Your Environment Affects Your Happiness More Than You Think with Dr. Leidy Klotz

Our surroundings affect our happiness in ways we often don’t notice. The layout of a room, the amount of clutter in our home, and even small changes to lighting can shape our mood, focus, and relationships. As The Happiness Lab continues its spring cleaning series, Dr. Laurie sits down with University of Virginia Professor Leidy Klotz, author of In a Good Place https://www.amazon.com/Good-Place-Spaces-Where-Thrive/dp/0316567361, to explore the hidden ways our spaces shape our inner lives. Why do certain places make us feel calm, connected, and grounded, while others leave us distracted or drained? From creating more connection at home to using our surroundings to remember loved ones we’ve lost, these practical ideas will refresh your space and your wellbeing. Experts Mentioned: Leidy Klotz https://leidyklotz.com/, professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia Nelson Mandela https://www.nelsonmandela.org/, anti-apartheid activist and former president of South Africa Jane Jacobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs, writer and urban activist Resources Mentioned: In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive https://books.apple.com/us/book/in-a-good-place/id6749524867, by Leidy Klotz (2026) Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less https://books.apple.com/us/book/subtract/id1525220124 by Leidy Klotz (2021) “Spatial Patterns of Solar Photovoltaic System Adoption: The Influence of Neighbors and the Built Environment https://resources.environment.yale.edu/gillingham/GrazianoGillingham_15_SpatialPatternsPVSystems.pdf” by Marcello Graziano and Kenneth Gillingham (Journal of Economic Geography, 2015). “Fire Drill: Inattentional Blindness and Amnesia for the Location of Fire Extinguishers https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-012-0355-3” by Alan D Castel, Michael Vendetti, and Keith J Holyoak. (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2012) “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2000_RyanDeci_SDT.pdf” by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci (American Psychologist, 2000). “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9252316/” by Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls (Science, 1997). “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf” by Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000). Related Episodes: "Choice https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/choice-overload/id1474245040?i=1000455959891Overload https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/choice-overload" by The Happiness Lab (2019). "How to Make Better Choices (with https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-make-better-choices-with-barry-schwartz/id1474245040?i=1000729897270Barry https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-make-better-choices-with-barry-schwartzSchwartz) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-make-better-choices-with-barry-schwartz/id1474245040?i=1000729897270" by The Happiness Lab (2025). "How to Design a More Meaningful Life (with Dave Evans and Bill Burnett) https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-design-a-more-meaningful-life-with-dave-evans-and-bill-burnett" by The Happiness Lab (2026). See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 0:14Laurie Santos?

  When we think about spring cleaning, we usually focus on stuff. What to toss, what to organize, what to tidy up. But what if we zoomed out for a second and thought about the nature of space itself? How we're using it and how it might be shaping our wellbeing in ways that we don't even notice?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  There's a whole realm of opportunities kind of in this relationship between our inner and outer worlds. And I think we don't recognize that our outer worlds shape our inner worlds in how people feel and think and behave and how spaces relate to that.

• 0:48Laurie Santos?

  This is University of Virginia professor Lydie Quatz. Lydie is the author of a new book entitled "In a Good Place: How the spaces where we live, work, and play can help us thrive."

• 0:59Speaker 01

  My scholarship bridges between engineering and architecture and psychology and behavioral science, even if you're just talking about, oh, should I add a new light to my office? That's going to change all sorts of dynamics in unpredictable ways.

• 1:13Laurie Santos?

  Before we go further, because we're talking about space, I'm curious about the space you're in right now. If you put on your sort of space psychologist hat, what would you notice about that room? How's it affecting your mind?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  My space right now is very minimalistic so that I can focus on the conversation with you and your listeners. But your space, on the other hand...

• 1:30Laurie Santos?

  Well, it's actually fake. It's a green screen.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a green screen. Okay.

• 1:34Laurie Santos?

  My green screen image is an actual photo of my real office at Yale, which was apparently giving much more away about my identity than I realized.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I love seeing books behind you. And to me, like, one of my favorite things about a space, so I love seeing people's books and then you're like sitting there as you're talking to them, trying to analyze, like, okay, what is this person? Because they have like a Beastie Boys book and a, you know, Catch 22 and then like Viktor Frankl and, you know, it's like, okay, what is Lori like?

• 2:00Laurie Santos?

