PLAY THE CROSSWORD Account

Talk Feb. 18, 2022

Yale’s Happiness
Professor Says
Anxiety Is
Destroying Her
Students
By David Marchese Photo illustration by
Bráulio Amado

Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her
class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of
the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was
offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body
enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-
achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques
for living a happier life. But you could also see something
melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these young high-
achievers looking for something they’ve lost, or never found.
Either way, the desire to lead a more fulfilled life is hardly limited
to young Ivy Leaguers, and Santos turned her course into a
popular podcast series “The Happiness Lab,” which quickly rose
above the crowded happiness-advice field. (It has been
downloaded more than 64 million times.) “Why are there so many
happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not
happy?” asks Santos, who is 46. “Because it takes work! Because
it’s hard!”

I was just Googling you to find out some minor fact, and I saw a
story in the Yale student paper that said you’re taking a leave of
1
absence for burnout. So, first, I’m sorry that things were feeling
difficult. And second, if the happiness professor is feeling burned
out, what hope is there for the rest of us? Back up, back up. I took a
leave of absence because I’m trying not to burn out. I know the
signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re
burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing
what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with
people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s
intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said
I wasn’t noticing those things in myself. I can’t be telling my
students, “Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed” if I’m ignoring
those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t
happening. From learning about the science of happiness, I treat it
like any other health issue: If my blood pressure was soaring —
you need to take action. So it’s not a story of Even the happiness
professor isn’t happy. This is a story of, I’m making these changes
now so I don’t get to that point of being burned out. I see it as a
positive.

Even aside from an expert like yourself, we all have more

resources about how to be happy than any humans ever, and yet so
2
many of us still find it so hard to figure out how to be happier. Why
is that? This is the way I frame a lot of the talk about happiness on
the podcast: Our minds lie to us. We have strong intuitions about
the things that will make us happy, and we use those intuitions to
go after that stuff, whether it’s more money or changing
circumstances or buying the new iPhone. But a lot of those
intuitions, the science shows are not exactly right — or are deeply
misguided. That’s why we get it wrong. I know this stuff, but my
instincts are totally wrong. After a busy day, I want to sit and
watch crappy Netflix TV shows, even though I know the data
suggests that if I worked out or called a friend I’d be happier. But to
do that I have to fight my intuition. We need help with that, and you
don’t get it naturally, especially in the modern day. There’s an
enormous culture around us of capitalism that’s telling us to buy
things and a hustle-achievement culture that destroys my students
in terms of anxiety. We’re also fighting cultural forces that are
telling us, “You’re not happy enough; happiness could just be
around the corner.” Part of it’s all the information out there about
happiness, which can be hard to sift through, but a lot of it is a
deeper thing in our culture that seems to be leading us astray.

Laurie Santos giving a lecture at Yale in 2018. Karin Shedd/Yale University

A lot of stuff that we know can have a positive effect on happiness

— developing a sense of meaning, connection with other people,
meditation and reflection — are commonplace religious practices.
How helpful are they outside religion? There’s evidence that
cultural structures, religious structures, even smaller groups like
your CrossFit team can cause true behavior change. The question
is what’s driving that? Take the religious case. You could mean two
things by saying you need a cultural apparatus around the
behavior change: One is you need a rich sense of beliefs; you need
to buy into theological principles to get the benefits. Another is that
it’s your commitment to these groups that does it, and it doesn’t
have to come with a set of spiritual beliefs. There’s a lot of evidence
that religious people, for example, are happier in a sense of life
satisfaction and positive emotion in the moment. But is it the
Christian who really believes in Jesus and reads the Bible? Or is it
the Christian who goes to church, goes to the spaghetti suppers,
donates to charity, participates in the volunteer stuff? Turns out, to
the extent that you can disentangle those two, it seems to not be
our beliefs but our actions that are driving the fact that religious
people are happier. That’s critical because what it tells us is, if you
can get yourself to do it — to meditate, to volunteer, to engage with
social connection — you will be happier. It’s just much easier if you
have a cultural apparatus around you.

Does it matter if that apparatus is one we think of as being socially

positive or not? Could someone get as much benefit from actively
participating in a white-nationalist militia as he could by actively
participating in a Quaker church? To my knowledge, positive
psychologists haven’t gone out and looked at white-supremacist
organizations. But if you look at accounts of people who’ve left
those organizations, often what they self-report is, this did give me
a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging. Things like social
connection, finding practices that allow you to be present,
exercising: There’s a simple set of things that we know statistically
will wind up boosting well-being. If you engage in organizations
that do that stuff, it’ll help. Now, I want to stay away from
advocating, like, oh, the white-nationalist-exercise organization is
great for well-being.

Is it possible that practices that lead to happiness like accepting

anxiety, avoiding comparison with others and being satisfied with
what we already have can also lead to complacency? Don’t you
need some of the emotionally detrimental stuff in order to
achieve? People have looked at this in the context of things that we
worry about when it comes to complacency: huge problems from
anti-Black violence to the climate falling apart. We need people to
recognize these issues, get angry and take action. There’s a worry
that maybe if you follow these practices, you’ll be so complacent
that you’ll let California burn and let horrible social-justice
violations continue. There’s been some lovely work on this by
Kostadin Kushlev, who’s a positive psychologist who has been
interested in, Do these practices make you complacent when it
comes to the big issues? What he finds is that the people who self-
report the highest positive emotions, they’re the ones who are
taking action. This comes up in other domains too: There’s
evidence that people who experience more gratitude have a high
level of what’s called self-regulation — kind of like sucking it up
and doing the hard things now. There’s also evidence that people
who are more grateful are more likely to do things for other people.
So I worry about complacency, but the evidence suggests it doesn’t
work in the way we might expect. When you do have some positive
emotion, you have the bandwidth to deal with other things.

