Laurie Santos on How to Matter in a Busy World | EP 583

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles welcomes Dr. Laurie Santos, a renowned psychologist and professor at Yale University, to discuss the importance of mattering in our increasingly busy and disconnected world. Dr. Santos shares insights from her popular Yale course, "Psychology and the Good Life," and her podcast, "The Happiness Lab," exploring how social connections, intrinsic motivation, and the act of helping others can enhance our sense of belonging and overall happiness. Link to the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/laurie-santos-on-how-to-matter-in-a-busy-world/Key takeaways: The Importance of Mattering: Mattering is crucial for our psychological well-being. It involves feeling valued and connected to others, which is essential for happiness. Cultural Pressures: Many students today, especially in high-pressure environments like Ivy League schools, are focused on individual achievements, leading to feelings of disconnection and anxiety. Social Connection: Happy people tend to have strong social ties. Engaging with others and helping them can significantly boost our own happiness. Technology's Role: While technology can connect us, it can also lead to disconnection. The convenience of digital communication often lacks the depth of face-to-face interactions. The Work of Happiness: Achieving happiness requires effort and intentionality. Simple acts of kindness and social engagement can enhance our sense of mattering. Connect with Dr. Laurie Santos: https://www.instagram.com/lauriesantosofficial/?hl=enSponsors:Factor Meals: http://factormeals.com/factormeals50off and use code “FACTOR MEALS 50 OFFRosetta Stone: Unlock 25 languages for life at “ROSETTASTONE.com/passionstruck.”Prolon: Reset your health with 15% off at “ProlonLife.com/passionstruck.”Mint Mobile: Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at “MINT MOBILE dot com slash PASSION.”Hims: Start your journey to regrowing hair with Hims. Visit hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK for your free online visit. Quince: Discover luxury at affordable prices with Quince. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at quince.com/PASSIONNext on Passion Struck:In the next episode of Passion Struck, John sits down with Dr Samuel Wilkinson, YALE professor and author of the book "Purpose.". In this discussion, we go over why, for generations, we've been told that evolution suggests that life has no deeper meaning, that we're simply the result of molecular accidents. For more information on advertisers and promo codes, visit Passion Struck Deals. Join the Passion Struck Community! Sign up for the Live Intentionally newsletter, where I share exclusive content, actionable advice, and insights to help you ignite your purpose and live your most intentional life. Get access to practical exercises, inspiring stories, and tools designed to help you grow. Learn more and sign up here. Speaking Engagements & Workshops Are you looking to inspire your team, organization, or audience to take intentional action in...

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

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  What we're trying to go for is convenience. If you're grabbing something off ChatGPT and pasting it into a dating app, it's because you want to reduce friction. You just want to make stuff easy, right? Real life is frictiony, like a social connection is frictiony. Mattering is frictiony. It takes work. It takes time, right? And so I think as we go towards an all too convenient society, we wind up losing some of the psychological benefits that can come from connection and mattering because we're trying to just bang things out and do it as easily as possible. Well, sometimes you have to put in some work to feel like things matter.

• 0:35John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hey, Passion Struck fam.

• 1:18John R. Miles?

  Welcome to episode 583. Whether you're a long-term listener or tuning in for the first time, I am so grateful you're here. You have joined a global movement dedicated to unlocking your full potential, living with intention and making what truly matters matter most. Before we dive in, let's take a moment to reflect on the powerful conversations we shared last week. First, on Tuesday, we explored deep spiritual and personal transformation with Natalie Namaste, who shared her insights on the mattering mindset and how we can heal from within to step into our highest potential. Then I sat down with Dr. Sam Wilkinson to discuss the neuroscience of resilience, decision-making and how our brains adapt to life's biggest challenges.

• 2:02John R. Miles?

  If you missed either of these episodes, I highly recommend going back to listen to them. They're packed with insights that will transform the way you approach. Approach your own growth and wellbeing. Now, let me ask you this. What if the happiness we chase isn't the happiness we truly need? What if the stories we tell ourselves about fulfillment are actually leading us astray? And how do we break free from the misconceptions that keep us from experiencing genuine joy, meaning and connection? That's exactly what we're diving into today with one of the world's foremost experts on happiness and wellbeing, Dr. Laurie Santos. She is a distinguished professor of psychology at Yale University, the creator of Psychology

• 2:44John R. Miles?

  and the Good Life, the most popular course in Yale's 300-year history, and the host of the internationally renowned podcast, The Happiness Lab, which has surpassed 100 million downloads. In today's conversation, we explore the biggest myths about happiness and how our brains must lead us, the role of social connection in feeling like we matter, why the pursuit of achievement doesn't always translate to fulfillment, and lastly, practical science-backed strategies to build more joy, resilience, and deep relationships. This episode is filled with powerful takeaways that will challenge the way you think about happiness, meaning in the way that you design your life. Dr. Santos weaves together groundbreaking psychology with practical insights that will help you

• 3:29John R. Miles?

  reclaim your wellbeing and align your life with what truly matters. If you've ever felt like you're chasing success but still feeling unfulfilled, or if you want to know the science behind lasting joy and purpose, this conversation is for you. And for those of you who want to dive deeper, check out our episode starter packs at passionstruck.com/starterpacks or Spotify. With over 580 episodes, we've curated playlists on themes like leadership, mental health, and personal growth to help you find the inspiration that resonates most with you. And don't forget to subscribe to my Live Intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com for exclusive weekly insights, challenges, tools, and actionable strategies to live with greater intention.

• 4:11John R. Miles?

  And if you prefer video, join the growing community on the John R. Miles YouTube channel, where you can watch this episode and more. Now, let's dive into this incredible conversation about happiness mattering and the science of a fulfilling life with the one and only Dr. Laurie Santos. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:41John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Dr. Laurie Santos on Passion Struck. Welcome, Laurie.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 4:49John R. Miles?