  Can I just say that I love how Lydie noticed my Beastie Boys book? But I also love the general idea that our spaces tell a story about who we are. Because if our outer worlds shape our inner worlds, that means we can design our spaces to take authorship over our stories. We can become more intentional about the places we spend time in and how they shape our mental health and our happiness. So stay tuned, because in this episode of our spring cleaning series, we'll be showing you how to do just that. Lidi will be back with all his helpful tips, right after these quick ads.

• 2:38Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes, and more about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your shows.

• 3:15Speaker 02

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• 3:43Laurie Santos?

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• 4:22Laurie Santos?

  When you think about spaces in your own life that have made you happiest, what are the kinds of spaces that come to mind?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I, to this day, like bedrooms that have weird angles because I grew up in like an old farmhouse. In my bedroom was full height ceiling where my bed was, but then quickly went down at an angle and any angled ceiling hearkens back to my childhood. And I actually do this in my class. I will ask students at the beginning of the semester as an icebreaker, like, what's your favorite space that you've ever been in? And most of the spaces that they talk about are some pretty regular space that's been imbued with meaning in some other way. So like the diner where my high school friends used to hang out, or even just like the kitchen island where I did my homework with mom, listening to podcasts or something like that.

• 5:05Laurie Santos?

  These kinds of spaces, the ones that make us feel safe, relaxed and happy, are actually pretty rare. We also fail to prioritize well-being boosting spaces like these because we're often not fully aware of what's going on around us. We fall prey to a bias that psychologists call habituation.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Habituation is just getting used to the way things are. There's a famous psychological study about fire extinguishers that people in offices ask where the nearest fire extinguisher is, can identify it, right? And of course, fire extinguishers are designed to be noticeable. They're red, they're placed in prominent locations, they're literally lifesaving. And yet, the more you walk by them, the less you kind of notice them just because they're always there. We get in habits with how we interact with our spaces. And a lot of the time, that's really good, right? I don't want to have to analyze the design of my baseboard every time I walk out of my house in the morning. I want to be able to think about other things. But it also causes us to miss really beautiful and meaningful things in the world,

• 6:06Speaker 01

  or just opportunities for spaces that we never considered and would want to use if we actually looked at them.

• 6:12Laurie Santos?

  And so let's walk through some of the evolutionary logic to the importance of spaces. A lot of the book uses this idea of self-determination theory. What's that and why is it so important when we're thinking about spaces?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  If you think about our hunter gatherer ancestors, the ones that survived were the ones that controlled their surroundings in some way. Figured out how to create shelter, you figured out how to, you know, have protection from the elements, protection from predators. So what would make you do that is some kind of psychological pull to want to interact with your surroundings, right? This feels good. And so self determination theory is the idea that we have these kind of three fundamental psychological or emotional needs that if we meet, we do well, and if we don't meet them, we struggle. And this is not my research. This is a whole body of research confirmed over and over in all kinds of different populations.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And these are agency, competence or growth and kind of connection or belonging. I think about them as like a kid playing on the beach with a sandcastle, right? So if you go to the beach and you've got kids with you, like when I took my daughter Josephine, she would go and immediately they have agency. The rest of their world, they're being told what to do by parents and teachers and they go to the beach and they can decide where to build, they can decide how big to make the castle, they can decide what kind of architecture it is, and they like it. So if agency is like the ability to do it, competence and growth is the actual doing. And so the things that a kid learns just building a sandcastle are quite amazing. If you think about, okay, they're learning pretty high level like fluid mechanics, just

• 7:46Speaker 01

  how the water erodes, they are learning material properties of sand, but they're also learning about themselves and their relationship with the world. When the tower collapses and they get frustrated, they realize that if they build it back, that also feels pretty good, that they have some kind of control over it. So that's the growth piece that we get from interacting with our surroundings. And then the connection, every one of these projects that I've ever seen starts with like one kid and then they realize that if they can recruit the cousins, it's going to get bigger and they can do more. And then I inevitably, as the parent, end up schlepping down to the ocean to like grab buckets of water and come back up and dump them in their pond that then goes away by the time I walk down to the ocean and come back again.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  But the connection then is like, okay, by building together, we're not Just building the structure, but also building relationships between the people. And you just think about human connection at the societal level. The leading theory now is that the reason hunter gatherer bands came together in the first place was to be able to build and maintain big structures. This act of building together is like the genesis of civilization. So, you know, these core needs that we have for agency, growth and connection kind of originated in our relationship with our surroundings. And now, of course, our relationship with our surroundings is different.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  You and I aren't having to go around, thankfully, manipulating our surroundings just to be able to survive. But we can still meet our psychological needs by manipulating our surroundings.

