00;00;01;04 - 00;00;34;24
Stasia Walmsley
Hi, I'm Stasia Wamsley, host of today's episode of the Providence College Podcast. I'm very excited to welcome cognitive scientists and Yale professor Laurie Santos back to Providence College. Dr. Santos is host of the wildly popular The Happiness Lab, which is based on her college course called Psychology and the Good Life. It focuses on the science of happiness. Many of you may remember her as an honorary degree recipient and the commencement speaker for the Class of 2020 one's commencement exercises.

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Stasia Walmsley
Here's a clip of her and her speech in May of that year.

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Laurie Santos
Providence College Seniors. There are so many unthank to people who have been on this journey with you, and whether it's obvious or not, their names are going to be on that paper right beside yours in invisible ink. But the beauty of gratitude is that we can make what's invisible visible. And so I want you to do that now.

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Laurie Santos
I want you to stand up and let all of those invisible names on that diploma know that you are grateful they're all back there and around. So stand up and give them some love.

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Stasia Walmsley
So welcome back to Providence College, where we're really happy to have you back on campus.

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Laurie Santos
It's been so nice to be back already.

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Stasia Walmsley
Terrific. I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you remember from the last time you were here when you it was about two years ago. You were on campus for our commencement exercises for the class of 2021. And I you remember that class had really been thrown a curve ball. They had their senior year completely upended by COVID.

00;01;47;09 - 00;02;16;14
Stasia Walmsley
And you came to campus and you really infused the whole ceremony and gave them a little bit of a background in gratitude and happiness. And then you introduced this really lovely moment of gratitude where they were able to thank those who made it possible for them to be in that that moment, a moment that they maybe were feeling some, you know, confused feelings about because of COVID.

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Stasia Walmsley
But I wondering what you remember about that particular time two years ago. And then also if you have any specific memories of your time here at PC?

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Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, you know, mostly I just remember like the utter uncertainty, Right. You know, was going to be outside. Is it really going to happen? Like, you know, I think everyone was so hopeful that they could pull it off and give something special back to the class of 2021. And I think in the end, they were really able to do that.

00;02;43;03 - 00;03;00;03
Laurie Santos
I think we learned that, you know, with some grace and patience, we can pivot a little bit. You know, we can try new things. But, yeah, I think this importance of taking time to be grateful, even when we feel like we shouldn't be grateful, when we feel like we're dealing with hassles, we're dealing with things that are kind of a pain in the butt, right?

00;03;00;03 - 00;03;17;07
Laurie Santos
You know, that we don't want to deal with. And so I think reminding the students then that there is still such tremendous things to be grateful for, even in the midst of all these hassles, even in the midst of all these changes, there was something that was exciting. I do remember we got the perfect spring day. I think when we moved outside it was like, Is it going to downpour?

00;03;17;07 - 00;03;35;02
Laurie Santos
Is it? But no, it was just, you know, somehow like you, the deities, The gods, like look down, is it? No. Providence College will have everything you know it needs. And so beautiful, beautiful spring day and just, you know, such a lovely event to see students, you know, celebrating and kind of getting together, you know, mostly because we're outside.

00;03;35;02 - 00;03;40;06
Laurie Santos
No masks. Right? Right. Right. I think it was just a really special moment. We're so happy I could be here on campus for it.

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Stasia Walmsley
I definitely myself, I'll never forget it. And I know members of that. That class won't. It was a very special day. So it was a couple of years ago. I'm wondering if you would remind our listeners a little bit about the type of research that you do your work and specifically what what do we mean when we say the science of happiness and what you study?

00;04;02;20 - 00;04;22;16
Laurie Santos
Yeah, So mostly I'm just really interested in, you know, what kinds of practices can we do to feel better, right, to improve our well-being over time. And I take a really evidence based approach to that. There's this big field right now of positive psychology, which is all the kind of studies that really look at the kinds of things we can do to improve our well-being over time.

00;04;22;25 - 00;04;39;17
Laurie Santos
I got interested in this when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I'm a professor at Yale and I became head of college on campus, which means I live on campus with students. I kind of, you know, see student life up close and personal. And even before COVID, I really started worrying about what we were seeing with our students.