  I was so taken aback when Katie Milkman made the introduction, and I love her work and your work as well. And then Emma Cappella was going to introduce me to you, but I think you all are doing such a fantastic job of expanding science's practicality and taking it to where people can put it to use. How have you seen this changing over the past four or five years and people being more and more receptive to it?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And I think people really want to know what they can do to improve like how they feel, right? Whether that's becoming happier, becoming healthier in terms of the work that a lot of the work that Katie Milkman does. And I think people want evidence-based strategies to do that. I think most people don't want a bunch of platitudes and woo. I think people want to engage with strategies that are really going to work. And so I think it really is the case that more scientists should be thinking about strategies that we can use to help people, right? I think more scientists should be getting into the business of sharing what we know. In some ways, the fact that there are a few of us is sad. I think more scientists should be out there like telling people, hey, here's what our field has really learned about the kinds of things you can do to feel better. And I've been doing this now for

• 6:00Speaker 01

  a little over six or seven years, and it's just been amazing to get people to really feel like people are taking what the scientists show and putting it into effect in their own lives, often in really creative ways. And it's really making a difference. So that's felt incredible to be a part of sharing some of this work.

• 6:16John R. Miles?

  It's great. I love what you have done, Katie, with her podcast, Dr. Huberman, of course, and others, Rhonda Patrick, and others are making this much more accessible. Your Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, became the most popular course in the university's history. And when you think about that, Yale has been around for hundreds of years.

• 6:38John R. Miles?

  What inspired you to create it? And why do you think it's resonated so deeply with students?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Well, it really started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. For a while, I'd been teaching there for over two decades. But in the last six or so years, I became what's called the head of college on campus. And so heads of college are faculty members who live on campus with students. So I got to live with students in this nice house in their courtyard. I ate with students in the dining hall. In this role, I was really seeing college life up close and personal. And I found what I was seeing really unexpected. It seemed like college life looked a lot different than when I went to college, which was back in the late 90s. It seemed like college students were much more depressed, much more anxious, much more stressed out than I remember my colleagues being back when I was in college. And this was sad for me as a head of college, right? I was the dead mother for this community that I was taking care of. I was this benevolent aunt figure.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  And I didn't like the fact that so many of my students were reporting feeling depressed and anxious and just experiencing panic attacks and in some cases even suicidality. It was just not what I was expecting. But at first I worried there was something particular about Yale, right? This Ivy League institution where students were under incredible academic pressure. But no, the increases that we've been seeing in depression and anxiety in young people really are happening nationally. Like right now nationally, according to the National College Health Survey, right now nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. More than 60% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious. More than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year. These are national statistics showing that we're not dealing with a couple

• 8:12Speaker 01

  snowflakes who are a little stressed out, as we often hear in the media. Like this really is a national crisis in terms of student mental health. And so the course started because in my position as a head of college, as a dead mother, I really wanted to do something to help my students. And the good news is that as a psychologist, especially kind of evidence-based psychologist, like we know that there are strategies we can use to feel better, right? There's decades of work in positive psychology, in the field of behavior change and behavioral economics that shows how we can change our habits, how we can nudge our behaviors and the particular things that we know will really improve our wellbeing. And so I designed the class to say, This is what our field knows about how to do it. Let me translate these strategies into something that the students can use. But when I first started planning the course, it was a new class on campus.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I didn't know if students would be into it. I planned for thirty or forty students taking it. I didn't expect it to be a quarter of the entire Yale student body, which is what it wound up becoming. The class was so popular, we had to teach it in a concert hall because that was the only spot, other than the football stadium, that would fit everyone who wanted to take it. So it was a bit of a surreal experience, but it really showed me that students were voting with their feet. They don't like this culture of feeling all stressed out and anxious and depressed. I think students are really searching for not just solutions, but really evidence-based solutions they could use.

• 9:29John R. Miles?

  So I remember a couple of years ago, I was interviewing Susan Cain, and we were talking about her book, Bittersweet. So we were already exploring emotions. But we got into this topic that when she was writing the book, she went back onto the campus of Princeton where she went. And she ran into this term that she hadn't ever heard of. I hadn't heard of it at that point, but it was effortless perfection. Is that something that you found on the Yale campus as well? And is that what's happening, or is it bigger than this?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, effortless perfection is definitely happening on Yale's campus. Different campuses have different words for it. My favorite is a term that came out of the University of Pennsylvania, which is called duck syndrome. And the idea is that if you see ducks on the surface of the water, they look like they're just gliding and everything's perfect. But under the water, their fins are moving around and they're moving really quickly and putting a lot of work in. And yeah, I think that's what Yale students are striving for, right? They are incredibly perfectionist, right? In many cases, they, a lot of them really think of their own worth as their academic performance, as what the internships they get into and their performance on the football field or the extracurriculars, right? So much of their self-worth is tied into their achievements writ large. And I think they're supposed to engage in all those amazing achievements

• 10:46Speaker 01

  without putting in any work, as though it's easy for them, right? So there's this culture of not admitting when you're struggling. I think there's a culture of kind of brushing off all the hard work that has to go into the kinds of achievements they experience. It's just a really stressful, really perfectionist kind of culture on campus.

• 11:06John R. Miles?

  So I'm gonna perk that for a second, but we're gonna come back to it in our broader discussion. I do want to go to the online version of your course, which I saw has reached over 4 million people. What surprised you most about how people from different walks of life have engaged with it?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the early surprises was just not just how much the class resonated on campus, but how much it resonated off-campus. About a couple of weeks into the first, when I first started teaching the Happiness course, there was a New York Times article written about the class. And I think that's in part because Yale's one of these schools that like something happens at Yale, somebody's gonna write a New York Times article about it. But most college classes don't have New York Times articles about that college class. And it wound up being one of the most-read articles of the year for the New York Times that year. And I think it was really exciting or interesting to people in part because I think we, when we think of the typical Yale student or the typical Ivy League student, you think this person has it made, right? They're 19 years old, they're like at the Ivy League, they're gonna get a perfect job,

