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Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students

The cognitive scientist Laurie Santos says “we’re fighting cultural forces that are telling us, ‘You’re not happy enough.’”

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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.