"Human Minds Are Stupid!" (with Rich Roll)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Human Minds Are Stupid!" The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Release Date: August 11, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Human Minds Are Stupid!" The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos delves deep into the intricacies of human psychology and the misconceptions surrounding happiness. Hosted by Katie Milkman and featuring insights from Dr. Laurie Santos, the conversation explores why our minds often lead us astray in the pursuit of happiness and how understanding these pitfalls can pave the way for a more fulfilled life.

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Defining Happiness

[05:13] Dr. Laurie Santos:
"Yeah, I use the very limited definition that lots of psychologists use. This comes from Sonia Lubomirsky and her colleagues. Right. The idea is you think about being happy in your life and with your life there's sort of two parts of happiness."

Dr. Santos outlines a dual-component model of happiness:

1. Being Happy in Your Life (Affective Component):
   Experiencing a healthy balance of positive emotions (joy, contentment) versus negative emotions (anger, sadness).

2. Being Happy with Your Life (Cognitive Component):
   Assessing life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning—essentially, how one evaluates their life overall.

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Origins of Interest in Happiness

[06:21] Katie Milkman:
"You know, I'm curious around how you got interested in this field to begin with."

Dr. Santos shares that her passion for happiness research sparked in 2017 when she became the head of college at Yale. Witnessing a mental health crisis among students—acute anxiety, depression, and suicidality—led her to develop a course focused on happiness strategies, which quickly gained popularity beyond Yale.

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Misconceptions About Happiness

[08:36] Dr. Santos:
"We as a species have always been obsessed with happiness... and the strategies that I talk about... really try to boost both of those."

Dr. Santos emphasizes that cultural narratives often misguide us to seek happiness through money, status, or material possessions. However, these pursuits typically overlook essential components like social connections, rest, and meaningful challenges, which are more effective in fostering genuine happiness.

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The Arrival Fallacy

[17:32] Dr. Santos:
"Human minds are stupid, man. I mean, human minds are stupid."

A key concept discussed is the arrival fallacy—the belief that reaching a specific goal (e.g., a promotion, a new car) will bring lasting happiness. Dr. Santos explains that this anticipatory happiness is often overestimated, and the actual fulfillment experienced after achieving the goal is usually short-lived due to hedonic adaptation.

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Negative Visualization as a Strategy

[22:27] Katie Milkman:
"One of your so called rewirables around this, which are, are basically actionable tools, right?"

[23:16] Dr. Santos:
"There's also lots of evidence that when we imagine these positive futures... can make people less likely to take action."

Instead of solely visualizing success, Dr. Santos advocates for negative visualization—imagining potential obstacles and challenges on the path to achieving goals. This method prepares individuals to handle setbacks gracefully, enhancing resilience and increasing the likelihood of reaching desired outcomes.

[26:37] Dr. Santos:
"Visualize the perfect swim... visualize what would happen if terrible things went wrong."

An example provided is Michael Phelps' technique of imagining worst-case scenarios in his races, which helped him stay composed and perform exceptionally even when unexpected issues arose.

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The Power of Curiosity and Mindfulness

[110:49] Katie Milkman:
"Another important pillar here is contribution to others service, basically..."

Dr. Santos highlights curiosity as a foundational element for happiness. By fostering a curious mindset, individuals can better navigate negative emotions, transform challenges into opportunities for growth, and cultivate a sense of awe and wonder.

[116:03] Dr. Santos:
"I think we have so many people who are off track."

Mindfulness and curiosity allow individuals to engage more fully with their experiences, whether pleasant or unpleasant, leading to greater emotional regulation and overall well-being.

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Social Connection and Its Mismanagement

[82:27] Dr. Santos:
"It's a little bit of a stretch for people, but if you engage in it, it doesn't make sense."

The episode underscores the importance of social connections for happiness. Contrary to the superficial interactions fostered by digital platforms, meaningful in-person relationships significantly enhance life satisfaction. Strategies like fostering genuine interactions, practicing gratitude, and engaging in acts of kindness are emphasized as effective ways to build and maintain these connections.

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Time Affluence Over Money

[127:25] Dr. Santos:
"I think there's a happiness strategy we haven't mentioned yet, which is this idea of time affluence."

Dr. Santos introduces the concept of time affluence—valuing and effectively managing one's time over the relentless pursuit of financial gain. Research cited indicates that having control over one's time is a stronger predictor of happiness than monetary wealth beyond basic needs.

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Purpose and Meaning Through Signature Strengths

[142:34] Dr. Santos:
"If you can't do it [in your job], bring it in your leisure and stuff."

Exploring purpose and meaning, Dr. Santos discusses the use of signature strengths—personal character traits that individuals can leverage to find fulfillment. By identifying and utilizing these strengths in daily activities, individuals can transform their work and personal lives into sources of purpose, enhancing overall happiness.

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Handling Negative Emotions

[95:16] Dr. Santos:
"I think this is something that we haven't really talked about, right? Which is, which is negative emotions..."

The conversation delves into the acceptance and regulation of negative emotions. Instead of avoiding or suppressing feelings like anxiety or sadness, Dr. Santos advocates for embracing and understanding them. Techniques such as expressive writing and positive self-talk are recommended to process and mitigate the impact of these emotions on one's happiness.

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Balancing Happiness Strategies with Structural Changes

[117:10] Dr. Santos:
"I think that there's so much of the advice about happiness that at least for some personality types or people with certain backgrounds feels like a little bit of a stretch."

Dr. Santos acknowledges that while individual strategies (rewirables) are essential, they must coexist with broader structural changes to address systemic issues contributing to unhappiness. This dual approach ensures that personal well-being strategies complement efforts to create a more supportive and connected society.

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Conclusion: Agency and Continuous Practice

[150:22] Dr. Santos:
"Yeah, I think when things are feeling the most unhappy, the most frustrating, just remember that all the science shows you have agency over it."

Closing the episode, Dr. Santos reinforces the idea that individuals possess the agency to enhance their happiness through actionable strategies. By understanding and implementing practices like negative visualization, fostering social connections, and managing time effectively, one can navigate the complexities of human emotions and achieve a more fulfilling life.

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Key Takeaways

1. Happiness is Multi-Dimensional:
   Comprises both emotional experiences and cognitive evaluations of life satisfaction.

2. Misconceptions Lead Us Astray:
   Pursuing money or status often overlooks fundamental components like social connections and meaningful challenges.

3. Arrival Fallacy and Hedonic Adaptation:
   Achieving goals doesn't guarantee lasting happiness due to inherent adaptation mechanisms.

4. Negative Visualization Enhances Resilience:
   Preparing for obstacles fosters better handling of setbacks, leading to sustained fulfillment.

5. Cultivating Curiosity and Mindfulness:
   Essential for emotional regulation and embracing both positive and negative experiences.

6. Time Affluence Over Monetary Gain:
   Valuing and managing time effectively contributes more significantly to happiness than excess wealth.

7. Purpose Through Signature Strengths:
   Leveraging personal strengths in daily activities transforms work and personal life into meaningful endeavors.

8. Acceptance of Negative Emotions:
   Embracing and understanding negative feelings is crucial for overall well-being.

9. Balancing Individual Strategies with Structural Changes:
   Personal happiness practices should align with broader societal improvements for comprehensive well-being.

10. Agency and Continuous Practice:
    Individuals can actively shape their happiness through informed strategies and consistent application.

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This episode serves as a profound exploration of the psychological barriers to happiness and offers scientifically-backed strategies to overcome them. By challenging entrenched misconceptions and advocating for actionable changes, Dr. Laurie Santos provides listeners with the tools to navigate their pursuit of a happier, more meaningful life.

Transcript

[Lori Santos]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Rich Roll]

Hey parents, quick question. When was the last time you won snack time? This was a problem that shocked me when I chatted with moms and dads about their daily stresses for my new happier parenting course. From hungry breakdowns in the kitchen after school to finding a midday treat for the kiddos that won't make you feel guilty, parents seem to be struggling when it comes to snack time. That's why Mott's no Sugar added Applesauce pouches are perfect to keep on hand. They're made with real apples packed in a super easy pouch. Perfect for tossing in a lunchbox, keeping in the car, or grabbing as you're running out the door. Plus, they're a good source of vitamin C and kids love them. It's a win win. Real apples make real good applesauce. Learn [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes and more about why we do the things we do. Listen to [e-mail] podcast or wherever you listen to your shows. Autotrader is powered by Auto Intelligence, the hyper personalized way to buy a car with tools that sync with your exact budget and preferences so you only see vehicles you can afford and actually want. Choose new or pre owned, narrow by style and select features. Even trailer hitch go ahead and get picky and with pricing you'll see which listings are the best deals so you can feel like you're winning the negotiation without negotiating. Autotrader powered by Auto Intelligence makes car buying less of a process. Visit autotrader.com to find your perfect ride.

[Lori Santos]

Pushkin.

[Rich Roll]

Hey Happiness Lab listeners. While we're hard at work prepping our next season on some of the must read psychology books of 2025, I thought you might appreciate hearing some of the fun conversations I get to have with Smart fol outside of the show. And one of my recent favorites was the chat I had on the Rich Roll podcast. Rich Roll is an incredibly cool guy. He's gotten to chat with an amazing array of people on his show, from doctors to scientists to sports stars to explorers. My conversation with Rich covered a lot of ground.

[Lori Santos]

And get ready because this episode does.

[Rich Roll]

Last a couple hours and I don't think we left any happiness stone unturned. If you enjoy what you hear. You should check out Rich's other interviews on the Rich Roll podcast. You can download it wherever you get your shows.

[Lori Santos]

We as a species have always been obsessed with happiness. The cultural apparatus that we surround ourselves with is telling us all the wrong things to do right. Go for money, go for status, just buy something, change your circumstances, you'll feel happier. And what we know is like, those are wrong. We go after those things at the expense of social connection. Time for rest, time for. We kind of forego those great things in the service of stuff that's not going to make us feel good. I think of these strategies as almost like preventative mental health. So you can have your little a la carte snack. List of different strategies you use to feel happier. And if you can manage to turn them into habits to put them into effect, you'll wind up reaping the benefits.

[Katie Milkman]

Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast, today's version of which is focused entirely on happiness. My guest for this very broad and somewhat elusive subject matter is Dr. Laurie Santos, who is a professor of psychology and the head of Silliman College at Yale University where she teaches psychology and the good life. This is not new terrain for this show, but I think this conversation goes to some pretty interesting new and important places when it comes to the many ways in which we misunderstand happiness and why we so often behave in ways at cross purposes with getting it. We discuss what gets in our way specifically and of course, the many things that we can do. Actionable tools Laurie calls rewirables to engender more happiness in our lives more often. You can read up on her online at drloriesantos.com, where you will also find her fabulous podcast, the Happiness Lab, as well as a variety of courses, courses for kids, for parents, courses for everyone, and there's even one for teachers interested in teaching happiness, which is pretty cool. So with that, let's do the thing. This is me and Dr. Laurie Santos. I want to, you know, start with some real basic stuff. We can't talk about happiness without having a working understanding of what it actually is. So what is your thesis? I'm sure people ask you all the time, you teach happiness. So tell me what it is.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I use the very limited definition that lots of psychologists use. This comes from Sonia Lubomirsky and her colleagues. Right. The idea is you think about being happy in your life and with your life there's sort of two parts of happiness. So being happy in your life is the fact that you experience lots of Positive emotion or a decent ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. You have contentment and laughter and joy and these things, and you have a nice ratio of those with the normal negative stuff. You know, anger or sadness, anxiety, overwhelm, whatever. The key there is. You're not getting fully rid of negative emotions, but you want the ratio to be decent. That's kind of being happy in your life. But being happy with your life is the fact that you think your life is going well. These are what's often called the kind of affective and the cognitive parts of happiness. How your life feels and how you think it's going. But how you think your life is going is the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied am I with my life? Do I have purpose? Do I have a sense of meaning? Does it feel like something to be here? And the strategies that I talk about in my course and on my podcast, really what they're trying to do is boost both of those. If you're kind of feeling good in your life and you sort of think your life is going well, then by and large, I'd be saying that you're happy.

[Katie Milkman]

You know, I'm curious around how you got interested in this field to begin with. Was there a catalyst or what ignited your passion around this subject of happiness?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, well, I've been a nerdy psychologist basically forever. Like, since I was a kid, I was interested in people and psychology, Spent most of my career studying animals, all kinds of different stuff. And then my interest in happiness started when I took on this new role at Yale. I became this thing called the head of college, which is, like, strange Yale speak for a faculty member who lives on campus with students. Like, I moved into this big mansion in the middle of this dorm and thought I was gonna be around lots of college students, like, partying and having this amazing time. And really what I just saw was the college student mental health crisis, right? Most of my day was like, students who were experiencing acute anxiety, suicidality, panic attacks. And I was like, this is, like, not okay. This is not.

[Katie Milkman]

How long ago was that?

[Lori Santos]

This was in 2017 was when I.

[Katie Milkman]

First started up pre pandemic. Like, we're in a different world now.

[Lori Santos]

I think things have gotten worse. But what I was seeing on the ground was just shocking. And it wasn't what I remember from college, and it wasn't what you kind of hear in the media of a bunch of snowflakes. These were students having, like, acute crises. And so I got interested in the happiness work because I was like, somebody needs to do something to help these students. It started with me being again, like a nerdy professor, thinking, I'll make a new class. I'll develop a class where I teach students these strategies. And I didn't realize how much that would go viral. Not just on campus, but lots of folks need these strategies.

[Katie Milkman]

I remember it was national news. You were all over the place, like, the most popular oversubscribed class at Yale.

[Lori Santos]

And I think it was a couple things. One is, whenever Yale does anything, it makes the New York Times and national news and stuff. But I think it was striking for. For people to see that these students who are 19 at one of the best universities in the world with their whole lives ahead of them, were suffering in the way that they were suffering. Like, not just at Yale, but right now. Nationally, more than 60% of students report being so anxious that they can't function most days. More than 40% say they're depressed. More than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last few months. And that was what I was kind of seeing. So I think it was a striking story for people to see, like, wow, young people are struggling way more than we thought.

[Katie Milkman]

And by being head of college and cohabitating with all of them, you're the door that is getting knocked on. Right. So you're on the receiving end of a lot of these stories and tales of woe.

[Lori Santos]

No. I spent numerous weekends visiting students in psychiatric hospitals. I had lots of knocks on the door late at night where my husband and I were like, where are my glasses? I gotta walk downstairs to see what's going on.

[Katie Milkman]

But you don't understand.

[Lori Santos]

Honestly, it was less the emergency and more just the low grade painful hustle in ways that just weren't making students happy. The kind of deep anxiety about the future just mortgaging the fun and the sleep and the social connection they could have in college. It just felt like a really unhealthy situation. And again, it wasn't just Yale. The more I dug into it, I was like, this is just college student lives generally.

[Katie Milkman]

That was my question because it takes a lot to get into Yale. So by the time they arrive, they're well into their striver trajectory. Right. Like, they've been grinding for a long time.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's aspects of being at Ivy League school that might be worse because they're kind of been in that grinding mode for so long. But I just think this is a generational thing and the data really bear it out.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You're starting to see Seeds of this stuff in high school, even in middle school, with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing. And I just think we have so many people who are off track.

[Katie Milkman]

Prior to creating the course, what were you teaching? Like, I take it that you weren't like, happiness wasn't an area of expertise or specificity for you.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I was really interested in kind of how humans got to be the weird species that we are. Both the strange, smart things that humans do, but also the strange, dumb things that humans do. I know you and I both are fans of Bob Sapolsky at Stanford, this primate researcher. And I'm a fan in part because I was a primate researcher. I studied these group, this group of monkeys off the coast of Puerto Rico, and tried to see how they made sense of the world.

[Katie Milkman]

So now it's your gambit to create this course, and you gotta figure it out. Right. So how do you piece that together and start to make sense of this very elusive topic?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, well, one of the things I did was stand on the shoulder of giants.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

There were lots of other faculty who maybe hadn't seen the same crisis in the same way I did, but were really interested in the science of happiness and had pulled together classes. I get a lot of mileage because I did this at Yale, but folks like Tal Benjer had offered a similar course at Harvard. There were courses all around the country that were looking at. I kind of pulled different folks syllabus and kind of looked at the stuff I liked. I think the unique thing that I added in, though, is that I was also really worried about not just what we should do to be happy, but how we put that stuff into practice. Because I know, you know from the show that, like, there's all these strategies and tips we can do to be more fit, to be healthier, to be happier, to strive more, whatever it is. But you can know all those things and not do any of that stuff. You can know all that stuff and lay on the couch every morning.

[Katie Milkman]

There's a big gap between self awareness and action.

[Lori Santos]

Yes.