• 12:08Speaker 01

  they have the academic credentials to get into a place like that. I bet they're happy. And I think the article resonated with so many people because people thought, oh, my gosh, there's so many unhappy students at Yale that like a quarter of the entire student body is flocking to this happiness class. What is going on? And I think that people were like, well, if Yale students need these strategies, then I, in whatever walk of life I'm finding myself, I definitely need them. And so after the article came out, we got a lot of a push from people, like just hundreds of emails from folks around the world saying, don't just give these strategies to Yale students. Like, we all, Yale students with as much privilege as they have, need these kind of strategies. We all need them. And so that was one of the reasons we decided to put the class online for free. Yale has this wonderful partnership with Coursera.org,

• 12:54Speaker 01

  where Yale is able to give content that's developed on-campus to people around the world for free. And so we put the class online. And yeah, it also just went really viral. We had 100,000 learners the first few months that we had the course up. And then soon after that, COVID hit. And in just the first couple of days, when most people were in lockdown, we saw the number of people. People who are trying to take the course octuple in just seventy two hours. I think it was like on the front page of Reddit or something, which is how people found out about it. But yeah, I mean, I guess the big surprise was just how many people are willing to take a class on happiness, right, to sign up for a Yale class where they would learn these strategies too. It's just, I guess the content just resonated with people much more than I expected. I knew people wanted to be happy, right?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  We've been talking about the pursuit of happiness since the Declaration of Independence, but I didn't realize just how much people needed these strategies. And I think that tells us something really important about not just the culture that I was talking about happening at Yale, but the culture that we're all living in right now of so many of us are trying to go after happiness, but doing it wrong. And so people really wanted to see what does the science say about how I could do it better?

• 14:02John R. Miles?

  Well, that's not the only thing that's gone viral. Your podcast, The Happiness Lab, which I'm a big fan of, has now gone over a hundred million downloads, probably far more than that. But I just want to give a shout out to it because I'm a personal listener of it. And I've loved your interviews with Gretchen Rubin, my friend Dan Harris, Jim Ilzaki, just to name a few. And I'm so excited for this current season that you're doing. So congratulations on that. But I wanted to ask you about the podcast. You've likely encountered some amazing stories of transformation as you've been doing it. Can you share an example, maybe of someone who applied the principles? Maybe it was a podcast listener who's come back to you that saw a profound change in their life?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  That's one of the most amazing things about both doing the podcast and the class, right? Is that people will come back to you months later and say, hey, I tried this and it's been working for me. And often it tends to be in things that like I myself am not putting the science into practice for too. I think there's this misconception that as a happiness professor, I'm doing all the things that I preach to my students that they should be doing to feel happy. But of course, a lot of these strategies take some work, right? They take some kind of active effort. And it always feels like when a listener or a former student of my online class comes up to me is like, oh, this helped me so much because I've been doing X, Y, and Z. It's usually an X, Y, and Z that I personally am not doing myself. So it's been fun to get them to. Maybe help the preacher practice what she's preaching, as it were.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  But yeah, one of my favorite examples was a learner from my Coursera course named Clement, who was on one of the first episodes of the podcast. And he wrote me a handwritten letter. I came home one day and just found this handwritten letter. And he said, I was feeling really depressed. I was actually even experiencing suicidality. I started Googling like how to be happier and your course came up. And at first, this is one of the reasons I love Clement's letter, he said, I figured it was like hippie dippy California stuff. Like, I just didn't think it was gonna work for me. But he was pretty desperate. And so he tried it. And he said that everything has really changed, right? He's now putting into practice these strategies where he tries to experience more social connection and more gratitude. He's more mindful. And

• 16:10Speaker 01

  the practices from the course really have helped. He's no longer experiencing suicidality, but also just like feeling much happier with his life. And then I get to have him on the show, I get to interview him and come on. And yeah, it was just incredible. And I mean, I think this is really what the work suggests, right? The research really suggests that everyone listening right now can become happier. But like all good things in life, it's gonna take some work. It's just like getting a little bit healthier, maybe learning to play an instrument that you want to learn how to play, learning a new language. There are all these things that we want to do to better ourselves, but they just take some time and energy. Becoming happier, I think the research shows work like that, right? There are strategies you can use to feel better, but they're gonna take a little bit of work.

• 16:54John R. Miles?

  So when I reached out to you and I was talking to Katie, part of the reason for doing this interview is I'm currently writing a book on mattering. And your insights are deeply resonant with what I've been exploring. But when I first started researching this, maybe a year ago, 18 months ago, I originally reached out to Angela and Katie and Ethan Cross and a number of Cassie Holmes and a bunch of others. And I couldn't find a single scientist who was, people were studying happiness, people were studying like Edward DC and Richard Ryan's self-determinations theory, but the only person I could really find who was truly focused on belonging was Jeff Cohen and then

• 17:36John R. Miles?

  Gordon Flett, who teaches at the University of York. And it really struck me that as much as mattering matters, that it's not a bigger area of exploration. But as I've looked at this more deeply, I think mattering impacts so many different things that there's a lot of science that's gone through it, but just different lens. So you have studied happiness extensively. How do you think happiness and mattering intersect? A feeling significant connects to our overall well-being?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  I think there's lots of big connections. I think lots of folks have been studying mattering, even though they might not be calling it mattering, if that makes sense. I think one of the domains where mattering connects with happiness a lot is in the domain of our social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests happy people are more social, right? They spend more time with their friends and family members. They even connect more with strangers on the street. But yet, we don't really invest in social connection as much as we probably should, given how much it really is, impacts our happiness. The reason I think this is connected with mattering is that one of the most important ways to matter in the world is to matter socially, right? People care about you. They care how your day is going. They want to talk to you about it, right?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  To do that, you just have to connect with other people, right? But in addition, there's lots of work showing that it's not just social connection that matters for our happiness. It's really the social impact that we're having. One of the biggest hacks that I teach my students about happiness is that a big way to boost your own happiness is not to treat yourself, to engage in self-care, but to do something for other people, right? Help someone else. Give them a compliment. Share what you're grateful for about them, right? This idea of doing something nice for other people seems to be an incredibly quick path to our happiness. I think one of the reasons is that it's a way of mattering, right? When you help someone else and they say, oh, my gosh, thank you for that thing that you did for me. That's a really easy way of mattering, right? And so I think a lot of the work in the field of happiness science that's been focused on

• 19:43Speaker 01

  the power of doing nice things for other people, the power of social connection. One of the reasons, one of the ways it's taking its effect on happiness is through this mechanism of mattering. By connecting with other people, you start to matter more. By doing nice things for other people, by impacting their day, you start mattering. And so I think that is really the path. Pretty much everyone's studying the impact of social connection on happiness, the role that good deeds play in happiness. I think that they really are studying mattering, even if they're not calling it that.

