[MELLOW MUSIC]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there! We're taking a little bit of time off this week, so we went through the archives and decided to bring you my favorite episode we made all year. This one's personal. It's about some really special people in my life, so I hope you enjoy it, and we'll be back with new episodes in the new year.
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[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, what does and doesn't work in the pursuit of happiness.
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[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: I consider myself a generally happy person. But these past two years have really tested me: the pandemic, serious health issues in my family, losing people that I loved.
That's why, earlier this year, I joined the millions of people who've signed up to take Yale's happiness course. It's an online class taught by Dr. Laurie Santos.
Dr. Laurie Santos: I think we have this misconception that people are either happy or they're not, but the evidence really suggests that through your behaviors and your mindsets, there are lots of simple things you can do to feel better that we often don't even expect.
Basu, Narrating: Over the course of 10 weeks, you're assigned to do a bunch of practices that are aimed at boosting your mood and well-being. One week, you're supposed to savor one experience every day; it could be a nice shower, it could be a cup of tea. The next week, you're supposed to perform seven acts of kindness. Another week, meditate for 10 minutes every day. Laurie's class has become so popular, she now also hosts a podcast called "The Happiness Lab," which covers many of the same topics as her course.
When I invited Laurie to come on this show, I felt like I needed to admit something to her: I really enjoyed the course, I got several weeks into it, but I did not finish it. Things just got hard in my life, and I was really struggling to make time for my happiness. So, I told myself, I will come back to the course when I'm ready.
I finally had the chance to complete a really crucial assignment just this past week, while I was visiting family in India.
Nona: Oh, Shumita, it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Thank you so much.
Mona: My god. Thank you so much. It's so beautiful.
[KISSES]
Basu, Narrating: I'll come back to that moment a little later. But first, I started my conversation with Laurie talking about how most of us want to be happier than we are now. But the stuff that we think will make us happier generally doesn't do it.
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Santos: Happiness and seeking happiness is hard in part because we have some really crappy intuitions when it comes to the kinds of things that will make us happier. I think if you think, what could you do to feel happier? Our answer often involves changing our circumstances, right? Like I need to get rich to be happier. I need to… I'll be happy when… Like, I'll be happy when I get that relationship or that new job or that new promotion. After you're earning a middle-class income, earning more money doesn't make you much happier. There's evidence that if you're earning around $75,000, just to pick a number that's been studied in the literature, doubling or even quintupling your income won't actually affect your happiness at all. It won't decrease your stress. It won't increase your positive emotion. It just like doesn't have the effect we think.
Basu: Wow. Yeah.
Santos: We think happiness is about changing what's going on in our lives. Now, if your circumstances are direly terrible or you're dealing with traumatic circumstances, obviously changing those will impact your happiness. But for most of the people listening to this podcast, most of the circumstantial changes you could make aren't gonna affect your happiness that much.
Basu: Mmm. I thought maybe we could back up a little bit and talk about how you became the expert teaching a college course about happiness. Like, what was your journey to teaching this course?
Santos: Yeah, well, I've been a psychologist, it seems like forever. I've been teaching at Yale in the psychology department for over a decade, but in just the last couple years I took on a new role on campus. I became one of Yale's Heads of College. So, when I first signed onto the role, I was seeing this college student mental health crisis up close and personal with so many of my students reporting that they were feeling depressed or anxious or having panic attacks, even experiencing suicidality. I got really worried. Is this something about Yale or something about the Ivy League? But it turns out that this is a national trend. Right now, if you look at national statistics, what you find is that more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. More than 60% experience overwhelming anxiety.
Basu: Wow.