[Katie Milkman]

When it comes to this stuff. I take it from me, as somebody who sat across from many a happiness expert, they walk out of the room.

[Lori Santos]

You'Re like, not so sure.

[Katie Milkman]

Do I actually then go do these things? This is a lingering question.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. The nerds in social science like to call this bias the GI Joe fallacy. You're my age, so you probably remember GI Joe. The cartoon, GI Joe. They used to end the cartoon with this public service announcement where GI Joe would teach kids things like, don't talk to strangers or look both ways when you cross the street. The quaint problems of the 80s that you needed to. To teach kids about. But then at the end, the kid would say, thank you, GI Joe. Now I know. And GI Joe would say, and knowing is half the battle. Go, GI Joe. There's tons of things I know that I don't put into effect and that you won't put into effect unless you have social support and the right habits and, like, a real commitment to these things. And so I think that's where my course is different. Everyone talks about it being a course about happiness, but the whole second half of the course is about, okay, now you know this stuff, but how do you put it into practice? How do you form the right habits?

[Katie Milkman]

Right. The difference between knowing something and then acting on it is just like you said, like, what got you interested in psychology? Like, why? Why do our brains lead us astray? It's like, we know better and yet we do these things and we get into these loops and these patterns that we can't escape from. I mean, that is central to happiness, but central to, you know, all facets of, like, trying to better ourselves.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. This was the thing that the folks who were first interested in psychology, who weren't psychologists.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

The philosopher ancients, all the folks who thought about the human condition, this was the thing they were really worried about.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Self regulation. How do you get folks to do what they really want to do? Yeah. So this gap has been following us around for a long time.

[Katie Milkman]

Is there science on? Because there are people like, oh, I read that and now I'm doing it. You know, it's not a leap, but for most people it is a leap. Like, is there some understanding around what differentiates those two archetypes? Like the person who can just kind of pivot right into action?

[Lori Santos]

Honestly, not great work. I mean, there are people who talk about it a lot. I know Gretchen Rubin, for example, and others, journalist, happiness expert. She talks about what she calls the lightning phenomena, which is like, a lot of times, behavior change is really hard, but then sometimes there's just this moment where you see some statistic or you hear something bad, or you have a health diagnosis and you're like, boom, that's it. I'm changing my behavior. And then like a lightning bolt, everything has changed. Sadly, most behavioral change doesn't work that way. And I think we, as social scientists, we really haven't figured out, out how to engineer the lightning bolt. If we did, podcasts like this might be Hard of a job.

[Katie Milkman]

Well, pain is a pretty good reliable motivator. If you're in enough pain, maybe for a while, you develop a capacity for willingness that you can't conjure. Willingness.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. So how you get folks to be motivated, how you turn something into a habit. I mean, honestly, the best strategies we have now were the same ones that folks like Aristotle back in the day came up with.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You know, do it repeatedly. So you become a person who does these kinds of things. You kind of fake it till you make it. You get social support.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

The best strategies we have in social science for getting people to do stuff are the ones that the philosophers thought of thousands of years ago.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah. Are there not different types of happiness? I mean, there's hedonic happiness, there's eudaimonic happiness. Is hedonic happiness actually happiness, or is that something different? Like, how do you think about that?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, there's so many different definitions of happiness. I try to squish them into this definition of the social scientists use. So often. The way I think about more hedonic happiness, that's the kind of in your life happiness.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

That's like things are going well, I'm experiencing joy, I'm savoring stuff.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I think it's not the pure way that hedonists thought about it, because if you just had like, you know, deep pleasure, Pleasure, pleasure all the time, it would stop being good, Right.

[Katie Milkman]

Well, you wouldn't be happy in your life, ultimately, Correct?

[Lori Santos]

Yes.

[Katie Milkman]

So you need to or with your life. I can't. What is the distinction?

[Lori Santos]

Both, I think, you know, if I was just going for pure hedonic pleasure, you know, like hot fudge Sundays and sex and, you know, days on the beach or whatever, and that was it. Eventually I would get bored with that.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

This is a phenomenon of getting used to stuff. What's called hedonic adaptation. Even the best things in life over and over stop being so good. So it wouldn't really make me happy in my life, and it probably wouldn't make me happy with my life. You and I, because we do. What we do tend to run in these circles where you meet lots of rich folks, lots of folks who have the privilege and the money to have every hedonic pleasure. By and large, my experience with those folks is they are not happy.

[Katie Milkman]

Well, this is the world capital of that. I mean, we live in, you know, this is Los Angeles. You know, plenty of those people cruising around here. So I'm very familiar with that. But I think part of what leads Them to that place is a fundamental misunderstanding of happiness. It goes back to the self awareness thing. Like we know and we've read in so many books and heard so many people say that the things that drive happiness are human connection and having a purpose and having some sense of meaning in how you show up in your life and all these things that you talk about that we're going to get to. And yet we still delude ourselves into thinking that the happiness that eludes us is just around the bend of the promotion or the new car, or when you get the new house, or just name whatever your poison is. And for some reason we believe that we are the sole exception to the rule. And no matter. It's like in aa they say the persistence of this delusion is astonishing. Like, it doesn't. It's like it's so resilient, this idea that the things that we chase in modern society will purchase happiness for us, even though time and time and time again they don't. And we don't learn our lesson. Like, what is going on with that?

[Lori Santos]

Human minds are stupid, man. I mean, human minds are stupid. My mind is stupid, right? I know all this research where I can quote you this specific paper and the journal that these findings are in, but for me it's like, oh, you know, like, cool new opportunity, maybe I'll make some money. It's like, how sexy. Or like, let me just get some emails done rather than like chat with my husband over dinner. Like, we just have these biases to go after. Stuff that we strongly believe, at least intuitively. Like our deep intuitions are that this will make us feel good, this will make us happy, this will make life better. And it just doesn't. The specific things that we go after, what a lot of folks call the arrival fallacy, one of the big ones that we mess up is if I could just get to this thing, if I could just get to the promotion, just earn a million dollars, just find the right partner when I arrive there, I'll be happy. But this is the arrival fallacy. It's like the happily ever after fallacy. And that's one thing we get wrong, which is there's never a moment where you're like, okay, one and done. I can be happy now and just exist in happiness. My colleague Dan Gilbert at Harvard is fond of saying that happily ever after only works if you have three more minutes to live. Like, it's just not happ. Happiness works, but we often think it is. And we often really think that the stuff like money, fame, all these things we think that that's going to get us there, and we go after those things at the expense of all the stuff you just listed. Social connection, time for rest, hard problems that give us meaning, but that we might not get to in the end. These are the things that are really ultimately going to make life worth living. But we kind of forego those great things in the service of stuff that's not going to make us feel good.

[Katie Milkman]

I'm curious or I wonder whether what we think of as happiness when we chase these things is, in point of fact the alleviation of fear or doubt. Like, it's not that we're imagining some blissful, permanent state of well being if we achieve these things or get to these certain places, but that we won't have to worry about stuff that we worry about now, that we will eradicate some level of uncertainty and we no longer need to be afraid and we won't have to work as hard. I bang on about this all the time, so I apologize to the audience. But I had this psychiatrist, Phil Stutz, you know who Phil Stutz is on the show. He's a wonderful man. And he has this working idea, this working theory, because he treats all these people in Hollywood who are like, rich and powerful and just miserable, Right. And he said that this sort of shared strain between all of these people is that they are in denial of three fundamental truths of life, which are pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. And in the context of happiness, on some level, it seems resonant, like we're chasing these things because we don't like these ideas of pain, uncertainty, and having to continually work on things. And if we just get to this place, then we can take a breath and we associate that with happiness. And I guess there's some veneer of happiness with that, but it's a little bit of a different thing.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think we're really bad at making effective, accurate predictions about, like, how much pain we're going to have in different situations. Right. Take money. I think this is one that people get wrong all the time.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Just walk in when the Powerball gets high and people are like, oh my gosh, when I win this $800 million, everything's going to be great. And I think if you talk to someone with $800 million, they'll be like, oh, man, no, you got to worry about the taxes. And everyone comes out of the woodwork to get money and where are you gonna park your yacht? It's a huge pain in the butt to Figure out where you're gonna put your yacht, et cetera, et cetera. It's like when we simulate these positive futures, we just get it wrong, right? We kind of miss out on the stuff that's really gonna matter. That's true for the good things in life. Interestingly, it's also true for the bad things in life, right? One of the most famous studies on this that folks did like back decades ago now, had people predict if we were to walk out of the studio and you and I both got hit by a car and we were both paraplegic, how would that affect our lives? And we say, oh my gosh, we so unhappy, our lives would be ruined. But you look at people who've actually gone through a terrible accident like that, who've become paraplegic, and what you find is that within six months their happiness levels are statistically indistinguishable from what they were before and statistically indistinguishable from folks who walked out of the studio and didn't get hit. That is absolutely not what we predict. But what happens, Life goes on, there's still reruns on TV and you chat with your friends and something funny happens on the Internet and that's what's changing your day to day. But we absolutely don't think that a terrible thing could happen to us and we'd be fine. So these are our prediction problems. When we simulate the wonderful thing, the awesome thing that we're going for, we don't simulate all the problems that go with it. And when we simulate the terrible things, we don't simulate all the day to day stuff that's going to affect our happiness much more than we expect with this terrible thing happening. So we're just kind of bad forecasters and that's a lot of what we get wrong.

[Katie Milkman]

One of your so called rewirables around this, which are, are basically actionable tools, right? Is very counterintuitive. We're all taught to visualize success and imagine what will happen and believe in yourself and all of that. And your counsel is basically visualize the opposite. Imagine the obstacles, which is a very process versus destination mindset. And I think it's really cool. I'd never heard anyone talk about this before. The idea that what you should be visualizing are all the problems you're going to face on the road to getting the thing. When you visualize on the destination, that's when you succumb to the arrival fallacy, right? Because when you get there, it's like, all right, Well, I already imagined this and maybe it's not as good as I imagined or it wears off very quickly.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

There's also lots of evidence that when we imagine these positive futures, like, oh my gosh, I don't know, I'm run ultramarathon. Oh, it's going to be so great. I'm going to be so cool. Everyone's going to think I'm great. Whatever. The more you imagine the positive future, your imagination kind of works like real brain cognition, like real brain thinking. You get some of the reward from that one thinking, oh my God, everyone will think I'm going so cool. I kind of get a little bit of the everyone thinking I'm cool already. And it actually makes people less likely to take action towards those goals. This is a lovely work of this woman, Gabrielle Oettingen, who's at nyu. She does these studies where she has students positively fantasize about getting good grades. And she finds that the ones who have the most vivid fantasies are the ones that put the least work into studying. Because kind of like that already happened to you, right?

[Katie Milkman]

I've already had the experience of succeeding.

[Lori Santos]

Meanwhile, you're not, you're not putting the work into things you really need your cognitive help with, which is like, okay, how am I gonna actually get to the library? Or how am I gonna go to office hours, or how am I gonna do the million things you need to do to achieve that goal? And so when you envision the obstacles now all of a sudden you're putting your cognitive brain power towards practicing and thinking through the things that are really gonna mess you up when you try to go for that goal.

[Katie Milkman]

But you do need some self belief that you can achieve the goal. Right. So you have to balance that against on some level. But there is value in seeing yourself cross the finish line or getting the report card or whatever to anchor you in the journey.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, it's more important.

[Katie Milkman]

It's more than you ruminate on it. Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's so nuanced. In fact, this was the thing that I just finished teaching my happiness class this semester, talking to me. I submitted grades right before I flew here to la, so I'm feeling really good. But the one thing my students kind of fought about and complained the most about was this. Because right now in the popular culture, this idea of positive fantasies is big.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

My students love manifesting. They hear about it on TikTok a lot. And so they're like, you're telling me manifesting is bad? Thinking about your positive future and thinking you were the kind of person that could do this is great. And the subtle distinction is you want to think that you're the kind of person who can do it, but you're not that person yet. Like you haven't done it already yet.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

So you want to be like, I'm the kind of person who can put in the work needed to become a good student. I'm the kind of person who can put in the work needed to become ultra marathon or get fit or whatever it is. Right. You want to think you're the kind of person who can do it it, but you also want to know the things that you actually have to do to do it. Because most big goals have some work that you need to put in. And when you get the reward without the work, that's when you get into trouble.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah. So by focusing on the obstacles with some anchor of self belief that you are going to be able to solve the problems and navigate through the minefield is very valuable. But it's distinct from maybe what some people misunderstand it to be, which would be like an attitude of dread around this or a victim mental. Everything's terrible. There's all these problems. It's going to take forever. I'm never going to make it. And why even try? Like, those are two different things.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And the best thing in Gabriel Otingen's work is not just imagine the obstacles, but imagine the if then plan you would take to get through the obstacles. I talk about this on my podcast, the sort of idea of kind of getting through the obstacles. And I interviewed Michael Phelps, the swimmer's coach, because Michael Phelps. Yeah, great, great guy. And can talk so articulately about what Michael was doing. And one of the things he did a lot was he used a lot of visualization.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Visualize the perfect swim. But Michael was so good at this, he got bored with it. And so he started visualizing what would happen if terrible things went wrong. His goggles came off, he slapped his foot against the thing. Just stupid stuff went wrong. And what he did in doing that, that he kind of just played out the scenario.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

He said, like, well, if my goggles fall off, then I know I can just count my strokes and that'll be fine. Turns out this wound up being incredibly helpful. I think it was the Beijing Olympics when his goggles actually came off. He kind of had practiced what to do and therefore he was fine. And he ended up winning a gold even though the horrible event that he was saying, wow, this would be so terrible, actually happened. And I think this is what we want to do. You want to ask the question? Okay, I'm trying to study more. What's the horrible thing? Well, there's a party this weekend. Well, how would I navigate that? Well, I'd set time to go to the party, and I'd set my alarm clock early and get up. I want to go running a little bit more this weekend. I want to pick up more miles or whatever. Well, what should I do? Well, I might have to cancel this thing and schedule a little bit more time. Oh, it's going to be raining. I got to get myself to the gym because I want to do on the treadmill. You're just going through the scenarios and coming up with a plan. So it's not this victim mindset. It's not like, oh, it's just going to be so hard. You're like, oh, there's an obstacle. But I can overcome that obstacle. And I've already thought through how to do it. I've kind of given myself some practice.

[Katie Milkman]

The distinctive quality in that is resilience, is it not? Like the ability to adapt when things aren't going your way without getting completely derailed by it. Right. So in the athletic context, when you've visualized the perfect race and something slightly is a miss or doesn't go as you imagined it, you collapse and fall apart.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

Versus being able to roll with whatever life throws at you.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

And it's also the practice that we can do inside our heads. I mean, this is a wonderful feature of the human mind.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Is that we can just experience things happening to us in our head.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I don't have to go through the morning where my alarm clock goes off and I don't want to run because, like, oh, I can practice that in my head and I can walk through like, oh, here's what I will do to do that better. There's just some amazing cognitive science work on the power of mental practice. One of my favorite studies that I tell my students about nerdily is I think this is by Kerry Morwedge at Boston University. He does this study where he either has people imagine eating M and Ms. One by one, slowly, or slowly putting quarters into a vending machine over and over again. And at the end of imagining this, you just give people a big bowl of M and Ms. What do you find? The people who imagined eating the M and Ms, they're like, oh, God, I don't want any more M and Ms. I'm good.

[Katie Milkman]

So interesting.

[Lori Santos]

I don't eat anymore. Whereas the people who imagine the quarters. It's like, oh, M and Ms, I'll have some, right? When we practice something in our heads, there's something in our brain that's a little bit confused about whether that's happened already. And when we get to mental practice in the fitness domain or in the health domain or in the happiness strategy domain, what it means is when you practice it in your head, you're building that habit up, even though you haven't had to do that in real life yet. And that can be great. That means your time stuck in traffic on your commute to work, the rumination that you have in bed at night of, oh, am I going to be able to get through this? You can harness that for good. You can practice the thing that you're worried is going to be hard and you'll get the benefit of that practice when you wake up or in real life later on.

[Katie Milkman]

That's the positive side of the coin. If you flip it over. The negative version of that is the person who talks all the time about the thing they're going to do and then never ends up doing it because their brain has already been satisfied by whatever it's seeking, right? So what's going on in the brain, like dopaminergically or neurologically that, like, what. What is the signaling that's occurring?

