1 In addition to
continuing her work
on the podcast,
Santos will carry on
teaching through this
academic year. She
will not be teaching
next year and
will also be taking
a leave from her Yale
role as a residential
head of college.2 A Gallup poll this
year found that,
taking the average
of 29 questions,
only 38 percent of
Americans said they
were satisfied.3 Whistleblower
documents showed
that Facebook, which
owns Instagram, was
aware that teenage
girls reported that
the app made them
feel worse about
themselves.4 The author of
‘‘How to Break Up
With Your Phone: The
30-Day Plan to
Take Back Your Life.’’5 A former dean
of freshman and
undergraduate
advising at Stanford.
Lythcott-Haims
is the author of,
among other books,
‘‘How to Raise an
Adult: Break Free of
the Overparenting
Trap and Prepare
Your Kid for Success.’’6 The book Santos
assigns is ‘‘Punished
by Rewards: The
Trouble With Gold
Stars, Incentive
Plans, A’s, Praise and
Other Bribes.’’12 2.27.
Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie
Santos began teaching her class Psycholo-
gy and the Good Life in 2018, it has become
one of the school’s most popular courses.
(The fi rst year the class was off ered, near-
ly a quarter of the undergraduate student
body enrolled.) You could see that as a
positive: all these young high- achievers
looking to learn scientifi cally corrobo-
rated techniques for living a happier life.
But you could also see something melan-
choly in the course’s popularity: all these
young high- achievers looking for some-
thing they’ve lost, or never found. Either
way, the desire to lead a more fulfi lled life
is hardly limited to young Ivy Leaguers,
and Santos turned her course into a pop-
ular podcast series, ‘‘The Happiness Lab,’’
which quickly rose above the crowd-
ed happiness- advice fi eld. (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 fi nd out some
minor fact, and I saw a story in the Yale
student paper that said you’re taking a
leave of absence for burnout.^1 So, fi rst,
I’m sorry that things were feeling diffi -
cult. And second, if the happiness pro-
fessor 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 notic-
ing what researchers call depersonaliza-
tion. You get annoyed with people more
quickly. You immediately assume some-
one’s intentions are bad. You start feeling
ineff ective. 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 many of us still fi nd it so hard to fi gure
out how to be happier.^2 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 chang-
ing 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 Netfl ix 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 fi ght 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 cul-
ture that destroys my students in terms of
anxiety. We’re also fi ghting cultural forc-
es 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.
A lot of stuff that we know can have a
positive eff ect on happiness — develop-
ing a sense of meaning, connection withother people, meditation and refl ection
— 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 benefi ts. 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 med-
itate, to volunteer, to engage with social
connection — you will be happier. It’s just
much easier if you have a cultural appara-
tus around you.
Is it possible that practices that lead
to happiness, like accepting anxiety,Talk