• 20:15John R. Miles?

  Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I know another person that you've spoken about on the podcast is Dacher Keltner. And I love Dacher. I love every time I get to have him on the show. And I think what you were just describing there is his concept of moral beauty, that people feel awe more times than anywhere else when they see someone perform an act of generosity to someone else. Is that where you were going with it?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think it's hard to, can you matter on a desert island, right? What else is there with you, right? Probably not. I think mattering really relies on our social ties, our social connection, right? We matter more when other people care about us. We matter to someone, right? And that's one of the reasons I think social connection is so important for happiness, but also that it incorporates mattering, right? Is that you need other people to experience a sense of belonging. You need other people to have true causal efficacy for the stuff that matters. And I do think the stuff that matters is the kind of stuff that Dacher is getting at, right? These moral actions in the world, right? Often we experience awe when people go like super above and beyond. These are his kind of ideas of these sort of moral goodness in the world

• 21:26Speaker 01

  really activates our sense of transcendence, our sense of awe. But I think the everyday kind of stuff, just like helping your neighbor move, right? Checking in on a friend who's going through a tough time. Those kinds of things show that you mean something. You've done something with your day that truly has helped another person. And that I think really increases our psychological sense that we matter.

• 21:47John R. Miles?

  I want to take this a step further. You gave some great statistics early on. I've recently been reading the report from the Belonging Barometer that the American, I'm not sure if you've read this or not, but it's American Immigration Council put together. But the results were quite startling, I should say. Sixty-four percent of Americans don't feel that they're included at work. Seventy-four percent feel excluded in their communities. And the one that kind of blew me away was that seventeen percent feel that they don't belong in any circumstance. So it's a huge issue. And as I've explored

• 22:28John R. Miles?

  this, I am terming it the disease of disconnection. And you're bringing up the need to connect with others, but in many ways, I feel we're disconnected from ourselves. What are your thoughts on that?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think specifically, the idea of mattering in the workplace, I think, is one that we just haven't thought a lot about, but is going to be really important for reducing burnout in the workplace, increasing happiness in the workplace, honestly, even increasing retention in the workplace. Jan Emanuel Denev, who's a professor of economics at the University of Oxford, did this really cool study recently with the job site Indeed. If you haven't been on Indeed, it's one of these job sites where you can rate all this stuff about your job, like what your salary is, and importantly, how happy you are at work, and so on. And he was able to get, by collaborating with Indeed, he got access to 15 million data points about people's ratings at work and their happiness at work. So for a nerdy social science like me, it's like a huge, oh, my God, this is a big data set. And what he

• 23:26Speaker 01

  was interested in is, what are some of the factors that predicted happiness at work? And he got a group of economists to make predictions, and they predicted the usual things you might expect. Well, it's your salary, it's having a good manager, it's like work-life balance. Those factors were important, but they weren't at the top of the list of what really made for a happy work-life. The thing that was most important for a happy work-life was what he called your sense of belonging. But it really is about mattering. It was made up of three different factors. Factors in this, in these, in terms of these indeed questions. One was the things that I do at work matter to the organization. The, the organization recognizes the things that I do matter. So you feel like you matter. The organization has recognition that you matter.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And the third factor was, do you have a best friend at work? Which is really just straight up social connection. Presumably if you have a best friend at work, you're doing things where you matter to that person. If it matters if you show up or not, right? This was the thing that predicted happiness at work, much more than what people were being compensated with in terms of money. Much more than just like, you know, all this stuff they teach MBAs about how to be a good manager. Like just feeling like what you were doing mattered. Was really a big factor in how happy you were at work. And how happy you were at work predicted all this other stuff. The stuff that you might expect, like retention at work and so on. But an amazing thing that it predicted, and one of the reasons Jan's paper, you know, is getting a lot of press right now, is that it also predicted how well a company is doing. In other words, companies who had more happy workers wound up earning more money.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  If you just look at their stock performance, they do better. And so it's not just like, the idea is like, mattering isn't just ephemeral. Now it's relevant for like capitalism. It's relevant having people at work that feel mattering matters for how much money a company is making, right? And I bring that up in part because I think of mattering and the, this kind of value that we have, like that the value that we feel about what we're doing at work, what we're doing in terms of our friends, just that we're having a kind of important causal impact on the world. I think that we just don't realize how important it is, right? Top economists who are making predictions in Jan Emanuel's data set, they said they were wrong about how important this factor was. And I think this gets to the idea of like, we don't matter to other people, but maybe we don't matter to ourselves.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Or like we're disconnected, not just from other people, but disconnected to ourselves. I think that we just like, don't understand how important some of these factors are. And therefore we tend not to invest in them very much. You get back to my Yale college students. I just gave you all those depressing statistics.

• 25:56John R. Miles?