[Lori Santos]

I think the key is, like, if you just sit there with the reward and that's it and you stop there, right? You kind of, oh, it would be so great if I did this. I'd be so proud of myself. You know, you kind of dust it off and you're done. That means you get the reward without doing the practice, without kind of getting the information when you start to simulate and ask, okay, well, what would I need to do to do that? What are the obstacles that are going to come up? Oh, I like to sleep in or it's going to be cold out or whatever strategy you need to think of, whatever obstacle that's there. Now all of a sudden your brain goes into planning mode rather than just sitting with your reward areas firing. Be like, oh, my gosh, this would be so awesome. Now you're kicking into the planning parts of your brain, your frontal lobes kicking in is trying to think through different scenarios and come up with these answers for you. And that means you get the answers before you have to be in the situation that's doing it. And so I think you switched from just kind of like sitting there and enjoying what you already accomplished, which you didn't accomplish yet, to turning on those planning parts of your mind and your brain that can actually help you get through in a much more successful way later on.

[Rich Roll]

You're listening to my conversation on the Rich Roll Podcast. We'll have even more after the break. As the summer winds down, I'm looking forward to my favorite season ever.

[Lori Santos]

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[Rich Roll]

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[Lori Santos]

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[Katie Milkman]

While we're on the topic of misconceptions around happiness, another one that occurs to me is the way in which we're wired to believe that comfort and convenience and expediency and all of these things, luxury, are essential in this equation. Happiness, when we know that actually it's discomfort and getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself and getting up when you set the alarm or whatever habit or practice it is that as uncomfortable and as miserable as they feel when we're doing them leads to that resilience and ultimately a sense of greater self esteem. Like these are like seedlings that blossom into a more lasting and. And low grade maybe, but sense of well being, that has to be part of happiness, yes?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, for sure. And I think we get it wrong in two ways, right? One is we assume that if we get to the comforts, that those comforts are gonna last, right? And what we forget is that we get used to stuff that again, the best thing in life could happen to you. And it's awesome when it first happens, but it gets boring over time. I think this is one of the reasons that people with just enormous privilege, the rich folks that were living around here, hanging out here in LA with, with us, that they don't kind of enjoy the great things that are happening to them because they're used to it. You fly in first class the first time, you're like, oh my God, I get a free drink, the seat's so nice, whatever. You fly in first class for the 15th time, the 50th time. It's just how you fly, right? The comforts that we bring to ourselves stop being comforting the more we have them over time. In contrast, the hard work we have to put in, the little bit of struggle, it does two things, right? One is that we kind of don't get hurt by it. As much as we think, because we get used to that too, right? When you're starting a new fitness program, my husband talks about this. He was a college swimmer and he remembers when the swimming season started and you do the first workout and you're so tired and you're like, I cannot do this every day for the next semester. Then two weeks into it you're like, oh yeah, that's just a workout.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

We forget that we're gonna get used to the hard stuff too, right. So we start off being really scared by the hard stuff. We start off being really scared about getting out of our comfort zone. But then once you jump into it to it, it's just like it becomes easier over time. And so this idea that we get used to stuff, this kind of concept of hedonic adaptation, we kind of adapt to stuff in the world. We forget that it causes us not to get as much happiness out of the comfort stuff because we're going to get used to the good stuff. It'll stop being as good over time and the bad stuff won't be as bad over time because we'll sort of get used to it.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Katie Milkman]

The non hedonic adaptation, is there a term for that?

[Lori Santos]

Well, it's like researchers call this kind of affective forecasting bias is one of the things we call it what's often called the impact bias, that the impact, whatever it is, both in terms of its kind of magnitude of how good or how bad something is and also its duration, it just doesn't impact us as much as we think.

[Katie Milkman]

A tangent of this hedonic adaptation. I'm just imagining the super wealthy guy driving around LA in the fancy car. Is that person's attention or my attention? I'll speak for myself. I'm not immune from this immediately goes towards comparison because there's always somebody who's more successful, more powerful, more wealthy, better looking, fitter, you name it, right? Why do our brains deal with hedonic adaptation by immediately going there?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, well, this is just a like really remarkably common feature of our brain.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You and I are talking in the studio. You've got these great lights. There's a podcaster I'm so jealous of. But when we walk out of this really bright space space into the rest of the studio, we'll be like, oh man, I didn't even realize when I was sitting talking to Rich that it was really bright. But when I walk out, everything will look kind of dark.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Our brains are always processing things in this relative way. I'm not Processing how much objective light is here. I just kind of get used to the amount of light here and then when I walk outside now, all of a sudden it's brighter or it's darker or something like that. That's our visual system getting used to stuff. But the fact that we get used to stuff, that we think in terms of these relative things over time rather than what objectively is going on, that's just a general feature of how our mind for everything. So nobody thinks of their salary as being objectively good or objectively bad. If you think of how your salary is going, you just think immediately in terms of like, well, what is the guy next to me in the office making? Or like?

[Katie Milkman]

And that comparison is very much a function of proximity.

[Lori Santos]

Oh yeah. And what's terrible about the comparison is that like, it never goes in the good way, right? There might be tons of people sitting next to you that aren't making as much money, that aren't as hot as you, that didn't have as good a vacation as you, that doesn't have a nice a car and you just like don't notice those people. This is what happens in la, right? I mean, even driving here. And again, I fall prey to this stuff too. You know, driving here, you know, I was like driving right next to this like super souped up white Porsche and I was like, oh, that's such a cool white Porsche, right? I'm noticing the car that's crappier than my rental car, but I didn't notice the hundreds, maybe thousands of other cars on the streets of LA that like just were unremarkable and weren't as good.

[Katie Milkman]

It's fun and easy to, you know, poke at the billionaire who's all bent out of shape because there's another guy at the cocktail party that has, you know, know a billion more than him. Like, how could you possibly, you know, think that? But it's just an extreme version of what we all do.

[Lori Santos]

And like, the data on this is like just. They're so funny. There's one really funny study, it was in Europe where they do lotteries a little bit differently. So here the lottery in the US is like you go buy a Powerball ticket, if your number comes up, you win. The way they do them in Europe is often they do what's called a postcode lottery. So I'm in zip code like 06511 and they're going to pull a lottery ticket that's just going to say my post. And if I played then in my Postcode, my whole postcode will win if I didn't play. I don't get it. What's the consequence of this type of lottery system? If your postcode is called and you didn't play, you're going to have a bunch of people around you who won something. They all won one.

[Katie Milkman]

That's like the worst case scenario for you.

[Lori Santos]

It's great for the lottery because a.

[Katie Milkman]

Lot of people want to play lottery.

[Lori Santos]

And regret insurance, right? But one of these lotteries was a lottery that gave people a new car, Right. And so people in the postcode, if their lottery number came up, they got a new car. What they found is that sales of lottery cars of the non winners went up when people won, of course. Because like you're like, I don't want to be the only one in my town.

[Katie Milkman]

And like, I crashed. Yeah, if you left out, you're going to get, you know, booted out of the tribe.

[Lori Santos]

And this is true, you know, in the context of material goods, it's definitely true for my poor students. In the context of grades, it's true in the context of looks. And our brains are just bad at it. We're just good at finding people who are better than us. And sometimes that's us, Right. I think in the context of fitness, in the context of looks, right. All of us are getting older over time. Like we're moving towards a reference point that's gonna be make us feel crappy about ourself. If not now, 10 years, 20 years, right. And so yeah, minds are built to not be objective. They're built to pay attention to stuff in this relative fashion and they seek out reference points that make us feel crappy. I did this consulting with a basketball team where I was talking about social comparison, a professional basketball team. And that's something that comes up all the time. Who's doing better than you? Who's making more money? And I was asking, well, who's the reference point for salary? And at the time it was like, Steph Curry. I was like, okay, Steph Curry, who's the reference point for like three point shots? And like, oh, Steph Curry? And I was like, who's the reference point for the best height in the NBA? And they're like, taco fail. I was like, wait, why is it not Steph Curry anymore? Steph Curry was the reference point for everything else. But in the one domain where you're like doing better than him now, he's not the reference point anymore. And like, that's just how our minds work. We Just pick the one thing that makes us feel crappy about ourselves.

[Katie Milkman]

And yet when we see those individuals who somehow have immunized themselves against this compulsion that's so human and stand proudly as themselves without concern for whatever anybody thinks about what they're doing, and they're not comparing themselves to anyone else, and they're just doing their thing. These are happy people, and there's a magnetism to that. Like, when you see those people, it's inspirational. You're like, wow, how can I be more like that? And then we go right back to comparing ourselves.

[Lori Santos]

You know what I mean?

[Katie Milkman]

I was thinking about this yesterday. I had had Bob Roth on here who runs the David lynch foundation, and we were talking about David lynch. And I'm obsessed with this guy. And he's like, why? What is it about him that captures you? And I said that very thing. It's like he's so thoroughly himself. And that's a very attractive quality.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think it's a really hard quality to go after because our minds are really built to be paying attention to what other individuals do. And I think that was bad enough back in the evolutionary day when we were a part of bands of people who are, you know, 100, 200 strong.

[Katie Milkman]

It's a threat to your membership.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, but it's so much worse when that membership is everybody on TikTok or everybody on Instagram.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I think this is something that comes up a lot. I see my college students talk about this where, you know, when I was in college, you could have these, like, dorky hobbies. You could be like, you know, I don't know, like, solve Rubik's Cubes really fast or, like, be, like, in a cool band. Right. Like, you played bass really well. Now I feel like our poor college students can never feel, like, do anything really well because they immediately go on the Internet. However fast you solve the Rubik's Cube, there's somebody who's doing it blindfolded and much faster than you.

[Katie Milkman]

And so maybe they're learning that lesson earlier.

[Lori Santos]

I don't think so. I think they're just much more paralyzed by it.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah, but you can also. I mean, I know you have a lot to say about the digital landscape and, you know, how social media is driving a lot of the malevolence here. But there are millions of sub communities now for every bizarre interest. And that lonely kid who is the only person he or she knows that's into name, your weird hobby, can go on Reddit or one of these places and find, like, minded individuals and have some sense of connection and community there.

[Lori Santos]

Totally, totally.

[Katie Milkman]

It's not a black and white thing.

[Lori Santos]

No. And I think this is one of the tricks with social media and really all of our technology, right. Is that has such good aspects when it comes to our happiness. There's such real potential to use this in positive ways to increase social connection, to get a better sense of purpose, you know, honestly, to see reference points that should make you feel really good about yourself, right? But like, I mean, just like the fact that you are anyone listening to this right now is privileged, right? You have a technology that you can use to access this. You have hearing, right? That, like, is working, right? You know, probably eyes are working if you're watching this on YouTube.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Those are incredible privileges that we can look to other people to feel good about, to remember, like, oh, that wasn't a given in life.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And so the point is that we can use technology in all these positive ways when it comes to our happiness. The problem is that we tend not to use it in those positive ways. And I think sometimes the technologies themselves are set up with algorithms that are set up to kind of lead us towards the not so good ways of using technologies.

[Katie Milkman]

You have a rewirable around this as well, though. Like the idea, the solution to this comparison problem in terms of actions that you can take, is to use this. What do you call it? The Braun. You know what I'm talking about?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. The bronze medalist, which the joke is we always. You have this idea of look for the silver lining. And the joke is you look for the bronze lining. And this actually comes from a sports domain too. One of the most famous studies of social comparison in the field of psychology was a study of Olympic medalists looking at the emotions they show on the stand. And what you find is that gold medalists, best in their sport are showing really strong positive emotions, emotions. But the silver medalists aren't just showing slightly less positive emotions. They're showing incredibly negative emotions. Their facial expressions show things like contempt, deep sadness, anger, and these kinds of things. And that's because of social comparison, Right. You were so close to being the best in the world, and you're not. And rather than feeling like you beat billions of people in your sport, which you did, you find very salient.

[Katie Milkman]

You're haunted.

[Lori Santos]

What could have been one person, right, that's a silver medalist. And the reason why it's the kind of bronze lining that matters is that if you look at the bronze medalists, you might think that they're even more Contemptuous, more angry than the silver medalists. But no, because the bronze medalist's reference point isn't gold. They were multiple seconds or multiple, whatever it was in their sport away from that. Their salient reference point is like, oh, if I was just like a teeny tiny bit slower, I wouldn't be up here, I'd be going home empty handed. And so it turns out that the bronze medalists, in some cases in these studies are actually happier than the gold medalists. They're showing incredible elation because they're like, oh my, my gosh. And this is why I like finding the bronze lining instead of the silver lining. Because again, for any trait you hear about, there are people who are doing a lot worse than you.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And if they're not doing a lot worse than you on that particular trait, you're looking at just broaden your horizon a little bit to be like, again, if you're watching this or listening to this right now, you have hearing in a way that not everybody on the planet has. You have the privilege of owning this technology, which not everybody has. You have your phone that didn't break 10 minutes ago.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Which it could have done. Right. Like, when we kind of take a broader perspective, we can use our social computer comparison to realize we're actually doing pretty good.

[Katie Milkman]

How do you give more than lip service to that though? Because it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can hear, I can see fine. Like, I know what you're saying.

[Lori Santos]

But the but the but the but. Yeah, well, like all things, you gotta do this strategy. But here's the strategy that I love. And it comes both from what we were talking about before in terms of using our imagination in positive ways. And it gets back to the ancients. This was a technique that the ancient stoics talked about. They called it negative visualization. But here's how goes. When I leave the studio right now, I'm going to get hit by a car. I'm going to lose the use of my legs, my phone's going to be dead, and I'm not going to be able to find my next appointment because I don't have a phone anymore. Something terrible is going to happen to my husband and I'm going to get a horrible phone call, like knock on one. That that's not going to happen. That took me like what, 30 seconds instantly. I'm much more grateful for my phone, much more grateful for my legs. I'm going to call my husband when I got this and be like, I didn't care. Something Terrible didn't happen to you, right? Honey, are you okay? That's negative visualization. The stoics thought that you should start every morning being like, I was exiled. I will lose my health, I will lose my house, I will lose my money. And you take a deep breath and you say, hey, that didn't happen. Now all of a sudden you're a little bit more kind of grateful for those things. I do this negative visualization exercise in my talks. Lately. I've been doing a lot of work on parenting and talking to parents about happiness. And I say, let's do a quick negative visualization. The last time you saw your kids, that was the last time you're ever going to see them. They're gone, never going to see them again. My guess is the next time even people listening see their kids or hug them, you're going to hug them a little bit. Like that's the power of imagination. It doesn't take us long to get to a reference point of we don't have the good things that we have in our lives. We just have to take a practice to do that, to recognize that a little bit more.

[Katie Milkman]

We all know people in our lives though that see the world through a very negative lens. Like nothing's ever going to work out. Like I'm worthless. It's only a matter of time before I get fired and then I'm going to be homeless and like I'm going to be starving on the street and I'm just going to die, you know, Like I know a lot of these people.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

So the key is that this, what you just shared isn't, isn't quite like it's a different thing, but like notice.

[Lori Santos]

That you do this like all day into the evening, two o' clock in the morning. They said just do it really quickly and realize you can shut it out.

[Katie Milkman]

I get that for the normal person. But what is the antidote for somebody who's really caught up in this looping negative, negative pattern of the mind that then translates into how they show up in the world and then they do manifest negative outcomes in their life because they're walking through life staring at their feet and expecting everything to go terribly wrong and kind of on some level are co creating that real world experience?

[Lori Santos]

Well, I think there's two strategies. One is a strategy just to shift your attention to the positive stuff. And this is what comes out of a gratitude practice. I feel like this is of kind, kind of in the common ether about people talking about the power of gratitude. Right. Just taking a Moment to notice the good stuff, even the little good stuff. The reason this is powerful is that it trains our attention to do the opposite of what we naturally do. We're naturally built to have this, like, negativity bias where we're noticing, well, my car's not good enough, or that bad thing happened. There's so much traffic today. The weather's so crummy in LA today, which, by the way, the weather is kind of crummy.

[Katie Milkman]

It's been terrible. It's been really crummy. Yeah, Believe me, I'm all upset about it. But keep going.

[Lori Santos]

Rather than, like, the temperature's actually quite pleasant. It's not, you know, like, raining, and.