00;04;39;17 - 00;05;03;11
Laurie Santos
You know, we have a mental health crisis nationally where over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function. You know, over 60% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious. You know, I was just seeing this in the trenches in my students and so I decided to develop a new class and sort of retrain in this field of positive psychology so I could figure out, okay, what are some practical strategies I can teach my students on campus that they can use to kind of feel better?

00;05;04;03 - 00;05;23;10
Laurie Santos
And the class I developed sort of went a little bit viral on campus. I think it went a little bit viral off campus. And that's one of the reasons that I was really able to, you know, harness these strategies that the research shows and share them not just with my students on campus at Yale, but beyond. I think it's one of the reasons I wound up here, you know, for my commencement speech at Providence College, too.

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Stasia Walmsley
And that class started prior to the pandemic, correct?

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Laurie Santos
Correct. Yeah. The first time I taught it was in 20 2018. And it feels like it was kind of prescient to be thinking about mental health and all these problems. Right. I think we had just no clue what we were in for, you know, these multiple years of, you know, not having the social connection we had before. Just utter uncertainty, anxiety, a lot of loss, a lot of grief, both for the traditions that we miss, but also for the people that we lost.

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Laurie Santos
I think we just had, you know, no idea what we were going to be up against.

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Stasia Walmsley
So in your students and then also in people that you talk to, what's what's different about studying the science of happiness post-pandemic versus the versus the work you were doing before?

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Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, I think we've realized just how acute the mental health crisis was before because it's gotten so much worse on campus. I think two years of anxiety of not being able to see easily the people we care about. You know, things have gotten worse. And I think our students are struggling even more, the kind of we saw a lot of loneliness before the pandemic.

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Laurie Santos
But these things have gotten worse as students spent three years in Zoom school and in many cases. Right. They're trying to kind of play catch up on a lot of these practices and strategies that they know can improve their well-being. And so I think it's become even more acute that we need some of these lessons now more than ever.

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Stasia Walmsley
Yeah, I I've been listening recently to the most recent season of the Happiness Happiness LED podcast, and you have been mentioning a concept that I've been pretty intrigued by called post-traumatic growth. So my getting that right. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and how maybe that is applicable to this time? And is that an emerging area for you?

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Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, so I mean, I think everyone's heard of probably post-traumatic stress, right? PTSD, Right. This is the kind of situation that when you go through some traumatic event, whether it's combat or some sort of trauma in your personal life, you can wind up with these long term kind of negative effects. Right. You know, you're more anxious or and things like that.

00;07;34;02 - 00;07;54;15
Laurie Santos
And we think that that's kind of what happens after trauma. But if but if you look at the research, what you find is a similar phenomenon in the opposite direction. And this is what's called post-traumatic growth. The idea is that after some traumatic events, sometimes you wind up finding more meaning in your life. You wind up strengthening social connections, you wind up figuring out what really matters.

00;07;54;15 - 00;08;26;29
Laurie Santos
You wind up gaining a sense of your own personal resilience because you're like, If I could go through that, I could sort of go through anything, right? And that leads to a host of positive psychological changes after trauma. And the reason I love this concept of post-traumatic growth is that it shows us that there's not just one path that happens if our circumstances are really bad, you know, we all can go through, you know, a terrible time like the, you know, COVID pandemic or a variety of terrible times that a lot of our students and a lot of people in our community face and wind up growing from it and wind up becoming stronger after

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Laurie Santos
the fact.

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Stasia Walmsley
There's really there's something about the evidence based, data based approach that you take to thinking about happiness that I know I have found pretty interesting. And, you know, if somebody may say and kind of smile, you'll feel better or look on the bright side. Those feel very much like platitudes. But the work that you're presenting in the podcast and to your students, because it's science backed, feels like there's there's it's more accessible to me.

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Stasia Walmsley
I don't know if you've been hearing that from other people. You know, certainly a lot of people are listening in, which is great. But that accessibility to science and bringing that out in, whether it's to your students or to others, what has that been like? What has that experience been like? What kind of feedback do you get?