  Good. That's where I wanted to come back. I'm glad you're doing it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  I mean, where do these levels of depression, anxiety and so on come from? I think it's, I mean, it's lots of factors, right? There's probably not going to be one smoking gun. For sure, otherwise we probably would have fixed it by now. But among those factors is the idea that students are just like really paying attention to their own individual pursuits. Right? Especially at a place like Yale, what these students are trying to be good at is good at their own personal academic success and their own extracurriculars. They're like building up their own resume, right? It's me. That's the focus. And it's hard to matter when it's really just about you, right? Mattering really involves connecting with other people, doing something that like is important, like for the world. But Yale, they have this slogan, for God, for country and Yale. But I think it's for God, for country and Yale. These are things that are bigger than you.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And I think the focus right now culturally, especially on young people who are so focused on academics and getting into the perfect college and getting the perfect job. It's about them, right? It's not about doing things that are bigger than you. Um, and that means that they're not focused on the kinds of activities that are really going to give them a strong sense of mattering. And so I think part of it is really a crisis of kind of not focusing on the things that really are going to improve your happiness, AKA mattering. But in doing so, you wind up getting disconnected from yourself, right? You wind up putting into affect all these habits and all these kind of strategies and all this work that's going after something that ultimately isn't going to be the thing that gives you a lot of fulfillment.

• 27:28John R. Miles?

  And I just want to take that and just bring in self determination theory here because really what Edward D C's initial work found was that uh, we were focused on so much external motivation and that wasn't what was really driving people to be happy or to to really succeed. It was really the intrinsic motivation. So I know from my time, uh, my, my background is I, I was a senior executive in Fortune 50 companies. Eventually became C level at, at a $60 billion tech company. And I, I always say I, I reached that pinnacle and yet I felt more disconnected from myself

• 28:11John R. Miles?

  than I ever had before in my life. And I found that what was happening is I was so consumed with the constant grind. Yeah. That everything else in my life was like falling apart, so to speak, because I was working a hundred plus hours at work. I had no time for anything else.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:29John R. Miles?

  And do you think in many ways that's what's going on with people?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I think so, particularly these very high-pressure school students, Ivy League students. I think that's what's happening. I mean, I think they're working incredibly hard to get to the next accolade. In my class, I show students these videos that current high school students who are posted online about the moment where they click on the admissions website and they find out if they get in. Yale ones are very popular where you click on the link, you're like, oh, my God, I got into Yale. They videotape it and they're cheering and happy. And I show that to remind students of what psychologists call hedonic adaptation. This idea that you get used to that first moment when you find out to get into Yale is great. But after that, you don't feel so good because now you're just on to the next carrot. It's the next admission to medical school or law school, or it's the next quarterly report.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You don't even get the happiness boost from striving for this external reward thing because as soon as you get it, now it's up, on to the next one. And the students really resonate with that. They're like, yeah, that moment I got into Yale was like the happiest moment. But like immediately after that was one of my worst moments where I realized, oh, my gosh, all that work I'm just going to have to put in again. And I think this is key, right? We're pushing for something. We're working really hard towards things that we think matter, that we think are going to make us feel fulfilled. But we're actually going after the stuff that's not going to work as well as we expect. And we're putting all that time in at the opportunity cost of stuff that we know does matter. In your own story, I bet you imagine that what got put on the wayside was relationships with family,

• 29:57Speaker 01

  probably your health, probably your sleep, probably active volunteering and just doing big things and good things in the world. Those are the things that the research shows really matters for happiness, much more than the grind at work. And so I think one of the reasons we're seeing these levels of depression and anxiety in college students is that they are actively focused on the wrong stuff being the grind, things that are going to benefit them as an individual, not the stuff that really winds up mattering.

• 30:23John R. Miles?

  I think you're so right. And when I describe it, the words I use are Henry David Thoreau's quiet desperation because that's exactly how I felt. I felt just stuck. And I was the most apathetic and numb I've ever been in my life. And I wanted to change so desperately, but it was so difficult because of everything that I had built up and feeling I'm going to be a shell of myself. If I don't do these things that I've been working on for the past decade. And now that I'm doing what I do now, I wish I would have started down this path a decade earlier.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  I mean, you're raising an important issue, right? Because I think we don't form our expectations about the things that are going to make us happy in a vacuum. Right? There's lots of cultural ideals about the things that you should be working towards. Right? Again, take my Yale students who just found out that they got in, they've been working all through high school. Now they got into Yale, like culturally, that's supposed to be the thing that you took off the list. And you're like happily ever after, right? You got this accolade. And I think the disconnect between my students feeling like I did the thing that was culturally supposed to make me super happy. But I'm feeling apathetic, I'm feeling miserable. Same thing when you get to the C suite, right? Like I'm running a successful company. I'm like at the top of my game. I'm supposed to like culture has told me this is the thing I'm supposed to do to feel good. But I feel really crappy.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I think that disconnect really is psychologically jarring, right? Because in some ways our expectations are really high for the happiness benefit that should come from this stuff. And we're not getting it. And we know expectations matter a lot for how we feel about things. But I think the second thing is it sets up what's often called the sort of golden handcuffs, which I think people think about in terms of money. But I think it's a lot due to status, right? That like, how could you leave this position that all your culture has told you is the thing that you're supposed to be doing to be happy? Something must be wrong with you. But in fact, I think our culture comes up with incorrect notions about the kinds of things that are going to mean a lot in terms of our happiness. We get happiness wrong as individuals, but especially as a culture. And that makes it really hard to switch gears when things aren't working. It makes it really hard to change.

• 32:35John R. Miles?