[Katie Milkman]

We need rain and it's beautiful and the hills are alive and green.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly, yeah. No, just so beautiful out. But this is where our brain normally goes. Negativity bias. Oh, the weather's so crummy. Rather than, my God, we need a rain. This is great. This is going to protect LA from all the yucky stuff that happens here.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And so this. This is the practice of gratitude, right? You're training your attention, which normally just gloms on to the bad stuff, to find the good things. Sometimes when I talk to people, they find gratitude to me. Be hard, or you really have to be grateful or it feels cheesy. Another practice I love, which comes from the novelist Ross Gay, who has this book called the Book of Delights. He says, rather than going for things that you're grateful for, which kind of feels like, I don't know, highfalutin or hard, just notice the lights on the way here. I was at the airport coming into lax, and there's just one restroom in the ladies room that has this orchid there. And I was like, who's the staff member who put an orchid there? Just, like, a delight. Or like, driving here, there was somebody blasting Cypress Hell out of his car, like in a lowrider, and just, like, really savoring and being in Cypress Hill. And I was like, that's a little delight, L.A. is so cool.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I'm not taking extra work to, like, find these things that I'm so grateful for. Whatever. I'm just noticing, like, the world has these good, funny things that are amusing, that are beautiful, that are nice. You just, like, train your brain to find Wodroska. In his book, the Book of Delights, he wrote an essay about one delight every. And what that did was it made him. He had to find a delight because he had to write the essay about it.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And so I find that writing these things down or finding someone you can share delights with. I have some friends that I like will just text a delight to, you know, like, my God, dude. Listening to Cypress Hill and his low rider delight. You know, like what you're doing there is you're training your mind that would normally be looking for all the yucky stuff to find a few of the good things. That's how to train your attention. But the thing you brought up, the sort of ruminating, I think needs another strategy which is like you need to find ways to harness more positive self talk or at least nip the bag self talk in the bud. And one of the great ways for doing that, I know you had Ethan Cross on the show recently, is a lot of the strategies he talks about for distance self talk. Like literally talk to yourself in the second and third person. Not like, oh God, this is so terrible. Me, me, me. You just say, laurie, it's gonna be fine. You've gone through stuff like this before. You just switch the pronouns that you use to talk to yourself. And what that does is it puts you in good friend mode, it puts you in mentor mode, it puts you in problem solving mode rather than ruminate all the time. That's a hack, one of Ethan's hacks that I use all the time. And it's like been a game changer for me because like you just automatically switch the narrative in your head when you're getting real with yourself. Dude, it's not that bad. Come on. Like, and you can kind of.

[Katie Milkman]

It also allows you to be a bit of an objective observer. Like you're disidentifying with the problem and you're bifurcating your identity. Like, oh, there's me. And then there's like that other voice that is saying a lot of these things that now needs to sit in the backseat and be quiet for a little while.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I mean it helps you realize your thoughts are your thoughts, which is one of the biggest innovations the human mind has come up with to realize that like, wait, that's not the truth. That's just like the little dialogue that's going on in my brain. I could put a little stop gap there and it'll work better.

[Katie Milkman]

Human beings are storytelling and story receiving animals. And as you were sharing about the person who is in a negative thought pattern loop, so much of that is anchored in whatever story they're telling themselves about who they are, what they're capable of, and probably a very age old story that maybe they inherited or was impressed upon them. But nonetheless become cemented in such a way that we rarely question it. And for the person who, who's waking up every day and saying it's going to go terrible and this bad thing is going to happen, I believe we have the power to sort of change that narrative. And the practice that seems like it would be effective is to kind of do an inventory at the end of the day or in the morning and say, okay, here's what actually happened. And reaffirming where the bad thing didn't happen, like, and something good happened instead. And like, like kind of starting to attune your attention to all of those things as a way of kind of creating a new neural pathway. Does that make sense? Is there science behind that or.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, totally. I think it's partly using that negative visualization. Like, it could have gone bad, but it didn't kind of thing, which is powerful, but it also fits with what a lot of the science shows is the power of practices like journaling.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Which often is the kind of thing people do towards the end of the day.

[Charles Schwab]

Right?

[Lori Santos]

Journaling practices are really powerful because when we're writing down, we kind of just assume that writing is supposed to have a narrative arc. You kind of got this in middle school and high school where it's like, it's got to start and it's going to have a conflict and then you kind of solve the conflict. It's very hard in your journaling just to be like, this sucks. This is terrible. I'm terrible, I'm terrible. When you're writing, your brain just automatically goes into like, okay, but how can I make sense of this? We go into sense making, we go into problem solving. It's kind of similar to some of Ethan's stuff. When you talk like you're a friend, if you take that other perspective, you instantly go into coach mode or mentor mode. When you're writing, you go into sense making mode, into storytelling mode. And there's lots of evidence that expressive writing, about whatever the thing is that you're scared about or that you're worried about, you wind up coming up with better problem solving strategies. There's some lovely work by Jamie Pennebaker, who looked at the power of expressive writing even in domains where people went through terrible trauma. He did some famous work looking at the narratives of Holocaust survivors and found that the people that got content onto paper, that were able to talk about their stories, whether in writing or whether with an interviewer, they wound up kind of going into. And it had not just a huge effect on how they process that horrible trauma, but also on their health later on. So those individuals live longer, they had less heart attacks and so on, because it's like, you're not like, holding in the body all this stuff. And so I think this practice of express. If you get. Kind of get stuck in this negative thought pattern and nothing works, give yourself an hour to just, like, get stuff on paper. And don't try to have an agenda. Just kind of let it go down and your brain will go into the normal mode it goes into to try to make sense of stuff. Some stuff.

[Katie Milkman]

I find that to be very effective in my life. It's something I've been doing for a long time. And I've learned that when I start to resist, like, I've. I've done enough. Like, I. I need to stop. Like, you need to have a certain number of pages that you commit to because something happens, you know?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. That's why I said you have to push through that.

[Katie Milkman]

Resist. Yeah. Like, then you're like, suddenly you're writing all this crazy stuff, that your unconscious mind gets asked, activated, and things start to spill out, and more will be revealed in that.

[Lori Santos]

And I think, just remember that one of the reasons the human mind is cool is there's so many different parts and processes. We have so many different kind of narrators coming online. And there's a narrator in there that wants to understand things and wants to make sense of things. You just kind of get to give them space to kind of come out.

[Katie Milkman]

All those voices just wanting to be loved and heard, wanting to help.

[Lori Santos]

All the voices want us to be happy.

[Katie Milkman]

I think another way in which our intuition leads us astray with this idea of happiness is that it is very much rooted in circumstance. So talk a little bit about that.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. I think we assume if we were putting together a big ingredient list of what we need for a happy life, we would assume maybe some genetics, you want some genes to be happier. But you would also want to have great circumstances. You wouldn't want a life with a lot of conflict, a lot of problems. You'd want life with perfect circumstances. You get into the perfect column if you're like, you know, the students I work with, or you, lots of money, or great things happen to you, everything goes your way. Your flight never gets canceled, there's no traffic. You just want the circumstances to be perfect. But it turns out that circumstances have much less of an effect on our happiness than we think. For a couple reasons.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

One, when you have good circumstances over and over again, you don't keep noticing that they're good, you just get used to them. The other is if you have bad circumstances, right, you become paraplegic, you have a horrible act, accident, quickly you get used to that bad thing too, and it doesn't continue to affect you as much as you think. And so oftentimes we're much better off not trying to change our circumstances, getting richer, changing where we live, but then changing our behaviors and our mindsets because those things are going to matter more, right? Getting more social connection, getting out and moving your body, stopping that negative self talk, finding the delights, those kinds of things are just intervention wise, going to have a much bigger impact on your happiness than changing your circumstances. It's also the case that changing your circumstances for a lot of circumstances is like hard, right? Like you could do it, it often takes, you can earn more money, but that's like much more of a pain than engaging in a journaling practice every night or like writing down a few delights every week.

[Katie Milkman]

It is a difficult thing though, because if you're somebody who came up from very difficult circumstances or your life is one in which it's difficult just by dint of where you find yourself, it's hard to claw out of that. It's like, you don't want to be dismissive of that. If somebody's like, you know, who's unhappy but they're caught in something.

[Lori Santos]

Let's begin out of the circumstances I'm talking about are not like you're in a refugee situation or you've been put in an El Salvadorian prison or Although bracketed, what we know is people who are in those horrible situations sometimes find a lot of purpose, a lot of social connection, a lot of happiness, right? But if those are the circumstances that you're listening right now and you're like, that's the situation I'm in. That's not what I mean. What I mean is for the person who has hoot on the table, who has a roof over their head, who's not in a terrible war zone or terrible trauma, I'm talking about the person who's like, oh, if I could only make $10,000 more a year, I'd be so much happier. I just need to move to a better neighborhood. I need a better phone or car. Those are the circumstantial changes I'm talking about. And the sad thing is changing those things are just not gonna impact your happiness in the way you think. This is similar when we were talking about happiness before and we say like, oh, money doesn't buy happiness. That's not entirely true. Money does buy happiness. If you don't have any. If you can't put a move over your head, you don't have food on the table. Yes, getting more money will allow you the basic needs. You need to, like, be a little bit happier. It's just that after a certain point, once you get those basic needs, more money doesn't impact your happiness. Like, you think.

[Katie Milkman]

What are the questions that you ask the person who comes to you, Lori, and says, says, I've done everything right. I checked all the boxes. You know, I went to the schools. You know, I. I got the job, I worked hard. I, you know, got married. I had the two kids. And, you know, I've. I've done everything, and I succeeded. Like, I kind of have it all. And I'm not necessarily unhappy, but I can't say that I'm happy either. I know that there is a greater happiness available to me. I just don't know what to do or how to get it.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. Well, first I would start by asking questions about their behaviors. You know, you have this perfect job and all this stuff. What's your social connection like?

[Katie Milkman]

Maybe not perfect, but, like, good, reasonable.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. What's your social connection like?

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Are you putting time into the connections that matter? Are you putting time into doing good in the world? One of the things we know is that treating ourselves just doesn't make us as happy as treating other people.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I might ask about, like, simple physical habits. Are you moving your body? Are you getting sleep? Or is all that at the expense of doing. Doing this other stuff that you talked about? And then I would ask about kind of how you think about emotions. Right. Are you trying to get positive emotion? Do you get positive emotions? We don't often think about sense of wonder, sense of awe, humor, those kinds of things. And I might even ask, how are you engaging with your strengths? What are the things that you find purpose in and value, and are you doing that stuff? I'd really kind of ask in detail about people's thought patterns and their behaviors, because often that's the trick. That's what people aren't investing in. And I see this even again in my Yale students who have every privilege. I think they fall a lot into the category you're talking about. Like, I got into the perfect school. I'm, you know, young and healthy and all that. My future's so bright. Why am I so miserable? And it's often because those are the same students who are mortgaging Their social connection filled with thought patterns of just, like, such anxiety about the future not sleeping. Right. You know, they're kind of doing the stuff that we know kind of will negatively affect your happiness in the service of trying to go after this stuff that probably won't impact their happiness as much as they think.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah. I think in addition to that, for those students or the person who has climbed the mountain, there's a sense of betrayal because they've played the game and followed all the rules. And implicit in the game is this idea that happiness is the reward. Right.

[Lori Santos]

Right. When you arrive there, you'll be happily ever after. You're supposed to.

[Katie Milkman]

This is a fantastic lie that has, you know, persevered within this narrative. And I wonder if it's more acute in America because this notion of the American dream and, you know, kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps and, you know, these stories. Back to stories. It's like, this is the story of what it means to live here and how to go from where you are to where you want to be.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. One of the stories I watch in my Yale students is that there's this phenomenon and the answer Internet called admissions videos. So when students are about to find out if they're gonna get to college, they've got a camera tiktoks watching, and they hear. And so in my class, I show students these admission videos. When students find out they get into Yale, which is like a big hurrah, they click on this little website and it plays this Yale theme song goes, bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow. It says, you got into Yale. And students scream and they cry. And their parents are in these videos screaming and crying. And the students will watch these videos and have a moment of sadness. Cause they're like, I remember that moment. And that moment was a good. But, like, 30 seconds later, I was like, now I just have to do the same thing to, like, get into medic. Like, carrot just moved, Right? And it's like you didn't even.

[Katie Milkman]

Pain, uncertainty and the need for constant work.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

[Rich Roll]

You're listening to me and Rich Roll on the Rich Roll Podcast. We'll have even more fun conversation after the break. Hey, happiness last listeners, if you're planning on taking a family trip to Orlando this summer to be transported to magical universes, well, you should know there's one portal you don't want to miss. Your portal to the original universe. Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where they have flying dragons, too. It's about science, where no spells are required. Walk beneath a towering Falcon 9 booster touch a real moon rock and come face to face with space shuttles Atlantis. You can even meet an astronaut. And get this, our friends at Kennedy Space Center Visitor complex are offering $7 off admission with code happy7. Discover something real. AutoTrader is powered by Auto Intelligence Put simply, their tools and data sync to your exact budget and preferences to tailor car buying to. You want a pink midsize SUV with 22 inch rims and a a V8? How about a two door convertible with a premium sound system and heated cup holders? Nothing's too specific. AutoTrader powered by auto Intelligence helps you find your dream car at the right price in no time because they do all the hard work for you. Imagine knowing what you can afford before you even start shopping. Having access to the largest automotive inventory anywhere with enough search filters to make it the personal only. Seeing listings based on your budget and your must haves. Finding the car that gives you the feels and the deals while feeling like you won the negotiation without negotiating and you can close the deal however you want. AutoTrader powered by auto Intelligence is the totally you way to buy a car. Visit autotrader.com to find your perfect ride. This is an ad by BetterHelp pretty much every time I scroll through TikTok or some other social media media site, I'm usually horrified by the mental health.

[Lori Santos]

Advice I see there.

[Rich Roll]

As a psychology professor who knows the research, I'm often shocked by the kinds of tips that pass for good advice. But I also get it. These days it feels like there's advice for pretty much everything. But how do you know what actually works for you? With so much information overload about mental health and wellness, it can be a struggle to know what's true and what actions to take using trusted resources like the ones we share on this podcast. But you can also talk to a professional therapist to get personalized recommendations to break through the noise. If you're thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. You can join a session with a therapist at the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Talk it out with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Lauri that's better h e l p.com Lauri L-A U R I E.

[Katie Milkman]

So we're kind of dancing around the edges here, but there are well identified scientifically evidence backed pillars to happiness There is relationships, like connection with other people, like how social are you in your community? And the low hanging fruit, like sleep and nutrition and physical exercise and being in nature. These are relatively easy to identify and also easy to fix. But there are other pillars that are a little bit more elusive. Like when you talk about purpose and meaning, these are kind of big, scary words that I think are hard, hard to get our heads around. Like, what does that mean? Like, if I do I have purpose in my life, is there meaning? Is what I'm doing meaningful? Is it meaningful to me? Is there some greater animating force that's propelling me forward that is of value? Like, how to identify that? And if it's missing, how do you fix it? Because I think when you say to somebody, like, well, you just need more purpose or you need meaning, you know, it's like, what are you supposed to do with that? Right? You know, I think it's paralyzing and I think it leads to people feeling guilty, if not ashamed.

[Lori Santos]

Totally, totally. And I think two things there. One is, I think when we think about purpose, you know, in our brains, I think we image like the capital P purpose. Like, it's so big. Some of the folks I've talked to on my podcast have talked about small P purpose, like, you know, little lowercase P. And I think when you think about it like that, you say, oh, it's like the conversation I have with the barista at the coffee shop. Or it's that I help my nephew with his homework, or it's that I really care about this hobby that I engage in. I find it fun. I like, I like moving up, right? Like, I get a sense of purpose for like running marathons, whatever it is, right? If you're not thinking like, you have to like, you know, become Steve Jobs or solve cancer or whatever. Like when you realize it's like, oh, that's the thing that just kind of. I feel better about myself when I'm doing that thing. I feel more authentically myself when I'm. I'm doing that. That's the kind of little P purpose. And I think you just want to build more of that in. I also use a technique with my students that get them to think about kind of more in an abstract way, what some of those things are. The little P purpose exercise is trying to figure out what are you already doing that does that. But a different exercise you can use is to try to figure out what researchers call your signature strengths. Researchers like Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman have done this work where they've kind of gone cross culturally and tried to figure out, what are the strengths, what are the values that different people can have, the good traits that you can in the world? And they've come up with a list of 24 of these things they call character strengths. They're things like bravery and love of learning, a zest for life, curiosity, helping people, social intelligence and stuff. And what they find is that all of these are good. All those things I just listed are great, but some of them you resonate with more than others. You can actually go online if you Google character strengths. There's a website called the Values in Action Character strengths, where you can take a psychometric quiz and look at this. You can just look at the big list of these. I find just looking at them, you go through like, oh, yeah, bravery is good, but, oh, humor, that's me. Or love of learning, that's me. Or whatever it is. The idea would be your signature strengths. And what research by Seligman and his colleagues has found is that the more you use your signature strength in your daily life, the happier you feel, the more purpose you have, like, the more like you love whatever you're doing in your workplace. For example, if you use your signature strengths, you can turn whatever job you have into a calling. And the reason I like the work on the signature strengths is that some of it's been done not in jobs like our job. We have this wonderful podcaster job or professor where I could build in all these things. A lot of the most creative work on signature strengths is done in domains where folks have jobs that are very constrained. This woman, Amy Rzynski, who's at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers. These are people who are washing the linen for people who are sick or mopping the floors. You don't think they could bring in bravery or curiosity or Prud or whatever it is.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

But what she finds is that between like a quarter to a third of janitorial staff workers say they love their job. They have to work to earn an income, but they would do it even if they hit the lottery, because they love what they do. And those are the ones who are naturally infusing their strengths into their job. She tells on my podcast, she told these lovely stories. She had a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward. And so if you're listening right now and you had chemotherapy or know someone who's, you know, people get sick, right? So a bad thing about this treatment is People tend to vomit. So a lot of this dude's job was cleaning up vomit. But he said, that's not my job. My job is. My strengths are humor and social intelligence. My job is to make that person laugh. The person's having a crummy day, and I see it as my duty to, like, make them laugh before I walk out of there. And he had. I guess he had, like, a standard joke where he said, like, oh, there's a lot of vomit. It's overtime today. Like, keep it coming, you know? You know, it's a stupid joke, but the person would laugh, and he's like, that's my job. Right. She talked about. About another janitorial staff worker who worked in a coma ward. So this was a staff worker who couldn't interact with the patients because the patients were all in a coma and unconscious. But every day she would walk around and move the artwork in the room. Her strength was creativity. I guess she thought maybe the patients will notice or wake up. Probably not medically accurate, but it gave her some purpose. Going to work. These are the ways we can infuse purpose into our work. And I love the janitor work because, again, not all of us have jobs where we can switch things around and do some intellectual switch, but everybody has a job where you can bring some of these things in a little bit. And if you can't do it at work, bring it in in your leisure and stuff. So if you're not sure what those are, I think Google character strengths. Just look at the big list or take one of these formal tests or just kind of have a sense of when I feel most authentically myself, what am I engaging in, and just try to do more of that.

