What We Still Get Wrong About Happiness (Live at Dartmouth)

In this special live episode, Dr. Laurie takes the stage at Dartmouth College for a conversation with happiness historian Darrin McMahon https://darrinmcmahon.com/. Together, they break down some of the biggest misconceptions about happiness in modern life, discuss the most effective (and often counterintuitive) ways to improve our wellbeing, and explore how smartphones, AI, and other new technologies may shape happiness in the years ahead. Experts Mentioned: Darrin McMahon https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/darrin-m-mcmahon, Professor of History at Dartmouth College Martin Seligman https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/people/martin-ep-seligman, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania Lorraine Siggins https://emeritus.yale.edu/fellows/lorraine-siggins, Director Emeritus of Mental Health and Counseling for Students at Yale Health Ashley Whillans https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=943704, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School Sonja Lyubomirsky https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside Carey Morewedge https://www.careymorewedge.com/, Chair of the Marketing Department at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business Gabriele Oettingen https://woopmylife.org/en/contact, Professor of Psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg David Blanchflower https://economics.dartmouth.edu/people/david-graham-blanchflower, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College Jean Twenge https://www.jeantwenge.com/, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University Jonathan Haidt https://www.jonathanhaidt.com/, Professor of Ethical Leadership and Professor of Business & Society at New York University Stern School of Business Elizabeth Dunn https://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia Manoush Zomorodi https://www.manoushz.com/, journalist, podcast host, and author Robert Putnam https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/robert-d-putnam, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Harvard University Kostadin Kushlev https://www.kushlev.com/, Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University Catherine Price https://catherineprice.com/, journalist and author Michael Inzlicht https://michaelinzlicht.com/about, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment in the Rotman School of Management Adam Smith https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/smith-moral-political/, Scottish economist and philosopher Erzo Luttmer https://economics.dartmouth.edu/people/erzo-fp-luttmer, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College Jan-Emmanuel De Neve https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/about-us/people/jan-emmanuel-de-neve, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science and Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford Resources Mentioned: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex https://www.amazon.com/Descent-Selection-Relation-Princeton-Science/dp/0691023697, by Charles Darwin (1871) “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21506599862&gbraid=0AAAAAqiPmCwrrBiN17xYWfJKFFM4_falq&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9ZLSBhCcARIsAEhGKgMg372wt7-O0WFwLAO6tZmuxJ47C2gaB6JCM7QVczHQp0gJhe7RojQaAqWrEALw_wcB,” by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010) “Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120,” by Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbra Mellers Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life https://www.amazon.com/Time-Smart-Reclaim-Your-Happier/dp/1633698351, by Ashley Whillans (2020) The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want https://www.amazon.com/How-Happiness-Approach-Getting-Life/dp/0143114956, by Sonja Lyubomirsky (2007) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-Ancient/dp/0465028020, by Jonathan Haidt (2006) “Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21148388/,” by Carey K Morewedge, Young Eun Huh, and Joachim Vosgerau (Science, 2010) Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Positive-Thinking-Science-Motivation/dp/1617230235, by Gabriele Oettingen (2014) “Declining Life Satisfaction and Happiness Among Young Adults in Six English-Speaking Countries https://www.nber.org/papers/w33490,” by Jean Twenge and David Blanchflower (NBER Working Paper Series, 2025) “Smartphones Reduce Smiles Between Strangers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563218304643,” by Kostadin Kushlev, John Hunter, Jason Proulx, Sarah Pressman, and Elizabeth Dunn (Computers in Human Behavior, 2019) Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being https://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Digital-Science-Well-Being/dp/1250411203, by Manoush Zomorodi (2026) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046, by Robert Putnam (2000) Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter https://www.amazon.com/Four-Days-Week-Life-Changing-Well-Being/dp/0063382431, by Juliet Schor (2025) “Do Happy People Care About Society’s Problems? https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57a40c19414fb54f51f8095f/t/64931bd01d517e1d9f25fa83/1687362512991/2019+Kushlevetal-Happy-People-Care.pdf,” by Kostadin Kushlev, Danielle M. Drummond, Samantha J. Heintzelman, and Ed Diener (The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2019) “When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7473022/,” by Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott Madey, and Thomas Gilovich (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995) The Theory of Moral Sentiments https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Moral-Sentiments-Adam-Smith/dp/1614279985, by Adam Smith (1759) “Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/3/963/1841496,” by Erzo Luttmer (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005) How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life https://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Up-Your-Phone/dp/039958112X, by Catherine Price (2018) “How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976261427747”, by Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn (Psychological Science, 2026) “Effort Feels Meaningful https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36272939/,” by Michael Inzlicht and Aidan Campbell (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022) Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance https://www.amazon.com/Why-Workplace-Wellbeing-Matters-Organizational/dp/1647826357, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward (2025) “Alysa Liu: ‘If I Didn’t Hit Rock Bottom, I Could Not Have Gone Up’ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/alysa-liu-olympic-gold-medalist-interview-1235525804/,” by Alex Morris (Rolling Stone, 2026) Related Episodes: “Why the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Is a Bad Idea https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/why-the-pursuit-of-happiness-is-a-bad-idea” “What Screen Time Is Really Doing to Your Body with Manoush Zomorodi https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/what-screen-time-is-really-doing-to-your-body-with-manoush-zomorodi” “What is Social Media Doing to Kids? with Dr. Jean Twenge https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/what-is-social-media-doing-to-kids-with-dr-jean-twenge” “Take a Three-Day Weekend Without Losing Any Pay (with Juliet Schor) https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/take-a-three-day-weekend-without-losing-any-pay-with-juliet-schor” 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Laurie Santos?