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Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, I get exactly the feedback you mentioned a lot, right, where people, you know, they want strategies that they can use to feel better and they don't want platitudes, right? They really want to know what is the evidence suggests and and I think that's important. Right? You know, there are lots of ideas out there about the kinds of things we can do to feel better, but we want to make sure we're putting like our energy into the right stuff.

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Laurie Santos
You know, we don't want to kind of put a lot of work in and find out, oh, that wasn't the thing I was supposed to do to improve my well-being. It's just not going to work. And so I think looking at the evidence, looking at what really scientific only makes us happier, what the evidence shows about what actual happy people are doing in terms of their behaviors and their mindsets.

00;10;01;05 - 00;10;20;28
Laurie Santos
I think it can be really powerful and and bringing that science to people, you know, trying to find ways to boil it down. And in our podcast, often using narrative stories to explain these concepts to people, I think it's been incredible. I mean, I hear from people all the time about how much these stories and the podcast episodes have really helped people, you know, in their daily life.

00;10;20;28 - 00;10;44;24
Laurie Santos
We just did this really fun live episode in Boston and we're having this conversation in April of 2023, and we just did this live show in Boston, and it was incredible. You know, so many like people after the show came up to me and said, Oh, because I learned, you know, this concept of like, you know, contrasting my plans and make sure I think about obstacles, like I was able to run a marathon or, you know, because I heard about the importance of fun.

00;10;44;24 - 00;10;55;19
Laurie Santos
I really been investing in it with my girlfriends. And here we are, eight of us at the show together. And so you just see that if you can figure out ways to put this science into practice, it can actually change our lives in a big way.

00;10;56;03 - 00;11;15;17
Stasia Walmsley
And I understand, too, that you have been introducing some of these concepts to adolescents, teens, because as you were mentioning before, this mental health crisis doesn't start in college. It starts, you know, Right. So how are you seeing that that age group respond to some of the science that you're presenting?

00;11;15;24 - 00;11;33;28
Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, you know, more and more I've realized, like, you know, I wish I didn't have to teach this class on campus. Like, I wish people learned it earlier. And in one of the domains where we kept getting questions and requests for new content was for high school and middle school students. Right. These are students who, again, are going through a lot of the same stresses that we see on a college campus.

00;11;33;28 - 00;11;58;15
Laurie Santos
But but sometimes in even more acute ways. Right. You know, the academic pressures they face, the social pressures they face, you know, adolescence is just a really tricky time. Right. And so we really wanted to give resources to that group. And so we've put a new class out there called The Science of Well-Being for Teens. It's up it was originally up on Coursera dot org, which is where we put a lot of our content, but most recently put it on YouTube too, because that's where all the high school kids today on YouTube.

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Laurie Santos
And so yeah, so it's just openly, freely available to anyone who wants to take it. We've already had 70,000 learners sign up just in the first like month or so. You know, the response has really been incredible. Well, we're getting we're starting to get reviews and, you know, as people make it through the whole course content and, you know, we're just hearing, why didn't I learn this stuff earlier?

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Laurie Santos
This stuff is so helpful. And so I think even in that age range, learning strategies that really work to feel better and that you can use to navigate stress is really important.

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Stasia Walmsley
And talking about kind of navigating and thinking about the ways that this these strategies are something that you can use at all points in your life, right? Like we think about just thinking even of the the phrase pursuit of happiness. You have mentioned on a couple of occasions in the podcast, and I know in some of the courses online that happiness is not necessarily a destination.

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Stasia Walmsley
And I think that's tough for some of us who have grown up thinking that it's something you can will yourself to be or a state of being. So is that, you know, one of the truisms that word word fallacies that seems that people think is a truism that people need to overcome before they can even jump into this work and this kind of this idea that they can they can use these strategies to help themselves in their journey for well-being, I guess.

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Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the one of the big misconceptions that we have about happiness is that it's this like destination, right? This is actually something researchers call the arrival fallacy, or I like to refer to is the happily ever after fallacy. You know, every Disney movie has led us astray as of then, and they lived happily ever after, Right?

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Laurie Santos
But that's just not how happiness works. My my Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert is fond of saying happily ever after only works if you have 3 minutes to live. It's like it's a kind of continued process. And so I think once we realize that, once we realize that happiness is a journey, it's a process, it can give us some real insight into how we can go about pursuing our happiness in a more effective way.