Santos: And more than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year, such that they've even made a plan for suicide. Right? And so, these numbers are striking. They were really scary when I learned about them. But they also really compelled me to figure out how to do something about it, right? As a professor, I like to think I'm teaching my students in the classroom, but Yale's not meeting its educational mission if 40% of students are too depressed to function most days and 60% are overwhelmed by anxiety, so they can't do anything. And so, the class and my kind of retraining in this field of positive psychology was an attempt to figure out, okay, what does my field have to say about practical strategies we can use to deal with this, practical strategies we can use to feel better. And as I did this deep dive into this work, I realized there are a surprising number of evidence-based strategies that we can use. What I didn't expect was just how viral the class would go. The first time I taught the class, which was in 2018, a quarter of the entire Yale student body enrolled in the class. So, over a thousand students.
Santos: We had no classrooms on campus that could fit all these people, so we had to teach the class in a concert hall. It was all really surreal.
Basu: Wow.
Basu: I thought maybe we could talk about, at the very beginning of the course, you have participants take this character-strengths survey where you get to learn about all these positive parts about your personality that really impact the way that you feel and you think and you operate and that you think about yourself. I really enjoyed doing this exercise. It was very early on in the course, and I just feel like it really sort of set the tempo for me on what to expect out of the rest of the course. Can you talk a little bit about why you ask people to take this survey, what you mean for them to take out of it?
Santos: Yeah. So, the survey you're talking about is a survey of people's character strengths, and character strengths are these just kind of universal values and good traits that we see across all kinds of cultures. People vary in them. So, I don't know the list. There's like 24 total, but they'd be things like humor, a love of learning, bravery, perseverance, just kind of like traits that you're like, oh yeah, if you did that, you'd kind of feel good. The reason the character strengths test is so important though is that, what the goal of it is, is to kind of give you a sense of which of those strengths really resonate with you the most. And the work of researchers like Marty Seligman and his colleagues has shown that people don't just have these character strengths, they have some that are particular to them. He calls them "signature strengths." And what he finds is that when you're using your own signature strengths, like if you're really into humor and you're engaging in some practice or activity that allows you to experience humor, if you're really kind of brave and feel like that's important to you, when you're doing things that feel courageous, you wind up feeling happier. And there's lots of evidence, for example, that people who execute their signature strengths at work wind up loving their job more. They're more likely to see their job as a calling. We forget that there are things that resonate with us that we can take action on that allow us to feel better.
Basu: Yeah. Wow. That really makes sense for me. Some of my top strengths turned out to be honesty, fairness, leadership, bravery. All of the descriptions were really making me think about journalism and how I ended up in journalism and how much they speak to my every day of what I get to do at work, which is so, so satisfying. But I also kind of made an unspoken rule for myself through the course that I wasn't going to use any work-related tasks to accomplish or use check marks as I went along because I was like, well, just because I'm doing those things at work doesn't mean I shouldn't be pursuing them outside of my work. Work can't be the source of all those happiness character strengthening things that I'm looking for.
Santos: I love that insight because I think one of the many things we get wrong, in terms of our happiness, I think we're not that great at finding good ways to spend our leisure time. Which is something I talk a lot about in the course, but also these days on my podcast. I think, first of all, we don't get enough leisure time. There's so much evidence that we're more time famished than you might expect. We're kind of starving for time, and this has really negative consequences for our wellbeing. But when we finally do get some free time, I think in part because we're exhausted, we often pick activities that might feel maybe relaxing is like the positive way to think about them - like I plop down and watch some Netflix or something - but they're often not like engaging or challenging or even fun. Right? If you think back to, like, what's the most fun you've had recently, it probably wouldn't be like plopped down watching TV or like scrolling through the internet. But when we have free time, we often spend a disproportionate amount of it doing that. And so, I think one reason I loved what you said about trying to get these strengths in not at work but in your leisure time is we're wasting the good leisure time we have because there's like an opportunity cost that, you know, we're spending it on relaxing things, but we could be spending it on challenging things, things that really activate our strengths, and often we're not doing that.