• 9:20Laurie Santos?

  So you've used this example with children, but as adults, we'd be happier in our spaces if we embrace these three things too. Thinking specifically about agency, your book shares some lovely examples of people finding agency over their space, especially in situations where this is seemingly impossible. You wrote about an example of Nelson Mandela. Can you share that example here?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  So Nelson Mandela famously imprisoned for a really long time. And I guess one of the things that he did when he was imprisoned was on the rooftop of the prison, there was a space that he found, I think he wrote, bathed all day in sunlight. And then he lobbied the guards to be able to have a garden up there and then was able to use it. And obviously Mandela is like an exemplar of taking obstacles and persisting regardless. It's an incredibly extreme example, but we all have like access to spaces that we're not necessarily taking advantage of. And we're all going to have our spaces constrained in some way. Hopefully, we're not going to be incarcerated, but there are spaces that we can't change.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  And when we face a space that we can't change, we can get agency by looking at something about it that we can.

• 10:27Laurie Santos?

  So that's agency, the second need growth. I love this idea of the kids building the sandcastle and learning all these new things, both in terms of their own emotion regulation and like fluid dynamics and so on. But you point out that there's simple ways that we can grow and get creative even in our own spaces. You use an example from a family that you knew that even just switched up where they ate dinner. Tell me about that.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  The Lee family, they're my friends. And there was a time in their life where they had four kids under the age of six. And I was talking to the dad at that time and I said, hey, how's it going? And he's like, things are pretty good. We've taken to eating outside. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, once a week? He's like, no, we eat every meal outside. And I was like, wow, that sounds like a lot. He's like, no, actually, so we go out there and it doesn't matter if the kids spill. It just like goes into the ecosystem. And then when they're done eating, they can run around outside and it doesn't bother Katie and I as much. And when they're making loud noises, it doesn't reverberate around the kitchen walls. So it had made their life better. And I think it illustrates this principle, similar to what Mandela did, but it's also like, here's a space that they had access to, that they had never thought of using

• 11:32Speaker 01

  that way. One way to kind of break through from that is to not necessarily put labels on your spaces according to like, this is a dining room, this is a kitchen, this is a patio. It's like, this is a 10 foot by 20 foot space that is pleasant in the spring, in the fall, and has some breezes and grass and a jungle gym near it or whatever. And then you can start to kind of line up your activities with the spaces and break away from functional fixedness that we get related to how these spaces are supposed to work.

• 12:05Laurie Santos?

  And so this is this idea of growth. We can get competent in our spaces. We can get super creative. The last need you mentioned when you were talking about the sandcastle example was the one that I think we talk about the most on the happiness lab, which is this idea of connection.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:18Laurie Santos?

  Usually when we're talking about on the happiness lab, we're thinking about individual strategies you can do to boost your social connections. So like text a friend or talk to this stranger in the coffee shop. But your point is that spaces are an incredible vehicle for building these really basic social connections. Why is that the case? Why can space be so powerful for that?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  This also ties into our modern world, like these opportunities that we have to not have to commute into work just to meet with somebody if we can talk on Zoom or. I get my groceries delivered and I don't miss the grocery store, but I do miss the random person who smiles at you and reminds you that there's like good humanity out there. So part of it is just proximity, right? How do you want to be able to have interactions? Who do you want to be able to have interactions with? I mean, I think about this a lot because I'm naturally an introvert. I'm not going to go out and like seek interactions, but I need other people around. And so it's really important for me to live in a place where there's just going to be people happening by if I'm sitting out on the porch on the weekend.

• 13:19Laurie Santos?

  So self determination theory suggests that we're wired to shape our surroundings in ways that support three basic needs, agency, growth and connection. But how do we actually build those kinds of spaces into our everyday life? After the break, we'll walk through 10 actionable ways we can do just this. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back.

• 13:45Laurie Santos?

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• 14:28Laurie Santos?

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• 15:11Laurie Santos?

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• 15:23Speaker 03

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• 17:00Laurie Santos?