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Laurie Santos
Because a lot of what the work suggests is that happiness requires some effort, you know, just like other good things in life, you know, like learning to master a sport, as so many athletes here at Providence College do. Right. You know, getting your education, you know, raising a child, learning an instrument. Right. You got to put in continued practice.

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Laurie Santos
Right. And that's just how happiness works. You know, you're never going to get to a destination where you're done. It kind of requires constant effort and work throughout your life.

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Stasia Walmsley
There's this concept that we talk about a lot at Providence College, and I think it's not unusual for college campuses in this idea of flourishing. And even I think whether it's at the high school level or even the college level, this is kind of taken off as almost a students are like hashtag flourishing when they're doing stuff. But in as much as it's can be said with tongue in cheek, that it is something that, you know, you talk a lot about in your work that is a key concept in something that again, something you need to work at.

00;15;08;24 - 00;15;18;23
Stasia Walmsley
What are some of the what's some of the evidence that you've seen maybe at the college level, specifically about students who have made an attempt to flourish in different ways?

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Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think the key is that we often get what truly leads to flourishing a little bit wrong, right? I think sometimes we assume that flourishing is about, you know, perfect academic performance or getting the perfect job or, you know, to these high school students that I've been working with recently, getting into the perfect college, you know, getting to a college like Providence College.

00;15;38;17 - 00;16;05;19
Laurie Santos
Right. And those things, you know, matter for our life. But if you look at what really controls are flourishing, it's the social relationships we form. It's the good things that we do for other people. It's the kinds of mindsets we establish for ourselves, whether we're feeling grateful or whether we're feeling present, right? Those things really determine a flourishing life, which is often defined as, you know, having a life where you have some positive emotion, but also having a life where you have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning.

00;16;05;19 - 00;16;24;06
Laurie Santos
You know, you're satisfied with where your life is going. And so I think we often are pursuing flourishing, but we get it wrong. Like, you know, you'll see like, you know, on Instagram of like, you know, I'm up all night studying, not hanging out with my friends, like hashtag flourishing. And I want to be like, oh, that's not you know, you might need a better a better balance there.

00;16;24;06 - 00;16;33;15
Laurie Santos
So I think this this term is really helpful to to point us in the direction of what we might need to be going towards. But we need to have an accurate view of what really leads to it.

00;16;33;23 - 00;17;06;15
Stasia Walmsley
Sure. I was mentioning to you before we started talking that I was quite a fan of your podcast during COVID and several members of my family. We would we would sit down and listening to it together and and really took away those strategies and started to apply them. And I think during the pandemic specifically, there was this idea that it was there was permission to start thinking about how do we find meaning and what's most important.

00;17;07;04 - 00;17;29;07
Stasia Walmsley
And now that we're in a situation where we're getting back to whatever this new normal is, I wonder if there's this kind of law of diminishing intent where these are the ways we had started thinking during the pandemic, or at least some of us did, about finding meaning and making sure that we were strategically considering our well-being and how to be happy.

00;17;29;20 - 00;17;47;13
Stasia Walmsley
Some of that's fallen away. So are there things that you're hearing from people now who are wanting to kind of reflex this happiness muscle? And what do you suggest? What are some of the tips to reengage those those kind of self-motivated actions to be happier?

00;17;47;22 - 00;18;14;16
Laurie Santos
Yeah. I mean, I think that the collective pause that was the pandemic, you know, was was a great moment for us to all assess like, you know, how are things going? Am I satisfied with my life? Do I have this sense of meaning? And I think it's what's launched a lot of sociological changes that have, you know, kind of surprisingly continued to last past the pandemic, you know, these kind of conversations about, you know, quiet quitting and the great resignation and just people really kind of making some big changes in their life.

00;18;15;03 - 00;18;33;19
Laurie Santos
I think the pandemic was a transformative experience for a lot of people, and that allowed them to kind of transform in ways that will hopefully improve their happiness. But, you know, as that collective pause ends and we go back to normal, it's easy to forget the lessons that we learned during that time and sort of go back to the grind.