Basu: So, I've gotten out my workbook from the course, which is titled "The Rewirement Workbook." I guess I was thinking about this as I was going through the course, and there's recommended activities - rewirements - for every week: exercise, get enough sleep, meditate, keep a gratitude journal every day. I'm curious to know which of these actions are sort of universal, I guess, in terms of their proven happiness impact, and which of them might be more personal or individualized. I'm curious if you've ever heard someone say, "That didn't really do it for me. That week didn't seem like it affected my happiness."
Santos: Yeah. Like, well, with all interventions, there's gonna be some individual differences. Like, we are not a uniform set of humans walking around the planet. But the specific rewirements we've picked are ones that have been vetted pretty well cross culturally, right? Like, for example, take social connection. We know that pretty much anywhere you go in the world, people who are more socially connected, people who interact and intentionally spend time with their friends and family members, they wind up happier. Same thing with things like random acts of kindness. We know if you look cross culturally at every country that's been studied, what you find is there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between, for example, donating money to charity and overall scores on wellbeing. We see this in "Gallup" polling and these big kind of worldwide wellbeing measures. That said, there's still gonna be individual differences. Sonja Lyubomirsky, who's a very famous happiness expert who I talk with a lot on the podcast and also review her work in the class, she's kind of just not that into gratitude. Right? Which is just a mindset shift that we know has huge effects on happiness. She's like, "I kind of find it hokey, so I focus on other things." And that's okay. I mean, one of the goals of the class is to take an evidence-based approach. You should try it for yourself, do the experiment on yourself, see what works and nonjudgmentally use more of the stuff that seems to be going well for you.
Santos: And that's fine if not all of the practices work.
Basu: Yeah.
Basu: Are there any of these practices that you yourself found really hard to make part of a regular practice?
Santos: Oh, so many of them. I mean, I think my natural inclination is not necessarily to be happy as a human. I think my DNA [LAUGHS] just like pushes me towards all ki…
Basu: Really?
Santos: Oh, so many bad strategies. Yeah. People often like that I'm honest in my podcast about how bad my intuitions are. And I'm like, well, I have to be honest 'cause my intuitions are like super bad, both in terms of what I prioritize, in terms of how I spend my time, both in terms of the stuff I'm motivated towards, the natural thinking patterns I fall into. I've had to work really hard to engage self-compassion rather than beat myself up like some mean drill sergeant, you know? So, I think one of the reasons I'm a good ambassador for this stuff is I struggle with all of these things. [LAUGHS]
Basu: Mmm.
Santos: Maybe more than most people. So yeah, I mean, I think that for me, one of the things that's been most critical for my own happiness, but I find really hard, is remembering the importance of these lessons about time famine. And so, I've been really trying to be very careful about taking my own advice to say no to things, to make sure I have time for leisure, to mindfully notice is this too much? Even in the next year, I'm actually planning to take some time off from my duties at Yale and my duties as a head of college just to kind have a little bit of a break, address some creeping burnout that I've noticed, and take some time off. And I definitely wouldn't have done that two years ago before I was teaching some of these things.
Basu: Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, and I'll just be very honest with you, I started taking the course this year - it was probably around January - and I really enjoyed it. I have to say, my mom sent this to me a couple of years ago. "Hey, you should enroll in this Coursera Yale course on happiness." And at the time, I think I was a political reporter, and I was just like, "I'm too busy. I have too much going on. I can't think… What is this happiness link my mom sent me?" I totally ignored it. So sorry, Mom, for ignoring it at first. But I eventually did come around to it. And then, frankly, life just threw me some hard stuff and I just didn't have the willpower or the motivation to pursue my own happiness and really focus some time on it. So, what's your advice for people who feel like they're not able to prioritize their happiness at the moment?