  University of Virginia professor Lydie Klotz studies how the spaces around us quietly shape our moods, our thoughts, and even our behavior. His new book, In a Good Place, breaks down how simple design choices can lead to big improvements in our well-being. I picked out 10 of my favorite ideas from the book and asked Lydie to walk us through them, starting with number one, something we can all use a little more of: better connection with other people. And for that, Lydie says we need more of what he calls campfires.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  A campfire, if you think about it, is just set up for people to connect. It's a circle. There's not a screen in the middle. There's just warmth in the middle. If you think about a campfire, it invites people in. There's an extreme example that I use in the book of an event planning company that set up campfires to try to make it so that people would bond at the event. But you don't need to have glowing orbs in the middle of a circle, but you do need to think about, well, if I have a 72-inch screen above my fireplace that's on and people come into the room, that's what they're going to be focused on. Whereas if I have a seating area that's arranged in a circle and I invite them to sit down and it's comfortable, there's more likely to be connection. So that's a campfire. I mean, here's an example that I would use at a conference

• 18:13Speaker 01

  is like thinking strategically about where I sit. It's uncomfortable for me to like come up to a group of eight people sitting in a circle unless we all come at the same time. But I could also like sit somewhere where there's an open seat next to me and it's inviting for somebody else to come and have like a random connection in that way.

• 18:31Laurie Santos?

  So it's kind of like creating these focal points where social connection becomes easy.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 18:36Laurie Santos?

  And so another tip that you have that's related to this idea of social connection, which actually comes from your earlier book, Subtract, is this idea that to engage in social connection in our spaces, we need to clean up. This feels especially salient to me right now because right now I'm upstairs in my podcast studio and a friend of mine who just happened to be in town was like, oh, I'll just come over to your house and wait till you're done the podcast and then we can have time to hang out. And my instant reaction when she said this was like, oh, my God, there's the stuff in the kitchen. There's the stuff on the floor. It almost made me tell her like, no, no, no, don't come to my house. We'll meet at some coffee shop or something. We can get really weirded out if our spaces don't feel clean enough for other people to connect. But you've pointed out that there's other reasons that cleaning up can help us connect better. What are some of those reasons?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I mean, connecting is hard. Connecting takes a lot of cognitive effort. Connecting takes a lot of attention. That's how we're wired. And if the space is taking away from that attention, you know, I can, an example of my house, maybe there's shin guards and boxer briefs on the floor. The person's thinking like, what's going on here versus connecting with me? It's the cognitive load of all the things that people have to pay attention to in your space is cognitive load that they're not devoting to connecting with you. And this person's already a friend of yours, so you're okay, right? But if you think about a new person coming into your house, you want not a lot of distractions in the space to take away from them connecting with you and feeling comfortable with you. Or even it could be like something that's, you know, a super fancy centerpiece that just the

• 19:59Speaker 01

  person can't take their eye off it and then focus on you. Those are things that are distracting from the human connection that might happen in the space. Also, just simply coming into your house and taking an outside view, saying, okay, if I didn't live here, what would this look like to me? I think is probably a good exercise.

• 20:17Laurie Santos?

  I love this point about the distraction specifically too, because that gets to tip number three that you've talked about, which is to find ways to use your spaces to fight choice paralysis, which is another way that we can kind of get cognitively overloaded. How do you define choice paralysis? And how can we use our spaces to fight it?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Too many choices causes us to not only make bad decisions, but also feel bad about the decisions that we do make. For example, with chocolates, if people have 30 chocolates to choose from, they are more disappointed with their choice than if they only have some subset of six to choose from, right? Because you're thinking about what you missed out on and you felt cognitively overloaded. Now, that's just 30 and six. And now think about all the degrees of freedom and all the endless options in our spaces. And so I think narrowing down those options. So we want to have choice, but we don't want to be like overloaded with the amount of choice that we have. And one thing that architects have learned to do was in the design process, if they're doing a new building or even like

• 21:15Speaker 01

  renovating, there's a stage where they present three different options. So one option might be like, okay, this is centered on a view out the window, and this one's centered on a gathering area in the living room, and this one's some other principle. So if we're thinking about setting up your home office, for example, starting with like, what are the three basic options that I want to explore before you get into any kind of furnishings and, you know, paint colors and all these other details that just make endless choice?

• 21:44Laurie Santos?

