#139 Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness

We are dealing with an enormous mental health crisis among our young people ... Over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. Another over 60% report feeling lonely, extremely lonely, most of the time. Over 80% say that they're overwhelmed most days by all that they have to do. And more than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide at least once in the last year.

I often say that if you're really worried about your kid's happiness, do some work to focus on your own. Because if you're feeling less anxious, if you're feeling in a better zone, if you're expressing gratitude, all these things are going to naturally come to your kids more easily, too.

If you self-report being time-famished, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. We know unemployment's awful for your happiness; just feeling like you don't have any time is bad, too.

This is a bias that researchers call the arrival fallacy... 'When this happens, I'll be happy.' And, you know, it's not like we're mis-predicting—you get a new house and like, yeah, that feels good, but it doesn't feel as good as you're going to think, and it doesn't feel good for as long as you're going to think.

Even these best moments in life, if they repeat over time, kind of get boring. And and this is what researchers call hedonic adaptation. It's the reason why, even when we get the good things, even if they stick around, we stop appreciating them as much, because we kind of just get used to them.

When I list out tips for how to feel happier, often the first one is improve your social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social.

There's evidence that in as little as 2 weeks, the simple act of writing 3-5 things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can improve your well-being, like significantly improve your well-being.

One of the key ingredients for happiness that we often forget is what's known as time affluence—this subjective sense that we have some free time.

There's evidence that getting a half-hour of cardio exercise a day is significantly reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

What's a dumb thing about our minds is that we never look to reference points that make us feel good; we always look to reference points that make us... feel crappy.

Happiness takes effort. Happiness takes work. Like all good things, you got to put in some work to get there. And part of that work is understanding the misconceptions. But part of that work is, like, we don't often have the best instincts about what will make us happy. The things that we, kind of, want to do in life are not necessarily the things we're really going to enjoy or that will give us a meaningful life.

Part of happiness really is about being present. There's so much evidence that when we're mind-wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy.

What I worry about a lot is that parents who, kind of, in this very well-intentioned way, try to solve problems for kids take away the opportunity that kids get from solving those problems themselves. And that might not seem bad, except that there's lots of evidence that that contributes to kids' beliefs about whether they can solve those problems themselves.

One way that you can spend your money to feel happier is to use your money to buy back time.

This is our bias of affective forecasting ... We get wrong, not the direction—we kind of know good things are going to make us feel good—but we definitely get wrong the intensity and the duration that that boost in happiness is going to last.

Relationships are happiest when you're in a relationship with other happy people.