00;18;33;27 - 00;18;49;22
Laurie Santos
And I think that's when it becomes even more important to think about like, you know, what are some of the strategies that like the research really shows we should engage in? And I think one of the ones that I think became so salient during the pandemic that we need to get back to is prioritizing what's called our time affluence.

00;18;49;22 - 00;19;09;25
Laurie Santos
So this is just this kind of subjective sense that we have some free time, that we have that kind of moment and that space to pause and assess and a time to be kind of mindful. And I think that's not what a lot of us are experiencing, you know, especially these days, post-pandemic. A lot of us experience the opposite, which is what's known as time famine, where you're like, famished for time.

00;19;09;25 - 00;19;32;24
Laurie Santos
And and there's lots of evidence that time famine works in our body like, like hunger, famine, Right. Like it causes a, you know, fight or flight response. It has effects on the way our body works, but it also has big effects on our level of happiness. In fact, there's some research by the Harvard professor, Ashley Willens, that if you self-report being time famished, a lot of the time, that's as bad for your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed.

00;19;32;26 - 00;20;05;20
Laurie Santos
You know, we suddenly becoming unemployed would probably negatively affect your well-being. Just feeling like you're strapped for time all the time is just as bad. And so I think this is a big lesson that we need to come back to that if you felt some space, you know, during that yucky time in 2020 when we had all this free time, but if you notice at that time was really helpful, you know, there needs to be ways that you strategically build that back in, you know, either by scheduling objectively more free time for yourself or by finding subjective ways to open up some free time.

00;20;05;20 - 00;20;22;22
Laurie Santos
And one of my favorite strategies is to make good use of the time blocks that you do have, you know, because we all have some free time. But you know, when you know when that meeting ends early or your kids fall asleep early or, you know, your practice gets canceled or whatever, you know, we tend to just say, oh, it's, you know, this little windfall of time.

00;20;22;22 - 00;20;51;15
Laurie Santos
I'll just check my email or go on social media. I just blow it off somehow. Right? But if we make good use of those little pieces of time, what researchers often call time confetti, these little sort of pieces of time floating around, we can we can use that time confetti to do better things. You know, that's a moment where you could, you know, squeeze in a little bit of movement for your body, your texter friend to be a little bit more social or, you know, engage in a meditation practice or you're just have a, you know, a breath to check in and see how things are going, you know?

00;20;51;15 - 00;21;06;03
Laurie Santos
So that's one of the big strategies I've thought of after COVID. You know, a big change was not having as much time as we did during the, you know, not so great periods of COVID. But if we can bring that back, I think we can experience the benefits that come from time at once.

00;21;06;14 - 00;21;13;09
Stasia Walmsley
So even in these short periods of time, do you have a favorite go to in your in your kind of snippet of confetti my.

00;21;13;09 - 00;21;28;13
Laurie Santos
Own happiness arsenal as I like to because you need like arsenal is like a bunch of weapons to kind of fight off the not so happy time. Yeah I mean you know for me when I have some free time. Well, first of all, I like to make sure I'm making free time and that, you know, it takes a lot of work.

00;21;29;24 - 00;21;46;28
Laurie Santos
But but it's really essential. But then once you get free time, I think the key is to make sure you're trying to spend it, you know, in ways that will promote your happiness as much as possible. And one of the big ones for me is making sure I'm getting a little bit more social connection. You know, when I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed, it's really easy to like, plop down and watch TV.

00;21;46;28 - 00;22;03;15
Laurie Santos
But that's exactly the time that I need to reach out to a good friend that I haven't talked to in a long time or catch up with a college roommate or, you know, really have some quality time with my husband. Right. I think especially when in the times where you feel so overwhelmed that you don't want to be social, those are the times when you actually do need to be social.

00;22;04;06 - 00;22;19;21
Laurie Santos
Another thing for me that's been a big one is just making sure I'm moving my body right. You know, it's not running a marathon. It's not beating yourself up about hitting the gym. It's just like making sure your body feels good because it's moved a lot and that it's rested a lot. To sleep is another one that's really big for me.

00;22;19;21 - 00;22;28;07
Laurie Santos
So yeah, so those are my quick my go to is when, you know, I feel like I need to up up the happiness ante a little bit in terms of my practices.