  Your book also has some tips that we can use to avoid choice paralysis. And one of them is that we need to avoid our tendency towards bike shedding. What is bike shedding?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Basically, it's that left to our own devices, we often focus on the small and inconsequential things at the expense of big, important things. And the bike shedding example, it's a built environment example that's been applied to all kinds of decision making. But the original example is like, a committee convened to discuss the construction of a nuclear power plant. Everybody's there, engineers, owners, architects, plant operators, maybe some community members. And the plans get presented. Everybody's like, looks good. They ask some softball questions about the nuclear power plant. And they're like, oh, you want to talk about the bike shed? That's going to go next to the nuclear power plant. And like, the meeting springs to life, right? Everybody has opinions. They're like, what's the new racking system going to be?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  What color are we going to paint it? Where's it going to be located? It's an illustration of like, the bike shed is more understandable. People get the bike shed and therefore feel okay chiming in on it. There's also, the decisions related to the bike shed, while small, are much more certain. Like, okay, if we paint the bike shed blue, everybody knows what that is going to look like. Whereas if you say, oh, we should have a different kind of nuclear reactor, nobody even knows what that would mean. So we focus on these small and inconsequential decisions because they're understandable, but also because there's more kind of certainty in what the ultimate decision outcome would look like. So it becomes really important to get over bike shedding, to go back to basic principles about what we want from the space.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And that's one reason why it's important to think about agency, growth, and connection. That's one way to avoid bike shedding is to say, okay, how is this going to contribute to these fundamental psychological needs? But what it's doing is helping people think through the big things before you move on to these small, granular decisions.

• 23:40Laurie Santos?

  So that's tip number three. Avoid the choice paralysis, fight the bike shedding. Tip number four, switches gears a little bit. It's this idea that we need to fight the habituation we would normally experience in spaces.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. A way to overcome it is to consciously tune in to what's going on. One interesting way to pay attention is to close your eyes. Close your eyes, all of a sudden you'll start hearing things and smelling things and maybe feeling things, maybe the breeze or whatever that you wouldn't have otherwise about the space. And this is An opportunity to notice pleasant things, but it's also an opportunity to notice negative things that even if you've habituated them away are still having a toll. So there's studies of workplaces where there's like a lot of ambient noise. And even if workers don't say that it's a noisy workspace, they still report being more stressed out at the end of the day.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Same with unpleasant smells, like the new car smell that comes in cars, but also off gassing carpets, right? And people sit in a space like that all day and don't even notice the smell and then go home with a headache because they've been inhaling the VOCs. So breaking free from habituation is a matter of paying closer attention, but like one way to do it is to tap into all your senses.

• 24:58Laurie Santos?

  Another tip that you've given for fighting habituation, which I love so much, it's going to get its own tip number, tip number five, is what you've called space before screen.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:07Laurie Santos?

  What's that?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Obviously, our screens are taking our attention. I use my screen. It does amazing things. It's allowing us to talk right now, me to talk to your audience. That's freaking amazing. But no matter what it can do, it's not tapping into my other senses, right? It is basically just visual and sound here, but there's no smell, there's no touch. It's two dimensional. And again, this isn't bad, but it is like kind of inadvertently taking out of our life, something that really provides meaning and happiness and fulfillment. And so space before a screen doesn't even try to fight that. And just use your screen as a cue to take in the space around you. So if I walk into this new space and I start looking at my screen to see like, okay, did I get a text from anybody?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  When you start doing that, say, oh, wait, I just looked at my screen. I'm in a new space. Can I take in the space? And now all of a sudden you're looking and you're smelling and you're noticing things and you're seeing opportunities. So using that thing that we're naturally drawn to and instead turning it around as a reminder to analyze the space that we're in. You can do that in spaces that you're in all the time and I guarantee you, you will notice new things about the space.

• 26:14Laurie Santos?

  Since reading your book, I've tried doing this, just using my own foe that I'm looking at as a cue. And I can tell you, this helped me in a lot of spaces, but especially in the morning.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 26:23Laurie Santos?

  I first wake up and I'm looking at my phone to check my emails. Like, no space before screen. And I stop and I'm like, oh, man, my cozy bed, the light is coming in. What's the weather outside the window? And it's just so much more embodied and grounding. When before I'd just be like halfway through my inbox before I would even notice I was awake and alive and I had a body at all.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that makes me really happy that it was helpful. I do the same thing and resist the same way that you do now.

• 26:48Laurie Santos?