Santos recording an episode of ‘‘The Happiness Lab’’ podcast. Ryan Dilley

Social media, Instagram in particular, offers almost infinite

3
capacity for negative comparison. Would quitting social media be
the most important thing your students could easily do to increase
their happiness? We go through a lot of the work on social media.
One of the things is: Delete all your apps right now. You can see
their faces. They’re like, Uhh. But all these things are tools. You
could use them in ways that are positive for your well-being or
negative. Instagram is worth mentioning in that sense of its totally
infinite potential for downer self-comparisons, but students also
use it to connect with communities — about eating disorders and
anxiety. So we talk about how you can nonjudgmentally try to be
present enough to notice how these things are making you feel. I
4
teach students — this comes from the journalist Catherine Price
— the acronym W.W.W.: what for, why now and what else? When
you pick up your phone, what was that for? Was there a purpose?
Then: Why now? Did you have something to do, or were you bored
or anxious or fighting some craving? And then, what else?:
actively noticing the opportunity cost. It could be studying. It could
be talking to your roommate. Based on seeing students in the
trenches, the biggest hit of social media on their well-being is that
they spend a lot of time on it thinking that they’re being social
rather than talking to other people. I do that too. There’s times
when my husband walks into the room and we could have a nice
conversation about how our day is and I’m looking at some crap on
Reddit. It’s like, I have a husband who’s here. I could talk to him!
We’re not always making good use of the humans around us.

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Is there anything surprising to you that people are just not getting
about happiness? For my students, it’s often money. My fast read
of the evidence is that money only makes you happier if you live
below the poverty line and you can’t put food on your table and
then you can afford to. Whether getting superrich actually affects
different aspects of your well-being? There’s a lot of evidence it
doesn’t affect your positive emotion too much. There was a recent
5
paper by Matt Killingsworth where he was trying to make the
claim that happiness continues as you get to higher incomes. And
yeah, he’s right, but if you plot it, it’s like if you change your income
from $100,000 to $600,000 your happiness goes up from, like, a 64
out of 100 to a 65. For the amount of work you have to put in to
sextuple your income, you could instead just write in a gratitude
journal, you could sleep an extra hour. Yeah, the money thing is one
that students fight me on. It hits at a lot of the worldview they’ve
grown up with.

Do students wind up happier after taking your course? Is it

working? We did a before-and-after measure of students who took
6
the online class versus students who took a different Yale
Introduction to Psychology class. We found that people who took
our class tended to go up about a whole point on a 10-point
happiness scale. But the dirty secret is that we can intervene and
briefly change behavior but long-term change is really hard. What
we know works is if you plop people down in a new culture, they
change. You move to the Netherlands, you’ll be happier. This
7
causes folks like Dan Buettner, who does work on blue zones for
happiness, to make the claim that someone like me is misguided
because, yeah, you can teach people to meditate or to do their
gratitude journal, but unless they have robust structures around
them societally that are helping people to do that, it’s not going to
work. But my hope is you can create those robust structures
societally. Right now on Yale’s campus there are 500 students who
8
are taking my class, which gets lots of air time on Librex and on
the Facebook page Overheard at Yale, talking about it in the dining
hall.

This probably speaks more to my deficiencies as a student than

anything else, but when I was in college, which is 20 years ago
now, I don’t remember such a pervasive, overwhelming sense of
being there solely as the next step on some ladder of achievement.
What has changed? It’s surprising how different it feels. I’ll have
conversations with first-year students on campus who will ask
what fourth class they should take to make sure they get that job at
Google by the time they’re 24. They come in planning this set of
next steps, in part because that’s how they got here in the first
place. They think that’s how you get the carrots. How that change
happened is an incredibly interesting cultural puzzle. Some of my
9
favorite guesses about it come from Julie Lythcott-Haims. Her
argument is that years ago, only certain people, for the most part,
were getting into Yale. They were mostly from a small set of prep
schools. We opened that up. In theory, anyone on the planet, if they
“put in enough work and are smart enough,” can get into Yale —
bracketed by the real cultural boundaries, structures of racism and
all the other isms, but that’s the idea. There’s also the sense that
the spoils of the war are really high: If you go to Yale, that’s going
to open up opportunities that won’t happen if you don’t. Lythcott-
Haims’s argument is that when the spoils of war get big, there
becomes a nuclear-arms race for who gets in, and that parenting
has changed to push children to be thinking about this stuff. They
develop this implicit belief that there is a path that’s correct, and if
you can figure out the Easter eggs, you can be on it. It’s something
I feel on campus so much. I assign students this book by the social
scientist Alfie Kohn, who does work on how much grades and
10
extrinsic motivations mess kids up. He tells the story of giving
this speech to high school students: A student raises their hand
and is like, If everything you said is true, and I’m not just working
for grades and trying to get into college, then what’s the purpose of
life? When I assigned that chapter, I also got that question. They’re
not sure what they’re supposed to get out of college other than
accolade building.

So what’s the answer? What’s the purpose of life? It’s smelling

your coffee in the morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Having
sex and daisies and springtime. It’s all the good things in life.
That’s what it is.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

Opening Illustration: Source photograph by Michael Marsland/Yale News

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk.
Recently he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate
goal of parenting and Tiffany Haddish about God’s sense of humor.

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