[Katie Milkman]

There's something wonderfully counterintuitive about that, though, because I would have thought that that inventory would be an attempt to identify the things that bring you joy or remembering when the last time, you know, you felt, like, really happy, what were you. What were you doing to, like, set it in the context of strengths as opposed to activities where you really feel yourself? I mean, you mentioned authenticity, so that's part of this. But why isn't it my version of that? Like, why is it strengths versus, like, activities that make me feel happy?

[Lori Santos]

I think ultimately they're one and the same for you. It's just that the ones that might work most for you might not be the ones that work for somebody else.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Like, there's people that, like, you know, their signature strength is humor.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Katie Milkman]

I love working on my weaknesses. Yeah, your strength Is that, that, that.

[Lori Santos]

Could be, that could be something.

[Katie Milkman]

I don't know who those people people.

[Lori Santos]

Are, but there are strengths that are bravery, for example, which I think depending on how you think of those weaknesses, it could be part of that. There are strengths that are self regulation that what I'm going to do is really try hard to kind of regulate my deepest emotions. Strengths of things like prudence, where it's like I want to just very carefully work on these things. Right. So the set of strengths when you look at the big list is pretty broad. And a lot of times the thing that feels most authentic to you when you look at the list, you'll be like, oh, that's kind of on there for me. You have artists who have strengths of things like appreciation of beauty or zest for life. A lot of folks who have strengths that are related to social intelligence, like kindness or forgiveness or social intelligence, kind of empathy and understanding people. When you look at the big list, usually folks have some that fit with that. And often if you're using those things, it can be powerful.

[Katie Milkman]

How do you parse the difference between purpose and meaning? Is it that meaning is this emergent property of finding some purpose even if it's a small p purpose by investing in your strengths?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, these definitions always, I mean, it's complicated.

[Katie Milkman]

It becomes like a mind bender. And I just like, I think of meaning as all these words are like the same, but they're not the same and are like, does one come from the other? Like, you know, I'm still after like having a million conversations about this. I still don't, I'm still not sure.

[Lori Santos]

I really get it the way I think about it. And again, I think we all, we use many of these terms interchangeably and it gets so much more complicated when we look cross culturally. There's a set of researchers at Harvard who are doing a project of trying to catalog emotional words that exist in one language or one culture, but that don't translate to other languages and cultures. And it's a really fascinating list to go through because me as a monolingual English speaking American, just see all these words of like, wait, I kind of know that emotion, but I never had a word for it. One of my favorite ones maybe might not translate as well in la. It translates a lot on the east coast, where I live in the Northeast is the feeling that you get on the first spring day where you can sit outside and have a beer in like the outdoors. That emotion. I'm like, oh man, I know that I don't Have a word for it.

[Katie Milkman]

It's like, I mean, listen, I'm from the East Coast, I lived in Ithaca, so.

[Lori Santos]

But this is the point. You know, if you look in Asian cultures, you have lots of different words that are hard to translate for an American that mean different aspects of contemplation or peacefulness or kind of attention to what's going on in the world. Acceptance, right? So point is, it's hard cross culturally. It's hard even for these terms that we all use in English together. I think of meaning as the experience. I get a sense of meaning from engaging in the purpose, which is kind of the activity or the kind of thing you're doing.

[Katie Milkman]

It matters less how you define those things than the actions that you're taking. Like, you're very action based. You're like, here are these things that you should do. Get into action. Journaling, identify your strengths. Like all of these, you know, sort of snackable, you know, what do you call them again? Rewirables.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Katie Milkman]

That are there to counter program all the intuitions and instincts that lead us astray when we're on autopilot.

[Lori Santos]

And I think this is the thing I didn't say that I would say to the person who's like, I feel like I'm doing everything right, or I feel like I'm really struggling. I have this rumination. I think that the thing that really gives me hope about all this stuff is like, there's like hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of studies on these things, these little snackable activities or mindset shifts. And they all work. They all work in a striking way, right? They don't take your happiness from 0 to 100, but they give small, reliable, significant increases in your happiness. I know you had Dan Harris on the show recently. He talks about 10% happier. And that's a great name for a podcast and a title for anything because that's kind of the range that you're going up and all these little meaningful changes. I'm suggesting you get a little social connection. You'll go from a 7 on a 10 point happiness scale to a 8. You get, you get some exercise in half hour of cardio every day. Like, you'll move from a six to a seven, right? Like that's about the magnitude of increase. But that increase is available for all the different things we've talked about, right? So you can have your little a la carte snack. List of different strategies you use to feel happier. And if you can manage to turn them into habits, to put them into effect, you'll wind up reaping the benefits.

[Katie Milkman]

Another important pillar here is contribution to others service, basically which as a 12 step person I know well and had to learn the hard way that this is the most reliable and truest antidote to self obsession. And I think self obsession is sort of at the root of a lot of unhappiness out there. We're just constantly thinking about ourselves all day long, whether positively or negatively. And if we can get out of that and invest ourselves in somebody else. I mean this is a big part of the community piece too. Like be with other people. You have to get out of your own narrative and immerse yourself in the world. But when you invest yourself in somebody else's welfare, even in the smallest way, it's incredible how that can shift your mood, your energy and your perspective. Perspective.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think this is something that culture gets wrong. We talked about culture getting manifesting wrong. I think that's number one thing we get wrong on TikTok, but number two thing we get wrong about happiness on TikTok is this. If you look anywhere on TikTok, it's all about self care. Treat yourself self, self, self. Like you look at the studies of happy people and happy people are not focused on themselves. Happy people are very other oriented. They're doing nice stuff for other people.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Controlled for income. Happier people tend to donate more money to charity than not so happy people.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's just these subtle correlations between doing nice stuff for other and feeling better. But then you have all these experiments where you kind of force participants to do nice stuff for other people. One of my favorite is by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues where they walk up to folks on the street, hand them 20 bucks and say, either hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice to treat yourself, or hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice for somebody else. You could donate it to a homeless shelter, you could buy a friend something nice, but has to go to someone else. When they call people at the end of the day or even at the end of the week, they find that people are happier when they treated someone else rather than when they treated themselves.

[Katie Milkman]

Right. That money to that other person, if you qualify it, it then becomes a burden for them as opposed to an enriching experience where you felt like, oh, I like, you know, I did something nice for somebody.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And this is a spot where even in my own life, if I'm not careful with it, like there's just like a terrible opportunity cost because like all the money you spend on yourself to feel better. You know, buying yourself a massage or buying yourself that new gadget or buying yours, treating yourself to a nice glass, making it worse. Well, it's just the same money that you could have spent on someone else. I often joke that every time my brain is like, I'm going to get a manicure, I'm going to do something nice for myself, I'm like, wait, can I give my sister in law a manicure? Can I buy that massage for someone in my workplace? It genuinely is one of these things that even violates my intuitions even saying it now. I'm like, dude, I would like the massage better than my sister in law, whatever.

[Katie Milkman]

But you're cultivating abundance and abundance mindset instead of lack, you have to hoard it because you're afraid it'll run out or you'll run out.

[Lori Santos]

And the benefits is like when you do nice things for other people, like what you get back in the social connection is huge, right? My producer and co writer for my podcast, Ryan Dilley, tells this story of he was walking into a coffee shop and someone was walking out with this cookie they were very excited about and then dropped it on the threshold of the door as they were walking out. It seemed sad. And he ran into the coffee shop and brought this person a cookie and gave them the cookie and the person was really happy. And he's like, months later, I'm still telling that story. I don't ever tell the story. At the time I walked into the coffee shop and just got myself the cookie. Now it's millions of people on your show are hearing it. And so these moments of good deeds that we do for others, they percolate. They percolate in our own memory, they percolate in our social conversations. Even just hearing Brian's story, probably all your people have this little boost in happiness that we get and so we forget that our actions and our things we do to feel happy at the moment, some of them live on better than others and the things we do for other people live on in special ways.

[Katie Milkman]

Is there there any science to establish? I want to call it a placebo effect, but it's not quite that. What I'm getting at is the intention behind it. Like, does it matter if you give of yourself from a place of, you know, open heartedness and generosity or you're doing it selfishly? Because Lori Santos said, if I do this, it makes me happy. And I know just based on my anecdotal personal experience that it actually doesn't matter. Like if I Just even if I don't want to do the thing, I know that it will make me happier. And so to be selfless from a selfish person back to perspective, it still ends up creating a shift.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think that's true for all the like we get the benefit from the behavior in a lot of the cases. I think again with all these things there's a little bit of nuance. Laura Acknen has this work that if you feel forced to do nice things for others, like you don't have any choice, you don't have any agency in it. That can be not good. This is one of the reasons we see things like caregiver burnout and so on. Like you have no choice, you have to be doing these nice things. That's not great. But if you come at it from like, all right, I don't really think this behavior, I'll try it, it kind of works. And look, that's true in all these domains. You know, like, I respect so many people that get the like the wonderful emotional hit that have the like craving for working out. I never have that. It's always a slog for me. I've hoped that doing it more and more, I' I'll get into it. Never is. But every time I do it when I'm done, I'm like, oh, that was great. Why did I hate doing that? What's my problem?

[Charles Schwab]

Right?

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

And I think the same thing can be true for doing nice things for others. For me that's also true for talking to people. I know that talking to strangers from all my studies again, I can tell you the journal article name that it makes you happier. But I'm just don't really feel like talking to people. But then inevitably when I do it, I'm like, okay, I should really do it. I wind up up feeling better. Even on the plane over here today, I was sitting next to someone who kind of plopped down and this individual sort of disabled and had a tough time getting in and was sort of seemingly sort of frustrated. And I had this moment of like, all I want to do is look at my phone and check my email. That's all my craving and motivation is telling me to do. But I know happiness wise, I should try to brighten this person's day. And so I did it and we had a little chat and then I felt a little bit brighter, you know, the first 10 minutes into the flight and feeling feel like I made his version of that flight a little bit better than if I was just kind of on my own.

[Katie Milkman]

How does this break down between introverts and extroverts? Because that type of behavior comes a little bit more naturally to the extroverted person. And so it would follow that extroverts are happier because they're more social. They like to be around a lot of people and it's an easier lift for them to kind of of engage with people out in the world. Whereas an introvert is like afraid of those situations or is avoiding those and isolating. So is there science around those two archetypes?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, yeah. Well, first is the, is there a difference in the happiness of introverts and extroverts? And the answer seems to be yes. Where extroverts are happier, probably presumably because they're socially connecting more often and more easily.

[Katie Milkman]

They can be more self obsessed though.

[Lori Santos]

They might be more self obsessed. Yeah, it's going against them. There's a lot of nuance, as I said, for all these. But there's a different question, right, which is if introverts engaged in more social connection, if they kind of pushed against their natural tendency not to do it, but tried it out more, would they wind up being happier? And this is something that's been studied by lots of folks. My favorite experiments on this are by Nick Aptley at the University of Chicago where he does these studies where he forces people to talk to strangers. That situation I was in, talking to the person on the plane. He basically makes people do that on commuter trains in Chicago. He says you'll get a $10 Starbucks gift card if you spend the train ride talking to someone. And everyone hates to do it, but they do it because the promise of the $10 Starbucks gift card in social science.

[Katie Milkman]

Amazing. Amazing what a gift card will do.

[Lori Santos]

Yes, but people predict that this is going to be terrible talking to a stranger on the train. And introverts predict that it's going to be more. I think the scale doesn't go low enough for them to say how terrible it will be. But both introverts and extroverts get a positive emotion boost from talking about talking to the stranger, which is not what people expect.

[Katie Milkman]

Is the boost higher for the introvert? Because there seems to be more to be gained. Like there's a bigger gap there.

[Lori Santos]

So the test that they did is the difference between your prediction and what the outcome was. They didn't compare introverts and extroverts. But what you find is the prediction error, Right? What you think is going to happen versus what really happens, that difference is much bigger for the Introverts, but everybody overall gets a positive boost. This is the thing, I'll tell you, because you're going to look at the comment section of the show that we're going to get the most hate mail about. Because when I did a podcast about introverts, try it out and get a little bit more social, we got tons and tons of hate mail. I had this fantastic guest on Jessica Pan who wrote this book called Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to An Introvert's Guide to Extroverting. And she was this incredibly hardcore introvert, like, would go to parties and have to go cry in the bathroom because she hated being social so much. And read the work on extroverts being happier and she's like, I'm just going to try it for a year. And she did one of these experiments that journalists do where they do the thing that will make them happy for a whole year. And she did improv comedy, she went to networking events, she talked to people on the train. She worked with Nick Epley about this. And at the end of the year, she was way happier. And at the end of the year, she found something interesting, which is like, it's hard at first because your prediction is wrong. If you think about that prediction error I just talked about, about, you see where it gets hard. You're an introvert. You're like, ah, I predict calling my friend. That's going to be yucky. Or talking to the barista at the coffee shop, oh, that's going to be yucky. You never do it. You don't notice it feel good and you keep not doing it right. It's like when we get in bad cycles of whatever, you know, I see this sometimes in my own, like, fitness journey of, like, I don't feel like exercise and I don't do it, then I forget, oh, my God, it feels amazing. Then it's harder for me to do it next time because I didn't do it before, and so on. And so folks like Nick Epley think that this is kind of one of the things that happens to end introverts is that you predict it's going to be crappy. You behaving based on your predictions, you don't engage in social connection. And then it's harder next time and it's harder and it's harder. And so his advice would be baby steps. This is not like going to a party or doing improv comedy or like, you know, going out with 300 of your best friends. This is just like text a good friend and say, hey, can we connect for coffee? Or like, you know, set a time to call, like someone you haven't talked to in a long time. It's not doing that all the time. It's just getting a little bit more. More of that in and try to see, Try to notice if it makes you feel better.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah. Well, let me try to inhabit the voice of Susan Cain right now and speak, you know, speak to the introvert thing. I think there is a distinction between the introvert who's just predisposed to a little bit more solitude and quiet and tends to thrive in those types of environments or is more suited to smaller gatherings, let's say, than the introvert who has this fear or this terror of these. And it has this negative predictive kind of brain around what happens when they're in those more crowded environments. And I think on top of that, I would imagine that part of the pushback that you get for this is that beneath it all, there's this perspective that it's better to be. Be an extrovert and that if you're an introvert, you should be more extroverted or there's something wrong with you. And some people are more wired to be. Many, many people are more wired to be more introverted than extroverted. I happen to be one of them. And it's very comforting to hear Susan talk about this and say, there's nothing wrong with you. You know what I mean? And that's not to say that what you're sharing is incorrect either. It's that, you know, if you are isolating and cutting yourself off from life because of this predisposition that you have, that there is greater happiness that you can find if you get out of your comfort zone and put yourself in those uncomfortable positions. It doesn't mean that you have to become an extrovert or that there's an expectation around that. Do you think that's exactly right?