  So tip number six is one that's helpful whenever we're in spaces that involve learning. And it's to harness what you've called memory anchors. What are memory anchors?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  So when we learn something, the information about where we learned it is filed right alongside the thing that we learned. Now, we can engineer that. And if we want to learn something and really remember it, then we can also do it in a spot that we're more likely to remember. So it's maybe a different spot. And a really simple example that I use in my teaching, I'll figure out a reason to just get out of the classroom and go to some random spot on campus. And then I'll guide them through an experience that helps them learn some important lesson. And then they're like, why are we at the amphitheater for this? We didn't actually need to come here. Like, I just wanted you to be more likely to remember this. Like, think back to your own school, right? If you remember something, it's very

• 27:38Speaker 01

  often happens outside of the classroom. Maybe it's on a field trip. I mean, my dad, I don't know if he knew he was doing this, but when he would help us with our biology, he would take us on walks outside. So you're just like getting people outside of the routine environment. And then you've got this memory anchor where it's the new space and the new idea working together to be remembered.

• 28:00Laurie Santos?

  Seems like it's just another way we've been harness our spatial memory system, right? Is that we're using space to kind of do what we actually want to do, which is to be learning new stuff.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Right. And, you know, one of the ways that you might hear about this idea is memory champions will, if they need to memorize a bunch of facts, will actually take the facts and associate them with spaces. That's super interesting, but it's pretty much useless for everybody else. And so we're basically just turning that around, right? It's like, okay, we want to actually learn. So let's align our spaces to do that.

• 28:31Laurie Santos?

  So far, we've looked at how our spaces can shape our daily habits, how we connect, how we focus, and how we learn. After the break, we'll go deeper into how our surroundings can reflect our values, tap into our instincts, and even help us stay connected to the people we've lost. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back.

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• 32:09Laurie Santos?

  We've been walking through my top 10 favorite ideas from Leidy Klutz's new book, In a Good Place, about how we can use our spaces to boost well-being. Tip number seven takes us back to our evolutionary roots and the kinds of environments that we're naturally wired to feel good in.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's a lot of advice out there about like what you're going to like. And I think the ones that really hold up scientifically are things that are aligned with the laws of nature. And so one great example is prospect and refuge. We talked earlier about spaces being critical for our survival. So what kind of space would be good for survival? Well, refuge first, right? So the space is going to protect you from the elements and from predators, but also prospect and being able to see like food or water sources or other opportunities from the space. In that prospect and refuge, I mean, that's sitting under an umbrella at the beach. You're getting prospect and refuge, washing dishes in your kitchen while looking out the window. That's prospect and refuge. So that's something that we tend to like.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  When it comes to design aesthetics, it's kind of a balance of organization and complexity. And so this is how nature just takes shape, right? If you think about a pine tree, for example, I mean, it's super complex, impressive thing that's doing all this amazing stuff, but there are also some very basic rules in the appearance of this tree. You know, there's small patterns in the tip of the branch that are identical to the patterns in a larger branch. And you don't necessarily notice them unless you're really trying to pay attention to it. But that's the world that we've been surrounded with, and that feels pleasing. And going into a built environment example of that, if you think about like a facade of bricks, super plain, right?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Seemingly very straightforward, but if you look at how bricks are organized, which now you're going to be cursed to do for the internet, but there are all kinds of different patterns. I mean, there's like a pattern where the bricks are just staggered offset by a half a brick each row, and that creates this balance of order and complexity. But there are other patterns where you might have a brick with the long side facing out, then a brick with the short side facing out, then long side, then short side, and then that alternates each row. And it creates this aesthetic of like, okay, there's complexity, but there's also this underlying order. And that's stuff that we've tend to have been surrounded by for a long time. And that kind of helps our brains feel comfortable and then we can go about our lives doing other things.

• 34:36Laurie Santos?

  Any tips for how to build more of that into our own spaces?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  The classic interior design advice about, you know, varying the materials. So you don't want to get things too matchy, but also have like a clear organizing principle to them.

• 34:52Laurie Santos?