Santos: Well, I think there's two pieces of advice there, right? I mean, building off your story, maybe it was right to hit pause on my class and come back to it when you felt a little bit more open. That doesn't mean not to prioritize any aspects of your wellbeing, but it might be that that might not be the way to do it. The other thing that I think that your story brings up is this idea that there are lots of different ways to prioritize our wellbeing. Right? Engage self-compassion. Like, what advice would you give if you were a really good friend who had that same set of constraints? You probably wouldn't tell your friend like, "Well, get it together and finish that Yale class. Because what a loser are…" You'd tell your friend, like, "No, do something nice, but like don't kill yourself over it. Like figure out what fits. It's okay." That kind of attitude is self-kindness. That's engaging self-compassion, and we need to kind of… We do that so naturally for our friends, but we need to apply that sort of attitude to ourselves.
[GENTLE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: The week when I fell off the bandwagon was a hard assignment: Write a letter of gratitude to someone and deliver it in person. I knew who I wanted to write my letter to. I wanted to write to Mona and Nona, my aunts in Delhi. I call them my "aunts," my "buas," even though, technically, they aren't family.
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Unidentified Speaker 1: Hello!
Basu: Hello!
Unidentified Speaker 2: Hi.
Basu: Hi! [LAUGHS]
Basu, Narrating: The short version is their family lived next door to my dad's family. The kids all grew up together and the parents were friends. But in time, their parents died, my dad and his brothers left India, and who was left? My grandmother and these girls from next door, Mona and Nona. For decades, they've been a huge part of my grandmother's life. They really are some of the loveliest, happiest people that I know.
Basu: Oh my god! You have a mango drawer! [COOS]
[LAUGHTER, INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Basu, Narrating: My grandmother died last fall. And as much as life prepares you to lose your grandparents, I'll admit, I've really been feeling her absence in these past few months. That's why it's been especially soothing to be here in Delhi right now, in the hot, sticky heart of mango season, to finally give this letter to these two special people who knew my grandmother best.
[ENVELOPE OPENING]
Nona: Mona, you read it out.
Mona: [READING LETTER] "To my buas." Sweet.
Mona: [READING LETTER] "I've been taking this really interesting online course, one that millions of people have enrolled in all over the world. It's called The Science of Well-Being." [VOICE FADES OUT]
Basu, Narrating: I told them how much it meant to me, as a grandchild living far away, to know that my grandmother had such loving people around her. And how lucky I am to count them in my family.
Mona: [READING LETTER] "It may be funny to be thanked for doing what comes so naturally to you, for being good to the people you love and making your warm and affectionate presence felt. But sometimes it's nice to say the things that don't have to be said, and the truth is I feel so grateful for you two."
Nona: How sweet.
Basu, Narrating: I described how, when I think of my love for them, my mind often goes back, years ago, to the very first time they introduced me to paan. It's like an after-dinner digestive, a bunch of seeds carefully folded in a leaf. That day had all of the hallmarks of a perfect Mona-Nona day.
[LAUGHTER]
Mona: [READING LETTER] "A wonderful meal, that energetic hum of doing something playful and mischievous, the waves of laughter, and the feeling of being totally comfortable and fundamentally understood by the people you are with. Real happiness. Gosh, I love you two. Truly and deeply. Thank you for being exactly who you are. A big, big hug and kiss, Shumita."
Nona: Oh, Shumita, it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Thank you so much.
Mona: My god. Thank you so much. It's so beautiful.
[KISSES]
Nona: Thank you so much. We really, really love you.
Basu: [CRYING] I love you so much too. Both of you.
Basu, Narrating: This exercise of not only writing a letter of gratitude but then delivering it in person, it was even more cathartic than I expected. It unearthed these kind, appreciative thoughts that I'd been meaning to express, but I just hadn't formalized. And Laurie told me, this is something that she hears often from her students, that the exercises really do stick with them.
Santos: So, I can say anecdotally that the class really affects my students. I get so many emails both immediately after the class and even years later about how the class has positively affected the students. It's not like you go from majorly depressed to like incredibly like joyful all the time, but it means you could go from like a five to a 6.25, or a six to a seven. And that matters in the real world. It matters to kind of have these strategies that you use over time.
Basu: How do you test a person's happiness level at any given point?