[Lori Santos]

That's exactly. I think when I talk about the work in social connection, some people hear me saying, don't be an introvert. That's wrong. Everybody should be extroverts. Not true. I think there's a lot of happiness boost that comes from certain aspects of introversion, like contemplation.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Time in a sense of kind of like being with yourself, understanding your own intentions. Right. I think there's forms of happiness that come from solitude that you can't get from social connection. That said, what we know is for better or for worse, one of the ways that we boost our mood and improve our overall happiness and life satisfaction is to have rich connections with other people. Not to like go to the hugest party and like whatever, but like make sure you're maintaining your social connection even with weak ties like the barista at the coffee shop or the stranger on the train. And what it means is if you're an extra, if you're an introvert that's not doing any of that, you're leaving opportunities for happiness on the table. And I think one thing to remember is there's so much of the advice about happiness that at least for some personality types or people with certain backgrounds feels like a little bit of a stretch. You know, like I think sometimes like, you know, some people might listen to this podcast cause like eating super healthy, like eating plant based and getting with from processed foods feels like a stretch for people given some backgrounds. Even, you know, if you're the kid who was picked on in gym class, like the, you know, moving your body every day might feel like a little bit of a stretch. I think social cognition is one that's just like that too.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's a little bit of a stretch for people, but if you engage in it, it doesn't make sense. Mean it's better or worse. But there's an opportunity for you on the table that if you engage with that a little bit more, you might wind up feeling better.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah. You don't have to break the rubber band, but you can, you know, extend it a little bit.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly. And take a moment to notice. Because I think one of the interesting things about so many things in this happiness space is that our predictions are wrong.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

We predict this thing is not going to work. We do it. Oh, actually I feel a little bit better. We predict this thing. Oh, definitely going to work. More money, status, whatever. I still got to go after more of it.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And so one of the reasons I like being a nerdy scientist in this space is I want people to test their predictions.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Try it out. Maybe it won't work for you. Maybe it will. But you can do your own experiments on yourself and see what, what, what works.

[Katie Milkman]

And those experiments require a little bit of discomfort.

[Lori Santos]

Yes.

[Katie Milkman]

Right. I mean that's the piece. Right. So it's, it's that Susan David thing. Like discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life.

[Lori Santos]

Yes.

[Katie Milkman]

So you have to be willing to step outside yourself, even if just a little bit to reap the benefits of any of these things that you're talking about.

[Lori Santos]

And this gets to something that we haven't really talked about, right? Which, which is negative emotions, senses of this kind of pushing yourself, feeling uncomfortable. I think that not only is discomfort the price of a meaningful life, but so are all negative emotions, right? Anxiety, stress, overwhelm, anger, all these things are prices for a meaningful life. And that means that we need to not run away from negative emotions. I think sometimes people hear about my class and assume it's this terrible Ivy League toxic positivity thing where I'm teaching people to be in happy emotions emoji all the time. And I think that's not true at all. I think what we wanna do is find ways to notice, accept, embrace, learn from our negative emotions, but also find good ways to regulate them.

[Katie Milkman]

Do you get criticism for the class?

[Lori Santos]

Oh, yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

Is there skepticism that you're treating this subject matter in kind of a reductive way? Or what is the nature of the critique?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, part of the critique is these snowflakes that need a class on happiness, Right. And I think those are people who just honestly haven't seen the data of just how bad this mental health crisis is. I think there are also folks who think we're treating it from a scientific perspective and therefore we're missing out on other ways to kind of come to these truths.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Which is one of the reasons I always like to bring in the wisdom of the ancients and philosophers, often, sometimes even spiritual traditions. Right? Because I like to see the science in part because often our intuitions are wrong. So it helps me to see the data of. Oh, actually talking to somebody does make you feel good. But so many of the ancient traditions figured this stuff out and had deep insights, even in the absence of these psychological and neural data on these questions.

[Katie Milkman]

What is your most controversial or contrarian opinion about happiness?

[Lori Santos]

Honestly, introversion, like introverts could actually get a little bit more social connection. It won't be so bad. That's when I get attacked on manifesting doesn't work in the way you think. When I get attacked on money doesn't make you happy, I always know what's contrary.

[Katie Milkman]

You're like, yeah, you're just whatever is going against the grain of TikTok trends.

[Lori Santos]

It might be. Honestly, it really is. Like if I could tweak the algorithm, we'd all. I'd get much less hate mail. I mean, I think another big one really is just this idea that being happy is ultimately good if what you want to do is face challenges and push yourself a different attack. I get yet is kind of look at the world right now. It is falling Apart from the economy to the climate to whatever, it's just a crappy place with many big structural problems. You're going around telling everybody to be happy and accept the things in life and find your purpose. People need to not be happy. People need to be out there pissed off, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention kind of thing. And this is a pushback I actually get from a lot of my students. I think a lot of the young people I work with are really inclined to worry about the big problems and fix them and think that the way you face those big problems is not to be happy in the face of them or to kind of be happy in ways that ignore the structural problems. I think sometimes people hear, for example, more money doesn't make you happy, that what I'm doing is justifying really terrible practices where billionaires get richer. It's like, no, no, no. I think what we need to remember is two things. One is that we can have individual change and individual strategies for feeling happier that work alongside the structural changes for making you happ write in your gratitude journal and doing expressive writing if you're in a terrible job situation while working to change that terrible job situation.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And those things should go together.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's not like, well, just expressive writing and then you can put up with these terrible bad practices. But I think the other thing is that researchers have gone out and asked the question like, what is this set of psychology and the set of emotions that you need to be the kind of person that's fighting these big structural problems is work by Konstantin Kushlev at Georgetown. And what he finds is that it's actually the people who are experiencing the most positive emotion, who are the ones who have the bandwidth to go out and fight this stuff. He looks at folks who are interested in, for example, in things like climate justice, and asks who are the ones who aren't just anxious about climate change, but really putting on solar panels, going to a protest, donating money? And he finds that it's the folks who experience the most positive emotion who are taking the actions. It's kind of like putting your own oxygen mask on first. And so this is something that I really push is that when people are like, well, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. It's like, yes, but a little bit of self care to protect yourself, kind of protecting your own bandwidth is going to make you the kind of person who has the resilience to kind of fight the big fights.

[Katie Milkman]

And so whatever you're pursuing, whether it's some strain of activism or you have an ambition. What I'm hearing, hearing is that happiness on some level is actually strategic in achieving those goals because otherwise you're on an unsustainable fuel source and you'll burn out. Right. So if you're fulfilled in finding meaning and purpose and all of these aspects of what it means to be happy in the pursuit of these difficult things, then you're going to stay in the game. Otherwise, like, if you're just fueled by anger and outrage and this has to change, change. You know, when you're young, it's like, you know, of course you think that you'll be able to do that forever, Right. But you're not going to last. Like, you're. You're not going to be able to stay in it for all four quarters of the game.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

And I love your idea that it's fuel.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Because I think it really is, you know, and I think this is a spot where we get the metaphors all wrong.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Another thing we hear on TikTok all the time is like, work, life, balance, right. Which I think in our brains, we picture like a scale. Like, well, when work is going up, when I'm performing really hard, like, you know, life is going down, they can't kind of. And I think a much more accurate way of thinking about it, which we get from the science, is the sense of work, life, harmony, right. Where if you're prioritizing life, by which I mean kind of happiness and mental health and so on, you're going to work better, you're going to perform better, you're going to have more bandwidth to do the stuff you care about. And this is the kind of thing we see in study after study. You give people a hard problem at work. One of these was done with medical doctors, where it's like you have to kind of. You get some tough problem, you have to figure out, like, what's the diagnosis? It's really tricky. You need true, innovative, out of the box thinking. You put some set of doctors in a good mood first. They just watch silly cat videos on YouTube ahead of time. They're the ones that come up with the innovative solution.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You have to go through something really uncomfortable at work, whether that's a terrible time, like Covid or just pushing yourself on a hard workout. But you go into that listening to happy, upbeat music versus, like, down eo or music, and, like, you're gonna push through better if you're just like, you know, and so it seems so Simple. But I think we get it wrong, right? We're like, well, I, you know, I have this ambition that I really care about and I'm just gonna like make myself super miserable. I'm not gonna see my friends, I'm not gonna sleep, I'm gonna just like, you know, but then I'll get to the success and I'll feel happy. And we get it wrong in two ways. One, that we talked about, like the success, that arrival isn't gonna make us as happy as we think. But second, if what you really wanna do is perform well, you're not doing that as well. If you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not giving yourself that sort of happiness fuel that we know performance, like true, exceptional, optimal performance really requires.

[Katie Milkman]

I think that's a really important point. I know what it's like to be laser focused on something and lose myself in the pursuit of a name or a goal. And there is something dopamine inducing about that. There's like a euphoria of like, I'm all in man, and I don't have time for anything else. That in and of itself is a form of self obsession where you begin to believe, or I should say I, you know, I, I have been lured into, into places where I would think is happiness, like, is, is it really all that important? Like, it feels like an indulgence and also something I can live without because I have this purpose and it's fulfilling and it's giving me meaning and it's driving me forward and I have this aim and I'm gonna, I'm gonna get there. And so not only is or are all of the things that you need to do to engender happiness inconvenient, they just feel indulgent and like a distraction. And that is part and parcel of like the strivers dilemma. We had this woman in here the other day, Dr. Judith Joseph, who talks about, you know, high functioning depression. And I'm like reading this book and I'm like, oh my God, yeah, they changed the name. Yeah, like seeing God, you know, anyway. But I can also imagine the person who has a very challenging life, like the single mom with two jobs and kids and has to take the us to work and life is just hard. And for that person, that person as well I would imagine is in a position where they could develop the perspective that this happiness thing is an indulgence. And I can't take my eyes off the ball because people need me and I need to provide and so make the argument for the self care, at least at a base level to cultivate some degree of happiness from that sustainability perspective.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. Like you just can't sustain that for very long. And again, we know this in other domains. I remember one thing from you reading your book that I loved in your story was, you know, even when you're training to be as fast as possible, you didn't want to run as fast as possible. You like actually want to be at.

[Katie Milkman]

I don't know, I'm not a fitness.

[Lori Santos]

Person, but 80% right?

[Charles Schwab]

Yes.

[Katie Milkman]

Conservation and efficiency and active rest.

[Lori Santos]

Right, Active rest. We understand that in other high performance fields, we forget that when it comes to just performing at our jobs in our life. And I think of active rest as the kind of fuel that we need to do it better.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

That sometimes what we need is a break. Sometimes what we need is like a moment to notice that stupid delight in the world to like, you know, have a gabfest with our good girlfriends.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Like we just kind of need this time to boost our overall mood and to kind of feel good in life and to feel good with life. And ultimately if we're doing that, it just makes it easier to achieve the bigger aims that we have for ourselves. I hope you've been enjoying my appearance.

[Rich Roll]

On the Rich Roll podcast. We'll have even more fun after the break. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. If you're planning on taking a family trip to Orlando this summer to be transported to magical universes, well, you should know there's one portal you don't want to miss. Your portal to the original universe. Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex where they have flying dragons too. It's about science where no spells are required. Walk beneath a towering Falcon 9 booster, touch a real moon rock and come face to face with space shuttle Atlantis. You can even meet an astronaut. And get this. Our friends at Kennedy Space Center Visitor complex are offering $7 off admission with code happy7. Discover something real. AutoTrader is powered by Auto Intelligence. Put simply, their tools and data sync to your exact budget and preferences to tailor car buying to. You want a pink midsize SUV with 22 inch rims and a V8? How about a two door convertible with a premium sound system and heated cup holders? Nothing's too specific. Autotrader Powered by Auto Intelligence helps you find your dream car at the right price in no time because they do all the hard work for you. Imagine knowing what you can afford before you can even start shopping. Having access to the largest automotive inventory anywhere with enough search filters to make it feel personal. Only Seeing listings based on your budget and your must haves. Finding the car that gives you the feels and the deals while feeling like you won the negotiation without negotiating. And you can close the deal however you want. Autotrader, powered by Auto Intelligence, is the totally you way to buy a car. Visit autotrader.com to find your perfect ride. The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. They say if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. When you go with Amica, you're getting coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers. So they'll help look after what's important to you together. Auto, home life and more. Amica. Amica has you covered. At Amica, they'll help protect what matters most to you. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.

[Katie Milkman]

You mentioned curiosity earlier. Clearly having a growth mindset or being interested in the world or wanting to learn things and seeking out new experiences are crucial to being a happy person. But at baseline, foundational to that is your relationship with your own curiosity. So talk a little bit about that. Like, curiosity is something that is part of being human but also lives on a spectrum.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And I think there's so much we can do with curiosity to feel happier. Right. One is that sometimes curiosity can be that little motivating force that gets us to positive emotions we don't expect. One of the positive emotions I think about a lot is the experience of awe.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

This sense of wonder, the sense that stuff is bigger than you. We've talked a lot about being self obsessed, but when you look at the skyline here in the canyon, or when you look at something bigger than you, or even just people doing amazing moral good in the world, you're just like, wow, there's things that are bigger than myself.

[Katie Milkman]

It's so inconvenient though. Well, there's so much aw is hard on gratitude.

[Lori Santos]

Go with delights. Go with delights. I mean, sometimes these words get.

[Katie Milkman]

So is that why you consciously use the word delights?

[Lori Santos]

I think so. Cause sometimes it feels like, was I grateful that the guy was listening to Cypress Hill in the car and the lowrider? Not really. But was that delightful talking about it now? Does it make me smile a little bit? Yeah, it does, right? And I think awe, if awe feels too much, maybe go with badass. When you see something where you're like, that was just badass. That was a badass sunset, or the James Webb Space Telescope where you just see all these worlds, that is badass. Or Someone doing an amazing, amazing, you know, thing in fitness is like, Simone Biles is just like, she's badass. That badass allows you to think of something that's bigger than yourself. It allows you to see achievement. Like, it just kind of feels like a good, positive emotion. And so I think curiosity can often get us to things that are badass, and that's helpful. But I think a bigger way that curiosity is so important for our positive emotions is that we can use curiosity to allow and deal with our negative emotions. I think the kinds of type A folks that you talk to a lot on this podcast and listen to this podcast are like, perform, perform all the time. And that sense of overwhelm or that fear, that anxiety, or that yucky feel, like, that is really inconvenient. So I'm just going to squish that down. But in doing that, we lose the opportunity to learn from our emotions, to learn from our discomfort. Something that Susan Cain talks about a lot. I think curiosity can be a way in, especially if you're kind of uncomfortable with those negative emotions and your move is like, squish them away. I don't feel that. Get curious. Like, huh, I don't want to do this workout today. What's going on? Like, oh, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed at work. Or, huh, I'm feeling, like, a little bit pissed off, right? I'm, like, extra pissed off in this traffic right now. Curiosity. What's going on? Where is this coming from? Like, oh, I'm actually feeling kind of lonely, right? Often when we get a little bit curious about our emotions, it's a way to engage with them in a way that doesn't, like, amplify them, but kind of has some common humanity. Like, makes sense. I'm feeling this. Let me try to understand. Understand it. And then we can use emotions, what they're for, what they're really for, evolutionarily, which, as I think of them as, like, our, like, internal signaling unit, like, I like to see our negative emotions as, like, the dashboard on your car. That's like tire light, engine light, you know, that comes on in your car. If it came on in my rental car today, like, it'd be really inconvenient. Like, crap, I got to deal with this tire situation. I think our negative emotions are kind of like that. It's like, ding, ding, Overwhelmed. Like, ding, ding, anxiety. It's like, this is stupid. But if you don't deal with it, you know, you're going to break down on the highway. And I think the same is true for negative emotions. Right. We need to get curious, like, huh, I wonder what's going. Why is that sense of overwhelm there? Like oh, I'm too busy at work or I need to take a break or often there's something in there that you can change your mindset or change your behavior about to fix it. But if you suppress it, you're just not going to notice what that signal is telling you.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah, it's another way of disidentifying, like detaching yourself a little bit.

[Lori Santos]

It's not me. It's a lot of indicator light.

[Katie Milkman]

Because negative emotions can be intoxicating and when they flare up, then there's a kind of instinct to indulge them. Right. And you're not even consciously thinking about it. It just takes over. And then in the aftermath of that, we self flagellate like, like I can't believe, why did I do that? And you feel guilty and shame. You just go down in the spiral. Right. But to be able to look at it as if you're watching it on television as opposed to something that's happening to you is a really powerful technique. And using curiosity as the way in is a really cool idea. Some people are naturally very curious. Some people are extremely incurious. I've asked this question to other people on the show and everyone seems to agree that curiosity is something that you can learn and get better at and, and trained. But you have to be curious about your own curiosity.

[Lori Santos]

There's an infinite loop there, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. I think with all of these things there are going to be some of these sort of happiness hacks, happiness strategies that come really easy.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You might be listening to this. You're a super extrovert. You're, oh yeah, social connection tick or oh yeah, watching what I eat or moving my body.

[Charles Schwab]

Great.