  So tip number seven was this evolutionary idea of go for these moments of prospect and refuge, maybe find order in complexity. Tip number eight is about aligning our space with our beliefs. What are some beliefs that we might be unknowingly propagating in our spaces?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I'll give you one I unknowingly propagated. So we bought an old Cape Cod post-World War II house. And the way those homes were designed, classic design, was that the kitchen's kind of in the back. And of course, that was based on post-World War II gender roles, where it was seen as the woman's job to be there cooking, but also cooking like out of sight from everywhere else. And what was supposed to be, you bring out the food and then return to the kitchen. And people don't have to see the mess and people don't have to interact with the mess. But like if you opened up your kitchen to make it a more open plan, and you're like taking down those gender roles.

• 35:42Laurie Santos?

  And this kind of thing comes up at work too, when it comes to hierarchies that we might not intend as well.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking about the quality of the offices, where the offices are, who uses what space? I was talking to somebody recently and they're like, we have this idea that our office is open plan and everybody can use any space. But the big boss always comes in and just sits in this conference room all day. And it's like, nobody's going to go take the big boss's space, right? And so really thinking about what message are you sending with the spaces? And does it align with what your company or yourself actually values? And what I think is really important about like sharing our ideas through spaces. I mean, people do all this work with social norms because social norms is one of the most powerful ways that behaviors spread. So when you see a sticker that says, I voted, that's like, okay,

• 36:30Speaker 01

  we're trying to spread voting by making a behavior visible. And what's hard about a lot of behaviors is that they're not super visible. So you need a sticker, but a space doesn't need a sticker. It's already there. And there's this classic example, I think it's actually Connecticut suburbs, of how solar panels. Spread and basically the gist of the study is that people who can see solar panels from their house are more likely to have solar panels on their house and they control for everything else. And so it's a classic social norm, right? It's just by seeing this space, it's spreading this value. And so I just think of that as it's a huge opportunity we have to actually enhance our influence in the world and make change for the things that we think are important.

• 37:11Laurie Santos?

  And one of the things we might think is important is a sense of community, kind of egalitarianism. And that gets to tip number nine, which is that if you want to use spaces to enhance what you value, you might want to consider promoting what's called collective efficacy. What's collective efficacy?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Building together, basically. I remember when I first started teaching my class on sustainability in the built environment, students in the class were like, oh, there's this project that's going to happen in New York City where they're going to redo this old abandoned rail line and make a walkway on it that allows people to walk through the city and experience it in a totally different way. And this has turned into the High Line. And when they first started talking about it, I'm like, yeah, great. I hear about these projects all the time. And this is just two people's dream. The people who started the High Line literally just met at a community meeting and had this idea for this thing. And then it grew from there. And it's just a really pleasant place that has been incredibly popular. It's a success by any measure, except for maybe gentrification, but that's a different book. And even if you think, you know, Jane Jacobs, another New York story

• 38:09Speaker 01

  where she was really famous for her activism, stopping a highway from bisecting Manhattan. And it started with people in rooms talking about not wanting this to happen and they protest against it and their group gets bigger from the protesting and then they're able to take on bigger space change projects. So that's collective efficacy. It feels good. It's one great way to get things done in the world. And if you track how these examples happen over time, it very often starts with groups taking on a relatively small project. And by taking on the relatively small project, they build their capacity to do things, but they also build the capacity of their group.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  That makes their communities stronger. And so this collective efficacy is not just making the space nicer, it's bringing the community together.

• 38:59Laurie Santos?

  So that gets us to our final tip, tip number 10. And I've saved the best for last because this is the idea that we can feel happier in our spaces if we use them to promote healthy forms of grief and nostalgia. And this is a theme that's really woven through your book, in part because of an awful tragedy that your family suffered. And so if you're comfortable with it, tell me about Josie.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love talking about Josie. So Josie's my daughter, and there's stories of her throughout the book. They were in there before she died, and I didn't want to take them out. After she died, she just died suddenly unexpectedly from a quick illness in 2023. And then losing a four-year-old is awful as it sounds. But I love talking about Josie. I love talking about her stories, you know, building sandcastles on the beach, or another story of Josie that's in the book is, we talked about this idea of functional fixedness. And one of the things I'll never forget about her was she had to have been like two or three. And I walked into the kitchen, and there's my daughter sitting at the pantry. So it was just like