Santos: Yeah. Well, I would love to have like a little happiness thermometer that we like stick in someone's mouth, and you get like 98.6 happiness. That's not how happiness works. The standard measure in our field - and a measure that I should note is like really well validated, even if it might not seem like that - is a self-report. I just give you a survey of: Tell me about your positive emotions. Tell me about your negative emotions. Tell me how satisfied you are with your life. And again, while this might seem like a silly internet quiz, feel like, "Tell me all the things about being a Leo," you know, astrological sign or something, they're not. Right? I mean, these are well-validated self-report measures that we have tons of psychometrics to show that the answers that you give on this would be correlated with, if I were to pull your social media feed or the text from your journals and do like a machine learning analysis of the positive, emotional words you use, or if I did detailed interviews with your friends and family members, these kinds of answers would match. And so, we know these self-report surveys are tapping into some real metric. But again, if there's any listeners out there in tech, like, who wanna make the happiness thermometer, I would definitely pay a lot of money for that. [LAUGHS]
Basu: [LAUGHS] I would invest in that.
Santos: Yeah.
[PERCUSSION MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Laurie's class at Yale is designed for young, college-aged people. But she says these practices are not age specific. Happiness is something that we can work at achieving at any age, which is something that she sees in the online version of the course.
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Santos: We get lots of learners who are in their 70s and 80s. I just recently got a handwritten letter from a learner in her 90s who is taking the class. What I've found surprising is like, yeah, some of the examples are geared towards college students or younger individuals. But what we find is that a lot of people from many, many ages are taking the insights and applying them in their own lives. One of the things we know about happiness and aging is that, at least historically, happiness tends to have an inverted U function. So, you're happiest when you're young and in your 20s, then you kind of go into the real world, your happiness sort of dips into middle age. And then, just around the time your kids leave home, around the time of retirement, happiness starts to sweep back up again. So, you get to the other side of that inverted U with something we don't expect, which is more aged individuals tend to be happier. That's the scope of happiness we see across different ages. But the reason that middle age tends to be a less happy place is that all these strategies we've talked about are the kinds of things that go away in middle age. We're not prioritizing our friendships and our social connections. We're not taking time to be time affluent. We're often much busier. Things like exercise and sleep, they go by the wayside when you're in your like busy middle-age life and career stuff. So, I think if we, at any age range, if you follow some of the practices we've talked about, the evidence suggests that you will wind up improving your happiness.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Every year, the "World Happiness Report" ranks how people evaluate their own happiness in more than 150 countries. The U.S. regularly ranks outside of the top 10 on that list. Meanwhile, Finland has ranked in the number one spot for the past five years in a row. Other countries in the top 10 this year include Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Luxembourg. So, I asked Laurie, what are these countries getting right about happiness? What are they doing to support and encourage happiness on a national level?
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Santos: It tends to be both cultural practices and structures within a society that tend to promote the sorts of behaviors that we've been talking about. So, take social connection. That's just easier in Scandinavian countries, for example, where there are social spaces outside where you can gather. Work ends at five p.m. so people can get together. There are culturally sanctioned social groups that hang out and like clubs and sports teams and things like that, much more so than you see in the United States. There are cultural practices that are based on savoring and mindfulness. Think of practices like hygge, again, in Scandinavian countries. Where even in the depths of winter, you're gonna sit there and savor a candle or like some delicious pastry, where you're really not just eating something delicious but really present with it in a different way. And so, I think my read on what makes different cultures happier are they have cultural practices and structures, even sometimes physical structures, within countries that allow individuals to engage in these practices better. One of my favorite examples of this comes from a lot of religious practices. I often get asked the question, "Are religious individuals happier?" And the answer is yes, but with a caveat. It's not individuals with strong religious beliefs that are happier, you know, a belief in God or something like that. It's individuals who engage in religious services and practices. So, the Catholic who goes to church and donates at the annual Catholic charity, the Buddhist who really commits to spending time meditating, the Jewish individual who practices shiva where they're kind of helping out other folks or like really obeys the Sabbath where they take time off once a week. It's these practices often that map onto the habits, mindsets and behaviors that we know improve happiness. Those are what's kind of contributing to religious individuals feeling happier.