  So I want to take this a step further. I recently interviewed Sige Oishii, who I'm sure you know. I think for a long time, when we have thought about happiness, there's a whole line of research that's been done on happiness and a whole bunch of research that's been done on meaning in life. And he is really talking about a third element or a third dimension called psychological richness. Where do you see this concept of mattering fitting into this entire framework? And where do you see his concept of psychological richness fitting in? Or do you think it even needs to fit in?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it necessarily needs to fit in. I mean, I think one of Oishii's views is that there are these different paths, right? The kind of path that you get from hedonic pleasure is just going to look different than the path that you get from meaning. But then it's also going to look different from the path that you get from this idea of living a psychologically rich life. By what she means, I think having adventures, doing interesting things, learning new stuff, which is different than doing the kind of hard work that you need to do to develop a very meaningful life. It's very different than what you would do if you just want to get pure hedonism, easy kind of hedonic life. I see mattering as being maybe part and parcel of all three, but I think it doesn't necessarily have to be. For sure, mattering is part of the meaningful things you do in life, right? I think mattering is really intimately connected to our sense of meaning.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Often when we do something, often when we feel like we matter, we've done something that also can give us a sense of meaning. If we're devoid of meaning, it's really hard to matter. You might have connections with people, but if you really feel like you're living a meaningless life, that mattering is maybe going to be lower than it should be. I think mattering does play into the hedonic, like just the sort of pure positive emotion part of life, because mattering feels good, right? Often when we're doing things that matter, it winds up boosting our positive emotion, right? So it plays on that definition of happiness. And I think one way to live, like one way to matter is to make sure you're doing things that involve a certain amount of psychological richness, right? Psychological richness can sometimes come from living out your values. And there's lots of ways to connect that with mattering, too.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  So I think it doesn't, mattering doesn't necessarily have to fit into all three of those different aspects of happiness, but in some ways it might fit into at least a few of them. Definitely the meaning side, for sure, a little bit of the positive emotion hedonic side, but maybe a little bit of the psychologically rich life side, too.

• 35:01John R. Miles?

  So I want to talk about villages and evolution. I was recently having a discussion with Sandra Matz, who's a professor at Columbia. And we were talking about algorithms and big data and this concept of throughout most of history, up until recently, humans have survived around this concept of a small village environment. And we are very much conditioned to be in that type of setting where we're around like-minded people who know our business, whether we're doing something good and being rewarded for

• 35:42John R. Miles?

  it, or we act in a way that doesn't conform with what the village or that group feels. Why do you think the need to matter is so deeply ingrained in humans from an evolutionary perspective?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think if you think of mattering as being part and parcel of healthy social cognition, right, the healthy part of being part of the village or having these kind of good connections, those connections really mattered over our evolutionary time. We really needed to, like, the only way we survived was being part of this group. This is why in ancient times, shunning was like the worst punishment you could give someone, right? You just, you didn't kill them, you send them out of the group, and that's like a horrible punishment, in part because it's like, it's our connections and our relatedness that really is important for not just our happiness, but also our survival. And so I think mattering winds up being like an important part of that, right? The best way to feel connected to the group is if they would never shun you, right?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  You mattered to other people, and so you're going to want to feel connected, you're going to want to do these kind of nice things. It's over evolutionary time, the things that we built up feeling pleasure for is often the stuff that like, really we needed to pay attention to back in the evolutionary day, right? This is one of the reasons that we tend to seek out like really sweet fatty food, right? That was hard to find back in the evolutionary day, so it feels really pleasurable. I think mattering was also essential back in the evolutionary day, right? Because it allowed us to have these social connections that kept us part of this village that was so important for our survival. And I think it's one of the reasons that actions that show we matter show they wind up feeling good.

• 37:18John R. Miles?

  I think that was a great foundation for my next question. So where Sandra and I went is we've switched as a culture from these localized villages to now a global village where the people we're interacting with oftentimes are anonymous to us. And unlike the people in the smaller village, who usually have our best interest at hand, many of these anonymous characters in the forest. And it brought back my discussion with Emma Cappella, because we discussed how technology can connect or disconnect us depending on how it's used. How do you think

• 38:00John R. Miles?

  this evolution of technology connecting us or maybe isolating us more because of technology? Like, how do you see this playing out? And how does it impact happiness and mattering?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think I'm going to agree with Emma in the sense that technology can connect us and make us feel like we matter. We can use it for that, and it can also do just the opposite. In fact, often it does just the opposite. But it's worth remembering that technology is just a tool we can use in lots of different ways. I think taking evolutionary view of mattering helps here, helps us figure out what we get wrong, right? Because we're built for these sort of small groups, we can't really sort of track what it means to matter in these like big Facebook groups or like being an influencer on TikTok and getting likes and so on. We're built for doing it in this small kind of way. And when we can put these mechanisms into situations where they have to scale up, they go awry in interesting ways. I'll give you one from the perspective of helping people, right?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  We talked about one way to matter well is to do nice things for other people. But one of the ways we get that boost of mattering is we often need to see the results of that thing that we did, right? We want to see someone smile and say, oh, thank you so much. All your listeners right now could donate money to a cause online that would, for small amounts of money, you can literally save a life of people who are living in extreme poverty, right? But you might not get the same feeling that you get when you carry your neighbor's groceries into the house, right? You might not get the same feeling that you get when you do something direct for someone one-on-one. You probably don't get the same facial expressions, maybe the same thank yous and so on. And the research really shows that we're not putting our money into these causes where we really could help folks, right? A lot of times, even if you look at the specific charities that people are investing

• 39:44Speaker 01

  in, they're investing in charities that are much more like face to face, right? Giving, say, to your like, local food pantry, or rather than these people who like are living in extreme poverty, right? The point of this example is to show that what kind of got us going in terms of mattering evolutionarily was like, we needed the facial expressions, we needed the one-on-one kind of feeling to know, ah, I feel good, I feel like what I did mattered. And so, online, we try to do the same thing, maybe do an action that matters much more, say, giving a small amount of money to someone in extreme poverty, so the outcomes are much better. It doesn't feel as good. We don't get the same psychological oomph of, that felt really nice, right? That's a backfiring of our evolutionary machinery, right?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  We should feel like the more objectively positive outcome in terms of helping somebody should make us feel like we matter more, but otherwise, it doesn't make us feel as good, right? I think that's just one of many ways that kind of scaling things up doesn't really use the evolutionary machinery in the right way, and we get these kind of misfirings that kind of mess up our mattering.

• 40:48John R. Miles?

  And I think a great episode, if people wanted to go back and find it, I can't remember what the episode number was, but I interviewed Harvard professor Joshua Green, and we were talking about the multiplier effect of altruism. So that is a great one that speaks to what you were just talking to.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:04John R. Miles?