[Lori Santos]

But then there's some that are like this one, that curiosity is a little harder. I actually think those are the domains where you can have the most impact.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You know, we, we mentioned this idea of being 10% happier. You're not going to go from zero to 100. So it's helpful to find the spots where you're as close to baseline, as close to not doing it all as possible. Because if you intervene on that, even a little baby step will kind of give you a big boost. And so if yours is curiosity, I think just use the opportunity to kind of notice a little bit.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Rather than call it curiosity, just call it noticing. Just noticing what's happening in my body. I'm noticing what's going on? Expressive writing is a really, really great tool for this in part because when you go into sense making mode, you have to ask questions, Right. And so just by the act of writing about whatever's going on, you can often go into question asking mode, which is sort of one of the fastest.

[Katie Milkman]

Ways to get to curiosity on the topic of noticing. Isn't attention sort of the whole ball game here?

[Lori Santos]

Totally.

[Katie Milkman]

Like it really is a function of the extent to which you're mindful about where you're placed in facing your attention. That's like the whole thing. So whether it's curiosity or your interactions with people out in the world, or your ability to notice something that could give you that moment of delight, it's all about being present with your own attention and not allowing it to randomly go where you know it's. It's sort of impulse to go, but commandeering it in a conscious way.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah. And that's hard, right? Because we know that attention is very. We know that attention is like basically built to go where it's going to go.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

If someone screamed fire right now in the studio in the one hour, no matter how interesting a conversation we were having, we would feel like we're on fire, whatever.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It would steal our attention. And that kind of mode of commandeering attention is the thing we've built into all the devices that are around us all the time. Like there's so much built out there to steal our attention. Like it was already bad just having a human brain that would just kind of get commandeered really easily. But now we have all these things around us that are trying to commandeer our attention, often for bad. Right. Because negativity is what makes algorithms lots of money. And so lots of folks around us are trying to commandeer our attention towards the anti delights or the anti grateful things. But yeah, if you can develop the agency to harness your attention and so much work in the field, psychology suggests that you can do that just through training. Right. Just through practice and trying to notice certain things more through your intention for your attention, you can kind of gain agency over that and feel a lot better.

[Katie Milkman]

What do you make of the mainstreaming or the degree of attention and interest there is now in the subject of happiness? Like this is sort of unprecedented in the history of humanity. And to me it's sort of like you can look at it through two different lenses. On the one hand you can say, well, this is just a byproduct of our metastasizing self obsession. Right. Like you Know, we're so caught up in our own selves and obsessed with our own degree of happiness. And this in and of itself is some form of disease, right? Or you can look at it as a symptom of the real disease, which is that we are suffering this. This epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness and disconnection and the like. And. And this is us raising our hand or, you know, like asking to be rescued.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess a couple things there. One is that I think we are obsessed with happiness now, but we as a species have always been obsessed with happiness. We've been obsessed with happiness since we were a species that could think about happiness. I mean, look at the ancients. That was all they talked about, was trying to live the good life in Eudaimonia, and how do we get there and create the right habits? You look at the founders of the country, which, you know, even in the Declaration of Independence could have written, like, you know, here's what we want, like, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right? They were living like longevity, freedom, right.

[Katie Milkman]

In the document, in the parchment.

[Lori Santos]

And there's actually a really interesting history. If you look at the original document, they went through different versions. It was like, life, liberty, and then they decided on happiness, which is sort of interesting, and it's all right, but the point is that, like, what was it?

[Katie Milkman]

Was it. Was there something in this place?

[Lori Santos]

It's hard to know, but I think it was like, do we want that in there? It was an interesting debate about putting that in there. So it was interesting. But point is, like, even old school, they were thinking about this. So I think we've always cared about it. However, I do think we're more off track than ever, right? I mean, I think we have cultural patterns that are actively leading us in the wrong way. You know, we were joking about TikTok and being a little facetious, but I think, you know, we mean something like the culture apparatus that we surround ourselves with that's easily stealing our attention, is telling us all the wrong things to do right. Go for money, go for status, just buy something, change your circumstances, you'll feel happier. And what we know is, like, those are wrong. And so I think the interest we have now is in part because we're kind of raising our hands and saying, help. We're doing it wrong. But I think it's also because how could we not be doing it wrong when there's so many other influences that are pushing us in the wrong direction?

[Katie Milkman]

Our digital devices are proxies for social connection. And we believe that it is making us closer to all these people.

[Charles Schwab]

And.

[Katie Milkman]

And we're not really conscious of the extent to which it's actually isolating us more and more and more. Like, it's very effective at convincing us that we're in touch with all these people and we know what they're doing, and it feels like one big community, even if we're prone to comparison and we're a victim of the algorithm and the like. Short of turn your phone off, do a digital, digital detox, don't bring it in. Like, all the sort of stuff we know. Right. Like, what is the counsel that you give to your students and talk about more broadly with respect to how we navigate our digital age in a healthier way?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth noting that technology is just a tool.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's a tool that we could use in positive ways. Right. Which I think we all saw during the pandemic. Right. I don't know about, like, zoom Thanksgiving and like, you know, zoom Pilates classes with friends of mine. Right. Like, it's. We can use this to really get connection, especially when we're feeling isolated, you know, communities that know you're the one person who cares about this thing, and now you can connect with others who care about that same thing and have that sense of little purpose. I think there's lots of things we can do positively with technology, but you're right, a lot of things we actually do with technology is like, leading us astray. It's leading us away from social connection, but we don't want to get rid of it.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Because it does have these positives. And so the strategy I suggest to my students is this strategy of attending, noticing, getting curious again.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

What are the parts of this that are feeling good, and what are the parts of this that are maybe leading me astray? And I like shortcuts to do this because it's hard to do this in the abstract. And one of the ones I share with my students comes from the journalist Katherine Price, who has this lovely book called how to break up with your phone, where she argues that you don't really need to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to couples counseling so you can develop maybe a healthier relationship with it. And she has this acronym she uses called www, which is funny because World wide Web. But in her case, WWW stands for what for why now and what else? She argues that whenever you find yourself kind of engaging with technology, you should ask this question, what for what was I picking my phone up for? Maybe I was checking my email, looking at the weather. Maybe I don't even know what it. Like I'm just in some Reddit rabbit hole and I have no idea how I got here.

[Katie Milkman]

Or you're just standing in line at the grocery store and you don't want to have to be alone with your thoughts for an instant.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly. And then that gets to the second question, why now? Right? What was the trigger? I was feeling lonely, I was feeling anxious, I was feeling socially avoidant.

[Charles Schwab]

Right?

[Lori Santos]

Like what was you're being curious about? What was the trigger, often an emotional trigger or situational trigger that caused you to get on it. And the final question, what else? What else could you be doing right now? Maybe in that grocery line, you could talk to a friend in the grocery line or text someone and check in. Maybe you could do just a couple deep breaths, right? Like, you know, there's notice the world around you. Notice that guy who's, you know, playing the Cypress Hill or whatever. What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now? And I like this WWW technique. What for? Why now? What else? Cause it doesn't say digital detox, get off your phone. It just causes you to notice your own patterns. Like, oh, whenever I'm being socially avoidant at a party, I look at my phone or I go to this whenever I'm anxious or huh, what else? I haven't noticed that it's springtime out. Cause I've just been staring at my phone the whole time. It allows you to get curious about the things you're using, using your phone for and when you're using it and what's the cost? And you can ask, are those things worth it for me, right?

[Katie Milkman]

It's a way of plying your curiosity, but you're certainly not going to find moments of delight, awe and wonder if you're looking at your phone.

[Lori Santos]

Sometimes you do. I mean, there's a lot of like badass, but it's like on this.

[Katie Milkman]

Yeah, I get that. I understand what you're saying, but like.

[Lori Santos]

The analogy I like to use and again, it gets back to nutrition stuff is like, I think oftentimes we get the sort of Nutri suite of social connection online, right? Where it's like, feels like I connected because I scrolled through my Instagram feed and saw what everyone's doing. It's not really nutritious social connection. So it's kind of like drinking the Diet Coke. It satisfies the sugar chews, but it doesn't and it has these kind of downstream consequences because it's not nutritious. I think the same thing is true for our kind of social connection psychology. It overcomes a little social friction. Like we kind of get to it easier than maybe talking to a friend or, or texting someone. But I think that ease is we kind of mistake it for something that's going to feel really good ultimately psychologically, and it sort of doesn't.

[Katie Milkman]

Happiness is a byproduct of welcoming into your life all of these things that we've been talking about. It is not the aim, it's not something you chase. Right. It's a consequence of doing all of these things where we place our attention. What is our curiosity? Like, are we going out of our way to be connected to the people we care about? Are we meeting new people? All the like. But do you think that there are still many, many people out there who are pursuing happiness in a wrongheaded way such that this pursuit becomes a barrier to happiness? Like, because it is such a mainstream phenomenon and there's so many books and so many experts like yourself, and we're talking about, and you're on the Today show. And in our collective consciousness, happiness is something we're thinking a lot about and we're trying to get more of. But if we're chasing it, we're getting in the way of it, I guess is what I'm getting at.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

I think for whatever reason we engage with these habits, many of them will work if I'm engaging in social connection because I really want to connect with this person, because I'm like, I'll get my little happiness boost. I might still get the happiness boost. Right. You know, the same with doing nice things for others. You know, I might do it because, like, well, Lori says to do it and then you'll feel happier, but you still, as you noticed yourself, you still get the benefit. I think where we go wrong is that when we go after pursuing happiness, we do it in a very perfectionist, very self critical way. We're like, I must get happy right now and I'm gonna not do normal baby steps and, you know, take a little day by day. I got to do it all right now. And then we wind up disappointing ourselves. We wind up feeling crappy about it. It winds up becoming a chore. It's another thing on the to do list. It makes us feel overwhelmed.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And I think that's not helping anyone.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

There are a lot of good things that we could do for ourselves from eating healthier to fitness, to whatever pursuit you want to engage in that will feel good if you do it in a self compassionate, kind, reasonable way. And we'll feel really terrible if you do it in like a perfectionist, self critical, has to be perfect kind of way. And I think one of the problems with pursuing happiness is people get into that mindset. I'll often get a question after a talk is like, well, you mentioned all these things. What's the thing I can do right now to do it? Like I just want to do the one thing. It's like, okay, we're already like off of the wrong path here. Maybe we want to do.

[Katie Milkman]

But it's in the declaration of Independence.

[Lori Santos]

Pursuit, the pursuit. But it's the how of the pursuit. You know, there's things we can pursue for the journey of it, for the growth of it, for noticing that stuff. And there's things that, that we can pursue where like if I don't get this right by Thursday, I'm like a loser. And we just get out of, get out of the loser mindset.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

We need to recognize that a way to motivate ourselves for anything, whether it's pursuing happiness or any of your pursuits. A healthier way to do that is through self compassion.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Kind of noticing this is a challenge. This is tough. Recognizing your common humanity. I'm just human. And talking to yourself in a kind way. Those are the paths to achieving so much of the stuff we want to achieve. I think where we get happiness wrong isn't that we're going after it. I think again it's just built in. We're going to want to go out, we're going to want to have a flourishing life. Most of us, but like if we go after that flourishing life in this like way, it doesn't work.

[Katie Milkman]

The person who's clutching onto it and who's like, tell me the thing and I need to have it now. It's sort of like asking a fish how's the water? Like that's the problem. That's sort of the barrier. Right. You have to emerge out of that like mindset and that, that bubble and find a different way.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

And I think, you know, when you really tackle the principles and understand the principles better, that comes a little bit more naturally, Right. You learn these strategies for self talk that are a little bit healthier. You learn to be more other oriented.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

So you get out of this individual pursuit and you kind of develop these notions of wanting to do nice things for others for the sake of doing nice things for others. I think what's interesting is if you start going after this stuff, you find it rewarding and it gets easier to do it not in a like grippy half do way, but in a kind of more measured sense, self compassionate way.

[Katie Milkman]

Are you a happier person now than when you started lecturing on this?

[Lori Santos]

Oh, for sure. I mean, I'm a nerd. I take data, you know, I do my little psychometric happiness tests all the time.

[Katie Milkman]

It would be so tragic if you weren't.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, well, I'll say.

[Katie Milkman]

Or if you had to lie about it.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I'm so much happier. No, no, I, I, I, you know, true to this idea of 10% happier, I'm about a point to a point and a half happier on a standard happiness test than I, than I, I was when I started this. But I will say something interesting, which is with the interesting meaning and purpose and amazing privilege of being able to do this comes a lot more happiness challenges. Right. If I'm not careful, I can have so many guest appearances like this. Opportunities for travel that will take away my social connection, that'll take away my sleep, that'll take me from my movement routine. If I'm not careful. And so I have to push against that, I get to see a lot more unhappy people. That gives me some challenges with negative emotions. When you know about this stuff, you're put in situations, situations where people need this stuff and you really see, you know, the full gamut of human emotion. And that can be really tough. And so I think even though I have these strategies I can use to feel better, it's also brought with it, like many good things in life, lots of challenges. And so it means that I have to practice what I preach, maybe even more now than I was before I.

[Katie Milkman]

Was doing this work, being really clear on your nos and your yeses.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

When to say yes and more importantly when to say no and how to have clear boundaries. What was like the, the biggest epiphany or shift that you made as a result of this experience in the research and everything that you've learned that made the biggest difference in your life?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, well, a big one is maybe a happiness strategy we haven't mentioned yet, which is this idea of time affluence, that one of the things we need to feel happier is to be wealthy, not with money and our finances, but to be wealthy in time.

[Katie Milkman]

I have none of this.

[Lori Santos]

I know most of us self report being time famished, which is like literally starving for time. And the physiology of this, when you look is very Similar to being time. It's inflammation, it's stress. It's all this stuff. This is work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School. If you self report being time famished a lot, that's as bad for your wellbeing as if you self report being unemployed. You probably would be sad if you lost your job tomorrow. Your listeners would be sad if they lost their job. Just not having a job time is this bad. This work was an epiphany for me, both because as a professor, podcaster, as a human in the modern age, I'm busier than I should be, but especially because this newfound path that I'm on have given me so many opportunities where if I don't set really hard boundaries, ones that I like, hate, I'm never gonna be able to have any time affluence.

[Katie Milkman]

So does that come up because you have a history of being a people pleaser?

[Lori Santos]

Oh, yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

Okay.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

Good. Just kind of confirming.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, yeah. And I think because, you know, the hardest times to set time affluence are like when there's really good opportunities. And I think for a lot of the, you know, interesting people with interesting jobs, interesting opportunities that are listening to this, you're gonna have to say no, not just to the stuff you don't want to do that feels like, kind of crappy, you're gonna have to say no to the stuff you really do want to do to leave space for the time, the stuff that really matters.

[Katie Milkman]

Which are kind of the fruits of your labor. Like, you work so hard and now you're in the same position where you get invited to do really cool stuff with cool people. And after all of that work to get to this place, you have to say no. Yeah, yeah, cry me a river. But, you know, it is. It is like a. It's. It's. It's tough to do that, I think.

[Lori Santos]

It's tough. And it's. It's tough to realize that that open space, that open time is going to be more valuable than whatever you could get out of these things. I think for.

[Katie Milkman]

But that's being clear. Clear on those values and what's important.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly. And not falling prey to all the biases we just talked about.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I think a big kind of trade off that people have to make is time and money.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I could spend a little bit more time at work. Maybe I don't take my vacation time and I get that promotion or I get some overtime. I get these things. And again, if you have enough money to put a roof over your head, if you're in that sort of threshold where more money is not going to make you happy, more time really will make you happy. And so Ashley was Willens finds that one thing you can do to improve your time affluence is to spend any discretionary income you have on getting time back. Get the chopped up vegetables, get the healthy takeout, hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn, whatever it is to free up time that actually makes you happier than spending your discretionary income on stuff or even in some cases, experiences.