Basu: So, whenever I see America ranking so low on these kinds of happiness lists, it just makes me wonder, like, what are Americans doing wrong? What are we getting wrong when we think about happiness?
Santos: Yeah. I mean, I think one reason we're often shocked to see America so low on the list is that overall, compared to a lot of the other countries that are higher than us, we tend to be a pretty wealthy country. But in addition to our wealth, we're also a very unequally wealthy country. And inequality, across countries, seems to really map onto happiness in a negative way. So, the more unequal a country is, the less happy they're on average going to be. But I think if you think about how much the United States culturally prioritizes some of the things we've been talking about, like not so much. Exercise relative to a country that's biking like Scandinavia, like not so much. Social connection, right? These kinds of practices where these things matter a lot. I think in more rural communities, these things are more prioritized than they often are in big cities. Time off, right? Americans are notorious for not taking their vacations, again, relative to other similarly wealthy countries. Americans leave vacation hours on the table that they simply just don't take. And so, I think culturally, the United States is often prioritizing a lot of - from the evidence-based perspective - what we would say is the wrong kind of stuff to feel happier. We're a really consumerist society. We like to buy stuff, and buying stuff just doesn't increase happiness in the way that we expect.
Basu: So, how can we force [CHUCKLES] or encourage some kind of culture shift in America? I think that's really the big question, right? We're in this country, we're in this culture, we're swimming in it. It's making certain demands of us. And as much as we can cultivate our own good practices as individuals, what can we be doing or encouraging on a societal level?
Santos: Yeah. Well, I think we all wind up controlling a lot more of like simple local cultures than we think. Many people are involved in work organizations or church organizations or friend groups or family structures, right? Like, what can you do in those tinier structural units to embody some of these practices? Maybe you need to bring back saying gratitude before a meal in your family, or making sure phones get put away so people are present, or forced social time. I think one thing that the pandemic and having the kids at home taught us - there have been challenging things about that - but a lot of families will self-report like, "Wow, we had more family time and that actually felt good." Right? "I wanna keep going with that." Right? So, I think in these local structural units, we can sort of make some of these direct changes. That's easier than doing that at the countrywide level. But all of us are voting, and we could vote for practices that allow us to engage in these things. Public parks and social spaces, reductions on the amount of time that people are working. In the U.K. right now, they're really trying out with more seriousness a four-day workweek. As we speak, this is kind of getting put into action. What would that look like in the United States? And taking seriously that everybody has the privilege to kind of engage with this stuff. The inequality we experience in the U.S. is often thought about in terms of inequality in wealth and income, which obviously is a big issue. But there's lots of evidence from people like Ashley Whillans that inequalities in wealth wind up also being strong inequalities in terms of people's time famine, that low-income individuals tend to be really time famished. And in her hand, some of the evidence suggests that it's really the time famine that's doing a real hit on the wellbeing of low-income individuals, maybe even more so than the wealth famine. Right? So, finding ways to get people a little bit more time and to build that into our societal structures, I think, could have a huge effect on people's overall wellbeing.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu: Laurie, thank you so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Santos: No, this was super fun. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
And thanks to my buas in Delhi for the mangoes and for everything else.
Basu: [SIGHS] Nothing like a good little cry before dinner.
Mona: Yes! [LAUGHS]
Nona: I know.
Basu: Just a little… a good, little cry.
[LAUGHTER]
Basu, Narrating: I've shared a few pictures of my trip to India to see my Mona and Nona on Twitter. You can follow me @shubasu. That's at S-H-U-B-A-S-U. And check out Laurie Santos' podcast, "The Happiness Lab," on Apple Podcasts. You can find a link to that on our show notes page.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]