  Laurie, I wanted to go now to the topic of listening. I was recently talking to Alison Woodbrooks, and we were discussing her new book, but we really got into how the art of listening is becoming a lost skill, and something that she said to me really blew me away, and then she goes, the way we listen or don't listen... Really comes down to making someone feel seen or unseen. And it really struck me because she's right. When we listen to someone intently, it's like we're holding up a mirror to ourselves because in that person we see ourselves. But so many people are tuned out. We're on our devices.

• 41:49John R. Miles?

  We're not, we're just, our mind is somewhere else. It's drifting. Are you seeing more of this come into play?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about the kids today that I see on the college campuses is they have so many more of these technological distractions. Right in a way that we just like never had. I rewind to like late nineties college life. All you could do in the evening was sit around and shoot the crap with people about what was going on in life. We would listen to each other, right? Now you might wanna, you know, shoot the crap with your roommate, but your phone is digging in your pocket. There's super interesting stuff on TikTok. I think the dopamine hits that we can get not from in real life, social connection are so profound that it makes it hard to pay attention to people in real life. And I think that has a huge consequence for students' ability to listen,

• 42:40Speaker 01

  but also a huge consequence by virtue of that for their ability to feel connected, to feel like they really matter. Right? And it's one thing if you're the listener, but it's a much worse thing if you're the listenee. Right to, it's one thing if you're the person not making others feel seen, but it's terrible for you if you feel unseen, if you feel like other folks don't listen to you. And I think that this is a real problem that technology in particular has created. Right? These little short sound bites and these quick things, right? Most human stories don't fit into that. Right? And when we get used to getting everything in a little dopamine inducing chunky soundbite, it can be hard to go back to those in real life interactions. And I think that's a real consequence for the kind of connection we feel with those around us.

• 43:22John R. Miles?

  That reminds me, if you've ever been interviewed for a short segment on TV, I have a hard time dealing with them because you can't really storytell at all. You have got to make just very short succinct points and it often doesn't connect well, I find. But I think that's how we're communicating more and more, unfortunately.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And without the normal and real life stuff, you and I are having this conversation not in person. I don't know if your listeners know that, but we're not in the same room together. We're connecting through a technology tool and that's great because we can connect in real time. We cannot see each other's faces and hear each other's voice and stuff. A lot of people today are not connecting in real time, right? You text, whoop, and then you get back five seconds later, whoop, lol. Our brains are just not set up to process that kind of social interaction. That's not happening in real time, right? In real life is the best, but at least in real time is pretty good. Like talking to someone over the phone or using video conferencing or whatever. But so much of our tools have moved that away. I think a lot of the disconnects that we see in offices these days is that people connect

• 44:27Speaker 01

  and not by walking by somebody's office and chatting with them. But they send them a Slack message, right? Or send them an email, right? These forms of communication work functionally, right? We can get the information across, but I think we're losing out on the psychological benefits of this sort of not in real time communication. And I think that has important consequences for mattering too.

• 44:48John R. Miles?

  It's interesting, and this is on a tangent, but I heard a commercial the other day for one of the dating apps, and I can't remember which one it was, but they have put a functionality in where a person can no longer paste in their answers because they were finding too many people were using AI and they weren't projecting who they truly were. So they're making people handwrite their answers. And I, I thought it was interesting that we've gone to that point that we're imposter-ing who we are in these conversations, like the, the person isn't going to find that out in the first or second time they meet you.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I think technology, all these technologies are supposed to be connecting us, right? Even a dating app, it's like literal purpose is to connect you with people. Maybe people you wouldn't meet if you're not at your local bar or something like that. But when the technology is not well suited to the way our psychology evolved, things can misfire in all these ways. And far too often, what we're trying to go for is convenience. If you're grabbing something off ChatGPT and pasting it into a dating app, it's because you want to reduce friction. You just want to make stuff easy, right? Real life is frictiony, like a social connection is frictiony. Mattering is frictiony. It takes work, it takes time, right? And so I think as we go towards an all too convenient society, we wind up losing some of the psychological benefits

• 46:09Speaker 01

  that can come from connection and mattering because we're trying to just bang things out and do it as easily as possible. Well, sometimes you have to put in some work to feel like things matter. I mean, that was like the old school Desi studies that you talked about, right? You putting the time in and maybe not even getting rewarded for it is one of the things that can build up some of the most intrinsic reward.

• 46:29John R. Miles?

  So one of the things that's a cornerstone of your teaching is gratitude. How does practicing gratitude enhance both happiness and the sense of belonging?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  You know, we think of gratitude as, oh, I'm so grateful for my morning cup of coffee or something like that. But what the research shows is that gratitude is more of a pro-social emotion. It, this is work by Dave Disteno and others, where what gratitude really makes you feel like is wow, I have a lot and I should probably give some back to other people. This is the kind of sense that gratitude gives us. So Dave finds that people who experience more gratitude want to volunteer more, right? They want to be nice to their future self, right? They want to save more for retirement, eat healthier because it's I can give back to like my future self who's like another person, right? And so gratitude is an emotion that facilitates the kind of self-sacrifice, the kinds of like hard work that leads to really positive social connection,

• 47:23Speaker 01

  leads to helping, and I think leads to doing things that really matter. So it's an emotion that gives you a sort of motivational bandwidth to do the stuff that I think increases mattering. And it's also no surprise that gratitude and experiencing more gratitude winds up making you feel happier, I think, in the moment. But I think it leads to these kind of positive happiness spirals where you feel good, but you also feel more motivated to do nice stuff for other people. And that boosts your social connection, which makes you feel even happier and less lonely and so on.

• 47:51John R. Miles?