• 40:02Speaker 01

  two full height cabinets. She had just opened both doors at the pantry, moved her high chair over there, and was just sitting at the pantry eating. So instead of like having to carry all the food over to the table, she's like, I'm just gonna bring my chair to where the food is. And then I've got all this food at my disposal. It's amazing. So I love being able to share her stories. I think that's one of the ways that the awesome things that she gave to the world keep going. And also, you know, thinking about how do we remember her in space? Because obviously, this is a big thing that we try to use our spaces for. I mean, from the Egyptian pyramids, right? They're to try to make somebody immortal.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  And a lot of donations to university buildings are, you know, it's worth $50 million for me to have my name on this thing that's gonna still be up after I'm not here. So I was thinking about that for Josie and we used to walk between my house and a pond on campus where we would go fishing and mainly just like throw rocks in and she'd run around. And she would always take different paths there because she liked exploring. And so one day we took a path that went through an old house that the university now owns. So basically she walked up their yard and then threw some English ivy and then hit a paved path that went to the street. And on that path, the homeowner had like put a marble block and inscribed her name in it. So Josie, one benefit of being four is that letters say whatever

• 41:27Speaker 01

  the heck you want them to say. So she looks at it and she says, that says Josie's way.

• 41:32Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I think she kind of knew the double meaning too, right? Where it's like, this is now I've just named this path after myself and also Josie's way is like my way of being in the world. So we wanted to do something for her in the world that kind of remembered her, remembered her spirit and the idea of a Josie's way. We made one next to the best playground in town that just goes parallel to it and over some creeks. And it's just a place where kids can go down, ride their bikes, but also get into the woods and explore. And it spreads things that she cared about and would have liked. It makes me happy. And that's, you know, agency, right?

• 42:07Laurie Santos?

  I love these stories so much. And one of the things I love kind of knowing about neuroscience is that what you're doing is really using the part of our brain that encodes space to kind of make these memories thicker.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I learned this after she died, the neuroscience. And as our brains, you know, adapted to relationships being more important and human connections, they didn't like develop new networks. They adapted the networks that were used to code space, right? So when we talk about being close and distant from somebody, those are spatial terms and we're having boundaries. That's a spatial thing that has taken on kind of relationship meaning. And, you know, so again, like trying to reverse engineer that and create spaces that help us remember the person and help spread the spirit of that person.

• 42:54Laurie Santos?

  It's almost like we're developing these physical experiences that we can go back to, to feel of the same emotions.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:01Laurie Santos?

  And so has recognizing this connection between our inner and outer lives affected your happiness positively?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I think so. I think I've always paid a lot of attention to it because I care about the physical world and that's like kind of the area that I work in. But I think what's really helped me is homing in on agency competence and connection because there's just so much there. And I think we can go a really long way to start with these core big three. And that's been what's really helpful for me in kind of just filtering decisions through that.

• 43:32Laurie Santos?

  It's almost like the next time you're facing a space question, ask yourself, how can this boost my agency? Where am I going to get some competence and growth from this? And how can I promote connection?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we need to come up with a Zillow or Realtor.com profile that like was the agency growth and connection scores for the house. But of course, they depend, right? So they depend on the person.

• 43:52Laurie Santos?

  I hope this episode has served as a reminder that the spaces around you matter. They're actively shaping your mood, your habits, and even the way you hold on to the people you love. The good news is that you don't need to redesign your entire home to feel those benefits. Even small changes, like creating a campfire-style seating area for guests, noticing your space a bit more, or using your surroundings to reflect what you value, can make a big difference in your happiness and in the happiness of the people around you. And if you want even more ideas about how to design your space to boost your wellbeing, be sure to check out Lydie's new book, In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive, which is out now. If you have thoughts about

• 44:34Laurie Santos?

  today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at [email protected] and leave us a review to tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlauresantos.com. That's D R L A U R I E S A N T O S dot com. In our next installment on spring cleaning your happiness, we'll go back to the Happiness Lab archives to share an episode about downsizing your stuff. We'll hear about the joy of letting go and learn why material possessions don't boost our happiness as much as we assume.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  I mean, there are more storage units than there are McDonald's. It's just ridiculously a symptom of a culture which has become obsessed with possessions. So it's like this demon, this little imp in our mind telling us to buy things and don't throw it away because it might be valuable one day.

• 45:26Laurie Santos?

  That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 45:35Laurie Santos?

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• 46:39Speaker 03

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• 47:02Laurie Santos?

  I've long been a fan of Dr. Teal's, so I was excited when I learned that they had a new product to help me unwind. I tried out Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray after a particularly hard week. It was the perfect ritual to end my day and signaled to my brain that the work week was over and it was time to rest.

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