00;22;28;11 - 00;22;41;26
Stasia Walmsley
Well I definitely am inspired to add more to my arsenal. My my go to for the pandemic was I started doing puzzles and I mean, there was something great about that, too, because it just makes you stop and concentrate and we don't it's just gives your brain a break.

00;22;41;26 - 00;23;01;25
Laurie Santos
But totally. And I think, you know, one of the reasons I love puzzles is, you know, they're partly very mindful and so on. But but they're also something that if you pay attention, like build you up rather than, you know, drops you down. And I think that was another kind of lesson that we learned in the pandemic was that a lot of us had the time to notice, like, oh, these things feel good, These are non-negotiables.

00;23;01;25 - 00;23;15;12
Laurie Santos
Maybe I added more time with my family, or maybe I took time to take a walk with the dog and just be present. Or I just did a puzzle, you know, took a half hour to do a puzzle. I think when you learn that there are things that really do make you feel good, you need to build those into your schedule too.

00;23;16;08 - 00;23;42;29
Stasia Walmsley
Well, thank you so much. I want to just to wrap up to ask one final question about the future of science in this field and thinking about the science of happiness. Do you see as you you know, think about your class next semester and as you think about, you know, your continued work as a cognitive scientist, do you see any trends that you're looking forward to diving into in the next several years?

00;23;42;29 - 00;24;01;26
Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, I think I'll see, you know, one area I think that's really exciting and then one kind of, you know, way to continue this practice of teaching this content, which I also find really exciting. But I think a domain that a lot of folks are interested in now, which of course really resonates here at Providence Colleges, the importance of spiritual experiences for happiness.

00;24;02;16 - 00;24;34;15
Laurie Santos
You know, there's a lot more really reflective work on, you know, what kind of causes us to transform them and really pay attention to what matters in life, in the meaning in life. And I think more and more kind of researchers are starting to look at the role that spiritual experiences play. But also other transformative experiences. For example, there's a lot of work right now on the potential therapeutic benefits of things like psychedelic drugs, which which functionally get back to the kinds of transformative experiences that were described, you know, in the Bible by religious leaders, you know, for hundreds of years.

00;24;34;15 - 00;24;58;19
Laurie Santos
And so I think there's some really exciting new work in these domains trying to figure out, okay, you know, what? Do how do we get these experiences, you know, whether through religious practices, contemplated practices or through chemical interventions, basically. And what are some of the benefits? Right. Like, how does it really change us over time? And so I think there's, you know, in the next ten, 20 years, we'll see some really exciting work in that domain.

00;24;59;09 - 00;25;15;07
Laurie Santos
But in terms of my next steps are kind of, you know, sharing this stuff, You know, we're excited with our new high school class, but, you know, really, I want to get this content out there to even younger students. And so I've just started up a partnership with Sesame Workshop, which is the group that makes Sesame Street.

00;25;15;07 - 00;25;15;20
Stasia Walmsley
Very.

00;25;15;20 - 00;25;30;27
Laurie Santos
Fun. Yes, very fun. I actually just got back this week from a big photo shoot with a bunch of Muppets. I posed with Big Bird and Elmo, which was very fun. But yeah, the idea is like, what if we could just teach a lot of these strategies to, you know, two year olds, three year olds, six year olds, right?

00;25;31;06 - 00;25;51;29
Laurie Santos
Because I think a lot of the practices we talk about, you know, they are based on the science, but it's not like rockets science, right? These are just simple strategies and hacks that even little kids can do. And so I'm really interested in ways that we can get parents to understand that these strategies are ones that we should be teaching our kids as early as possible and to try to get that content out there as much as we can.

00;25;52;17 - 00;25;55;21
Stasia Walmsley
That's terrific. I can't wait to see that emerge.

00;25;55;24 - 00;25;59;02
Laurie Santos
Stay tuned for the Happiness Lab with me and Elmo Cummings.

00;25;59;06 - 00;26;15;23
Stasia Walmsley
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here on the Providence College podcast. And it's just been a joy to have you back in Providence. And that's all for today's edition of the Providence College podcast, along with our producer, Chris Judge. Thank you for listening. We're happy you did.