  So I wanted to use whatever time left we have just to give some people some takeaways. So what daily habits or rituals do you recommend for someone who's listening to this and they feel the disconnection that we're talking about to foster more happiness and a sense of mattering?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think a big one is to increase your social connection, right? I mean, it's like the one hack that we know can really improve happiness overall. And that can be reaching out to friends and family members, complimenting a stranger on the street, chatting with a barista at the coffee shop, texting a friend and just saying you're thinking about them, right? All these simple actions wind up making you feel a little bit less lonely and a little bit more connected. And it's often an important path to mattering. I think a second thing you can do, we just mentioned, right, is to engage in a mindset of gratitude, even if you're just feeling thankful for your morning coffee cup, right? It can make you feel like, wow, I really do have enough that I can start giving back. And that's really a path to the sort of pro-social actions that I think matter a lot for increasing

• 48:53Speaker 01

  social connection, doing nice things for others, but also doing things that that kind of matter. So I think that mindset of gratitude is really important. And I think a third one, we talked about technology and these kinds of things, you should sort of think a little bit about your digital distraction. Things that often steal us from the stuff that really matters in life are often our phones, our technologies, right? We get stuck on that stuff. So what can you do to find more of a mindset of presence, right? Maybe consider a digital detox or even simple things like when you're around other people, say, putting your phones away and things like that. Those are just three quick hacks that I think are going to increase happiness, but also really particularly increase happiness via the sort of path of improving mattering.

• 49:35John R. Miles?

  And my last thing I wanted to explore with you is I really love the work of the late Emile Bruno and what he was trying to do around the whole space of dehumanization and trying to find ways to get people to see the beauty in each other. And as I think about his work, there are a lot of different cultural variations and socioeconomic inequalities that come into play here. How do you think they affect people's ability to feel happiness or that they matter? And what are some ways to pull out of that?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Well, one interesting thing specifically with regards to the inequality type stuff is that if you look at happiness across different countries, what you find is that one of the predictors of whether or not a country will be happy is its level of social inequality. So the United States, for example, is a very wealthy country, which would typically predict maybe a little bit more happiness. But we're also very unequal in our wealth. And that means that we're less happy than a country of similar wealth where it was distributed a little bit more evenly. So just being around inequality makes you feel less happy on average. And so I think finding ways to fight that inequality and to fight a lot of what Emile talked about was these sort of political rifts, right? To not build up your sense of belonging by doing that, by hating the other group,

• 50:58Speaker 01

  but really finding these common paths. I think that's really essential, too. I mean, I think one of the limits of, one of the things that's limiting social connection today is it feels like your identity groups are so fraught. I can't talk to somebody outside of my, you know, political party or I wouldn't want to talk to somebody like that because they're different than me. And I think a lot of Emile's work was trying to figure out mechanisms to cross those lines, right? To get everybody to feel like they were part of one big human group. And I think the way that intersects with happiness is it really allows us to form more social connection, right? We don't have these limits on our social connection just by what person we want to vote for or how we identify, right? We can see the common humanness in everyone. And the research really shows that doing that makes us feel good.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Feeling cynical, feeling really polarized, it's not a great emotion, right? It's a pretty negative feeling. And that can wind up really impacting our overall happiness. So I think Emile's enterprise was really one of making, of boosting human connection even across traditionally very disconnected lines. And I think that can allow us to boost our happiness, but also find ways to matter because we just wind up connecting and doing more good for more people.

• 52:08John R. Miles?

  Laurie, it has been such an honor to have you on the podcast today. And I always like to give my guests an opportunity to tell the listeners where they can learn more about you. So I was hoping you could share that with them.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Totally. You should, if you want to learn more about the science of happiness, you should check out my podcast, The Happiness Lab. And if you want to try out that online class that you heard something about before, you should head to Coursera.org and look up The Science of Well-Being.

• 52:34John R. Miles?

  Well, Laurie, thank you so much for joining me today. It was really such a great conversation. Thank you so much.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me on the show.

• 52:41John R. Miles?

  And that's a wrap on today's conversation. What an incredible one it was with Dr. Laurie Santos. Her insights in happiness, matter, and connection remind us that true fulfillment isn't about chasing external success. It's about aligning our lives with what truly brings us meaning and joy. From understanding the cognitive traps that mislead us about happiness to embracing the power of human connection, Laurie has given us a roadmap to living with greater purpose and intention. As we close out today's episode, I invite you to reflect on a few key takeaways. How can you cultivate a greater sense of mattering in your daily life? What small shifts in your mindset or habits could lead to deeper fulfillment? And how can you strengthen the connections that bring true joy and significance? If

• 53:25John R. Miles?

  today's discussion resonated with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It's one of the best ways to support the show and help us bring impactful conversations like this one to more people. And if someone in your life could benefit from Dr. Santos' wisdom, share this episode with them because a single conversation can change everything. For all the resources we discussed, including The Science of Well-Being course and The Happiness Lab podcast, visit the show notes at PassionStruck.com. And if you want to go deeper, be sure to check out the video version of this episode on my John R. Miles YouTube channel, where you'll find more enriching conversations just like this one. And while you're there, hit subscribe and join our growing community. And if you're looking to bring these transformative insights into your organization or team, visit johnrmiles.com/speaking

• 54:10John R. Miles?

  to explore how we can work together to create intentional change. Coming up next on Passion Struck, I'm joined by Bryant Wood. A former model and bodybuilder turned master breathwork instructor and transformational coach will be diving into the power of breathwork, emotional resilience, and redefining strength through vulnerability and connection. Brian's journey from external validation to deep inner healing is an inspiring testament to how we can all break from limiting beliefs and reclaim our authentic selves. It's the perfect complement to this episode with Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  I've always been someone that's totally down to admit where I was wrong. And at the end of the day, I was not the same person that I am without the substance, right? It totally changed the chemistry of my brain, the way I was behaving, my emotions were flaring up, and it wasn't who I was. Because this connection is a byproduct of making less productive decisions. And when you can rally and start making slowly conscious decisions for your health that nurtures you, your friends, your family, they come along because you're taking care of yourself.

• 55:13John R. Miles?

  So make sure you're subscribed and get ready for another transformative conversation. And remember, the fee for the show is simple. If you found value here in this episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And most importantly, take what you've learned and put it into action because knowledge alone doesn't create change, but action does. Until next time, live life, passion spread.