put sunblock on, put sunblock on has had any impact, it hasn't. But I am miserable and in so much pain and now I'm, yes, this.
- [50:46]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Is going to have an impact, right? This is going to change her behavior. This is what we need to remember as parents. Like, you know, imagine you have like a naggy spouse who keeps telling you to do, you know, like, you didn't do the dishwasher, you didn't take the garbage out. What's your instinct? It's not that moment to immediately take the garbage out. Like, oh, thank you so much for nagging me about it. If anything, you're just like, no, I'm going to leave the garbage there, right? We know this with other adults. Why would teenagers, who are so much more in a developmental stage where they want to assert their authority and show resistance, why would this magically work with them? It's just not going to. And so what we. What a better strategy that we talk a lot about in the parenting course is something that David Yeager refers to, the psychologist David Yeager refers to as kind of collaborative troubleshooting, right? Where you kind of don't tell them what to do, don't tell your kids what to do, but try to kind of talk through it, right? You know, like, even if you had that situation where you talked about, like, this sun is pretty hot. I'm trying to think about if I need more sunblock than California. Like, what do you guys think? Like, do you. Like, do you think we need more or not? Like, you're not telling her. You're treating her like this other agent of person. You're even asking her for advice. I bet at that moment she might be like, well, actually, yeah, Miami's a little. Maybe we could take up, like, that's a completely different interaction than you walking, like, with some block in hand, about to apply it to her back, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is the idea of kind of like asking, right? Not telling this kind of collaborative troubleshooting. Because sometimes when you engage in that, what you find is your kids have actually thought through this a lot, right? You know, they might say, like, well, I'm not going to do it now, but I'm planning to go in at one o' clock because I know that, like, the sun's going to get harsher then or something. Like, they might have already thought through a good answer. And by assuming that they know nothing or that we have to tell them, you'll kind of miss out on that. And sometimes in some situations, I think especially for older teenagers, they actually do know more information about us, right? We're coming in, like, with our knowledge of their algebra homework, and it's like, no, they learned some technique that they're trying to apply that you don't know. We're trying to give them information about some special social situations where there's some rich nuance that they know the context of that we don't. And so kind of treating them agentively and asking questions rather than telling. It cannot just be a strategy that helps your kids kind of, you know, not fail on their own and have their own learning moments and whatever, but it can Also just actually be a more effective way to solve problems. Because even though we like to think we know everything as parents, we kind of don't.
- [53:10]
Dr. Eliza Pressman
Yeah. I mean, I would say most of my moments that I feel most sort of like I'd like a do over on that have been when I've just decided forget all of it, I know best and I'm just. And I'm doing this. And I would say the other really challenging thing is other parents judgment.
- [53:31]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Right. Because I think, you know, one of the reasons you don't want your kid burned to a crisp is, you know, the other parents are going to look like her mom. Like put a node, no sunblock, you know, how dare that mom. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I think we need, you know, this is another thing that the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy talked about in his report. It's like at the very least, parents need to start supporting other parents. Right. Rather than being judgy. And so I think just as the advice is to extend a little bit more self compassion to yourself, like it is hard, you're going to mess up sometimes. You're either going to not, you know, jump in when you need to for the s' mores or jump in too much when the sunblock isn't really needed for your 18 year old. Like we're gonna mess up. Right. That's just a common parent experience. Right. But the flip side is we also need to extend that same compassion to other parents. Right. The next time you find yourself kind of getting judgy over something, maybe take a step back and again sort of realize like you might not know that full situation. You don't know the history of this. You don't know what a parent's trying or what they're going through. I think we just all need a little bit more trust and support for one another too. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.