[Katie Milkman]

There's a piece within this subject of time affluence that has to do with deferred happiness. Like, I don't have a lot of time affluence right now, but it's because I'm in this phase of life and I need to do these things and I am going to defer my happiness and all these things that I know because I, you know, pay attention to Lori and everything that she says and I get it and I agree. But it's just going to sit over here for a while, while, and I will indulge it at the appropriate time. So you hold it in abeyance versus, like the time is now and your life is happening now. And you know, I, I fall into that. So how do you disabuse people of that mindset?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I think having the terms for some of these things can be so helpful. I think often we worry about what researchers call myopia, right? Which is like, you know, eat unhealthy now, you know, because, like, you'll do, you'll start your workout tomorrow kind of thing. We kind of are indulging now because we're myopic. We're like, not taking care of our future self. That does happen, of course. But I worry much more about the opposite, which is what folks call hyperopia, which is like, I'll have my rewards in the future. I'll just work really hard right now and then, like, social connection, I'll do that later. Or enjoying the thing that I really care about. I'll get to that later. And the sad thing is that later is not guaranteed. So many of us have had the experience of this thing that we were waiting to do, like, runs out. You know, the cliche is like, you know, they buy the nice bottle of wine that you're saving for a good occasion, and when the good occasion finally comes around, you open it and it's like, it's toast and it's dead. Or you save your frequent flyer miles or, you know, for the people like me who like chicky self care. You know, you buy that one nice candle that you're going to use or like that one bath bomb that you're going to save, and by the time you get to it, it's like all smelly. And it's just, you know, I think we're doing that so much with the big opportunities in life that we're assuming that they're going to be available tomorrow and they might not. I just did this episode with my colleague DJ dedona, who's a sabbatical expert who talks about the benefits of taking extended time off now. And he finds that people are like, well, I'll do it someday or I'll do it when I retire. And he shared this statistic that I think I'm going to get right, which is that if you're in a couple, the possibility that both individuals and your couple, you and your spouse will make it healthy to retirement age and be able to do stuff is actually only 50, 50% that both of you will make it and be healthy enough to travel or do whatever you're fantasizing.

[Katie Milkman]

And retirement's not really a thing anymore.

[Lori Santos]

I know, yeah, this is. You're lucky enough to take retirement. But his point is like, don't be hyperopic. Like, see if you can get that time affluence now. And so I think, I think we need to kind of. I think too often we worry about myopia.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

I think like capitalist culture gets us to do this of like, you know, put up, don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today. But then we end up doing it everything today, assuming there's going to be a healthy, happy tomorrow. And that given that that's not guaranteed, we can have a healthy medium where we put in some fun times from enjoyable stuff now. And I think our mistaken assumption is like, well, I can't do that because I won't be as productive. But everything you've just heard showed you that that's a misconception. You'll actually be more productive if you have that break now. If you engage in that social connection, if you engage in rest, active, active rest now, you'll be able to perform better in the future.

[Katie Milkman]

It's so much of this is about short term versus long term. Also, what makes us happy in the short term doesn't make us happy in the long term. And these uncomfortable things that are important for the long term feel like tremendous inconveniences.

[Lori Santos]

They do.

[Katie Milkman]

And easy to dismiss. You know, because we can just say, I am going to do it. Like it is important. Important to me, just not right now.

[Lori Santos]

So of course there's a conflict between the short term and the long term.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

This is again, the thing the ancient thinkers talked about, but often, more often than we think, the thing that's good for us in the short term is also good for us in the long term. We just are predicting wrong. Take exercise. A good workout might seem inconvenient, but you do it and you actually feel good. You're pretty soon into it and that's good for the short term and good for the long term. Social connection. Right. That's the kind of thing that like, might feel like, oh, it's going to take up time. I should be checking my email, but let me talk to this person on the train. It's actually going to feel good for you and the experience. Like, the research shows that like, you won't actually get a ding in your productivity. If anything, you'll be more productive later on.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

And so I think there are cases where obviously there's this kind of disconnect between our short term and long term happiness. But a lot of the things that really work for happiness do both. It's just our mistaken minds that think they're going to be in conflict. In practice, they're not actually as much and conflict as we think.

[Katie Milkman]

Is there anything that you changed your mind about because of emergent science or some new idea that cropped up that challenged your, your preconceived idea about happiness?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I mean, I think I've changed my mind a lot about the time stuff.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

You know, I would have, you know, set no boundaries. People, please put in every opportunity, push, push, push. And I think I've really seen the signs be like, no, no, that's not going to work. I need to build in rest and I need to build in breaks. I need to build in that stuff. I wouldn't have thought that before and it goes against all my intuitions, but I think that it's been so essential for me.

[Katie Milkman]

You mentioned Martin Seligman earlier and Sonia Lyubomirsky, who's been on the show. In the pantheon of people who study and teach happiness, Arthur Brooks comes to mind. Where do you and your colleagues divert? Like, is there daylight in your perspectives? Like, I imagine you don't match up perfectly with Sonia or Arthur. You have a different lens. So where is that daylight? What are the kind of points of departure and why?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I mean, I think so many of us are swayed by the data that to the extent that the data all agree, I think we kind of mostly agree on these things. I think if there's a spot where not so much we disagree, but our emphases are different. I think my emphasis has really been on this idea that our minds are biased, that our minds are lying to us, and then unless we kind of like approach those things as lies, as misconceptions, we're kind of not going to get it right. And so I think that's a difference of focus that like, if you look at my course, for example, I'm so focused on like, what are the misconceptions? Because we have to understand what we're getting wrong before we can figure out what we need to do better.

[Katie Milkman]

I feel like Arthur puts a lot of emphasis on faith cultivating a relationship with the divine. And I don't know that you disagree with that, but it doesn't seem to be as top of mind or as big as a priority. I mean, Arthur, very devout Catholic. How do you think about that aspect of it?

[Lori Santos]

Well, I think in terms of their research, Arthur is right on this. Many studies have looked at what makes people happy. And a big predictor is if you have some participation in religious faith. What's interesting though is if you kind of break down, what does that mean? Like, what are the components of being a person of faith that allows you to feel happier? It seems like it's actually not so much your beliefs as opposed to your behaviors and what you do. What do I mean by that? Let's say you're, you know, I don't know, a devout Catholic who like really believes in God. Like you kind of like, kind of really buy into the whole like, worldview, all the metaphysics you agree with. But you never get to church, you don't have time to pray, you're very busy versus you are someone who goes to church a lot, you pray a lot, you do the pro social acts. Like you donate to the spaghetti suppers and so on. But inside you kind of. You're not there with some of the metaphysics. You're like, is it really the body of Christ? I don't know. I have some questions.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Turns out that the person that will get most the of the happiness benefits is the latter person, is the person who doesn't necessarily believe in the faith stuff, but actually engages in the behaviors. And if you look at the behaviors that matter, it's all the stuff we've been talking about, social connection and community. It's doing nice acts for others. It's taking time for presence and contemplation. It's turning your attention to the good things in life.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's often taking time for rest. Most active religions and faiths have time for like a Sabbath or like taking time off.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

It's doing a lot of the behavior that you would do that we've just talked about that matter for happiness. But you're doing it in the context of a cultural and a religious tradition that brings it all together for you and in a community of people that are doing it together, which is one of the biggest hacks we know. Matter for happiness. So I actually think that the reason that faith, among many reasons that faith is really good for boosting happiness, is that it, like, kind of forces you to do a lot of the behaviors and the mindset. Things that we know matter a lot.

[Katie Milkman]

It drives you towards all of those behaviors as naturally as a result of the culture around it.

[Lori Santos]

Exactly. To quote the Big Lebowski, 3,000 years from Moses to Stanley Kovacs. You know, it's like. Yeah, no, I think. Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

I think Arthur would say, and I would probably agree with Arthur on this, that there is something distinct from what you're talking about with respect to believing in and appreciating that there is a power greater than yourself and that that power is ineffable. And as a result of that, it doesn't have to take any dogmatic or, you know, particular strain of thought or faith, but that alone is a way of disabusing yourself of your self obsession. And it's ultimately humbling. And it also makes place for awe and wonder and. And. And the mystery of it. All that I think is, you know, I think that is a big piece.

[Lori Santos]

Totally. And that's what one of the other. I think the behavior of finding more awe in your life is another thing that, of course, religion gives you writ large. And I think this idea of having a sense of purpose that comes from religion and being a person of faith is really powerful. And often it's in part something that's bigger than yourself. But it's also. Most faiths are about not being about you. It's about other people. It's about connecting. It's about doing good things for others. And so I think having those in one packed up tradition that's culturally relevant that you're doing with other folks is. Is really important. It's not the only way to do it.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

There's work by folks like Caspar Terkeil who studies ritual and cultures and these kind of strange cultures that find you can actually get a lot of it, not everything for sure, but some aspects of it from other kinds of cultural traditions. He actually looks at people that are really into CrossFit, for example, where he finds that people push themselves. They have a ritual that they go to have a sense of community. If somebody gets sick, they all work together to help that person. They're all in this kind of shared experience together. Not all the benefits, but you get some of them. And so I think that faith traditions are one way to get at it. But for those folks who are atheist, agnostic, questioning, maybe just didn't grow up in a faith tradition, that was really obvious to them, there might be other ways to get some of those things too.

[Katie Milkman]

Obviously, a big piece in the declining quotient of happiness, at least in America, has to do with the decline of faith based institutions and community. After school programs like CrossFit is a great example. But, you know, 30, 40 years ago, we would have been talking about, you know, the after school programs or YMCA or, you know, any number of things that kids used to do or young people used to do. And so many of those have gone away, and people have to come kind of find their footing in all of these subcultures, which thank God they exist. And I think they serve a really important function. But the infrastructure upon which we used to create so much of that seems to be no longer.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, and this is something that researchers have focused on a lot, especially researchers who've looked at, say, increases in loneliness and declines in social connection across time. There's a very famous sociologist, Robert Putnam, the political scientist, society sociologist, who talked about what he called third places. So there's a place that's not work or not home where you can get together with other people. He had this very famous book called Bowling Alone.

[Katie Milkman]

It's called Soho House.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. But no, but Robert talked about how in the 1950s people joined bowling leagues. Right. And you have this league. Let me talk about Big Lebowski. But you have these leagues where you bowl with other people. You see them every week. It would be cross sections of people from different wealth categories, different political backgrounds and so on. Nowadays you don't get bowling leagues. People are bowling alone. Or maybe this was his book in the late 90s, early 2000s. Nowadays, I think we have bowling on Wii or bowling on PlayStation or something.

[Katie Milkman]

And people don't even go to work anymore. Everyone's at home on Zoom. And that gets back to the digital aspect of it.

[Lori Santos]

But having these places where you don't have to spend money, where people know your name or you have cross sections of society, these things are going away. And he kind of charts from the 1950s. Today kind of changes in this. When he wrote his book in the 2000s, it was just the dawn of the Internet. So he kind of talked about how maybe television was causing this. I think if you look at kind of the way we engage with TV and all the media that you and I create and the things that we get online now, it's easier to stay home and entertain yourself than it was back in the day. The reason I love Robert's work, though, is that this could be just like a really depressing conclusion about Boeing alone. Like, from the 1950s to today, everything's going to come crap and social connections going down and third places have gone away. But he actually looked at the history before the 1950s, and what you find is that from the beginning of the century, from the late 1800s to the 1950s, people were actually creating these institutions that we were really atomized society, really individualist society, really polarized society, and a society of really unequal wealth distribution, where it was the robber barons who controlled every everything and so on. And people kind of got together and created these local, in real life, in person, communities. And it really changed the structure of society and probably changed the structure of happiness. And so his what might seem like a depressing conclusion has a positive upswing. In fact, that's why he has a new book called the Upswing that he talks about. This, which is like we were at a yucky place in terms of social connection and community before, and we fixed it. And with the right structures, we could have the intent to rebuild those kind of structures, structures today too.

[Katie Milkman]

Life finds a way and the pendulum has to swing back because we need it, right? And even if we're not conscious of what we're lacking, we will intuitively start to build those things because, you know, deep down we know that this is important to living a meaningful life. Yeah, I think that's true.

[Lori Santos]

If we can get over our misconceptions, I think we can build structures for ourselves that make us a lot happier. But I think we can also build a world filled with structures that would make everyone, everyone happier too.

[Katie Milkman]

I have this question and I find myself reluctant to even ask it because I'm not sure that there's even an answer to it. And if there is, it's probably a four hour podcast, you know, to answer it. But I guess I'm curious, maybe just on A top level how you think about all of these tools and ways to engender happiness in one's life for. For the person who is suffering from maybe something a little bit less than a mild mental health disorder. I mean, as a psychologist, what do you say to the person who, because of childhood trauma or because of a certain particular type of upbringing when they were young, is caught in a mindset pattern or a behavior pattern pattern that makes it very difficult to see their lives clearly and make these decisions effectively that can change their behavior and in turn, their relationship with happiness?

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I think this is. I'm glad you asked this because I think this is an important question because when we talk about these kind of rewireables or rewirements, we can assume that they're the whole answer. And I think it depends on the degree of problem that we're experiencing.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Again, sometimes I use a physical analogy when we're talking about happ. Mental health, right? So let's say I go into my doctor and I say, hey, doctor, I'm experiencing a little bit of inflammation, some high blood pressure. What should I do? The doctor will be like, well, eat right. Get on the treadmill, do this thing. If I walk into my doctor clutching my chest and say I'm having an acute cardiac arrest right now, the doctor would be like, well, eat right. They would clear and do all the things.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

There would be an urgent medical intervention for an urgent situation. I think the same is true for our mental health.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

If you're feeling a little bit of languishing, things are going right, but I'm not healthy, as happy as I could be. All these rewire bulls are for you, right? They're the thing you can do if you are acutely suicidal. If you're actively in the middle of a panic attack, I'm not gonna be like, well, go out and find the delights in the world. Or like, you need a more urgent medical intervention for that.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

But just like in the physical health case, right. You know, hopefully my walking into the doctor with acute cardiac arrest, I get through it and I'm on the other side at that point. The doctor might say, you know, now that you're in recovery, I think you need to look at your eating patterns. You need to get a little bit more excellent exercise and so on. I think the same is true for our mental health, Right. Once you're through an acute crisis, once you're working on something that's maybe a long standing issue for which you need professional help or a very acute issue which you need treatment for. Like once you're on the other side of it, I think all these strategies then come into play. I think of these strategies as almost like preventative mental health. Right. Like, almost like the project to make sure you can kind of get back to equilibrium. But they might not be the best immediate intervention if what you need to is urgent care or really serious kind of mental health support.

[Katie Milkman]

I guess I'm imagining a situation in which it's not necessarily urgent, but there's an underlying wound and that wound is the reason you're behaving the way that you behave.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Katie Milkman]

And you can do all of the rewirements and rewireables and try to improve your behaviors and that, that may move you in a forward direction. But ultimately, if you don't heal that underlying wound, like you're still dealing with symptoms, I guess. And so at some point you have to look inward and kind of contend with that if you truly want to make the magic leap to the happiness that eludes you.

[Charles Schwab]

Yeah.

[Lori Santos]

And I think again, the physical analogy there would be, you know, maybe you have like a heart, an underlying heart condition or some genetic. Genetic thing that.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Like even if you're doing or just.

[Katie Milkman]

You have like you got a calcium scan and the score wasn't so good, you're not going to die of a heart attack tomorrow, but there's a situation looming on the horizon for you.

[Lori Santos]

I think sometimes when we talk about these strategies, we think, well, that's the only thing Lori thinks you should do. I think these things can work in conjunction with going to therapeutic practice. Right. A lot of the strategies we're talking about are basically cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy, where you're changing your thought patterns to change your behavior. Behavior and your mindset. And sometimes that's hard to do on your own, especially if there's deep seated stuff. Like there's a reason that some of these therapeutic practices work, but ultimately what they are is being curious.

[Charles Schwab]

Right.

[Lori Santos]

Being curious with the help of some supportive person who can maybe help you see in if seeing in is hard. But then once you get curious, you're going to have homework where you try to change your thought patterns. You're going to change your behaviors in the face of this. And so if you're struggling to do it yourself, it might be that what you need is some therapeutic help in part because like that can kind of get you closer to some of the answers. It can maybe make the curiosity part easier if what you have to be curious about is not some low grade thing. But some deep, like Sherlock Holmes mystery of what's going on with your mental health.

[Katie Milkman]

This has been great. Thank you.

[Lori Santos]

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

[Katie Milkman]

I'm not done yet, but I got one last one for you, Laurie. We're going to get you to Santa Barbara though. I think it was would be great to just round this out with one message about happiness or a concrete thought or action that you would like everyone to hear.

[Lori Santos]

Yeah, I think when things are feeling the most unhappy, the most frustrating, just remember that all the science shows you have agency over it. There are concrete things you can do to change your behavior and change your mindset, to regulate, regulate your negative emotions that you can learn the skills to do. And so even when it feels bad, remember there are strategies you can use to feel happier.

[Katie Milkman]

Beautiful. I love it. I'm happier now than I was at the beginning of the podcast.

[Lori Santos]

I should have given you a scale before and after. Me too.

[Katie Milkman]

All right, good. This was great. It was a long time coming, like we said at the outset, but I feel like we did the thing. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode [e-mail] where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects. Please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any [e-mail] Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our Creative Director, Dan Drake, content management by Shayna Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior and of course our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants Namaste.

[Rich Roll]

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[Lori Santos]

You know it's going to be stinky.

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[Lori Santos]

This is an iHeart podcast.