  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.

• 0:37Speaker 02

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• 1:04Laurie Santos?

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• 1:46Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:52Laurie Santos?

  Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. We're taking a break from our Happiness Hot Take series to bring you a special treat. If you listened to last week's episode, you know that I recently got to interview happiness historian Darren McMahon, who told me all about the history of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Well, in this episode, I'll be Continuing my conversation with Darren, but this time he'll be interviewing me. You'll get to hear a live conversation that we had at Darren's home institution of Dartmouth College as part of the Nelson A Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth's Public Conversations on the Pursuit of Happiness. We talked about all things happiness science, like what practices we can do to really feel better and some thoughts I've had about new technologies and AI.

• 2:34Laurie Santos?

  It was a wide-ranging and super fun conversation, so I couldn't wait to share it with all my podcast fans. So enjoy this special episode of my conversation with Darren McMahon at Dartmouth College.

• 2:47Laurie Santos?

  Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  This is the second in our series on the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, both in the past and the present and maybe the future. Today we have Laurie Santos and I'm just delighted to have you here, Laurie. Last week Laurie very kindly invited me to be on the podcast and to talk about happiness in the 18th century. Today I think we're going to talk about the pursuit of happiness in the 21st, but feel free to bring history into it if you feel so moved.

• 3:32Laurie Santos?

  Oh yeah, we're going for Father's.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  So Laurie is known as an authority on the science of happiness and the pursuit of happiness. But you cut your teeth as a psychologist and researcher studying animal behavior, I think particularly dogs. And I'd love to hear, I mean, I get as a dog lover, the link between dogs and the pursuit of happiness. But I'd love to hear if there's a link between the study of animals and the pursuit of happiness or how you got from one to the other.

• 3:56Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest like between animals and happiness is that animals, definitely dogs, make us really happy. They keep us moving. They make us mindful. Lots of evidence showing that dog owners are happier. So if you need one quick happiness tip, get a dog. It can make you happy.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Not a cat?

• 4:10Laurie Santos?

  Not a cat's too. Less research on cats, interestingly, but definitely cats make you happier as well. But I think the psychological connection is one of the reasons I was studying animals. Is that I've long been interested in the kinds of ways that our minds lead us astray. Most people study animals to try to figure out whether or not animals are as smart as humans, but I spent a lot of my time studying whether or not animals were as dumb as people were in some of the ways that people are dumb. I did this with monkeys, studying the economic errors that we have and trying to see whether monkeys show those too. With dogs, we were really focused on social errors. Do dogs imitate to the point that they're doing really irrational things in some of the same ways as humans do? And the connection between that and the happiness work is that my take on happiness has always

• 4:53Laurie Santos?

  been that one of the reasons we're not as happy as we can be isn't that we're not working towards it. We're working very hard towards becoming happier, but we're often doing it in the wrong way because our minds are lying to us about the kinds of things that we need to do to be happier. And so in some ways, this work on animals, which is really about what it is that makes our minds go awry, it's very similar to the way I think about happiness.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  That's so interesting. Is there actually work on the well-being of animals? I always point out that Darwin writes about some horses that are sort of ill-tempered and some that are cheery, and he begins to speculate along those lines, and I don't know if there's actual work in the lab.

• 5:28Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, there's lots of work trying to look at what animals feel. This is really important even for animal researchers who are trying to make animals' lives better and thinking about animal welfare and so on. The problem with animals and thinking about animal happiness is that the way I know even if you, Darren, are happy is that I ask you, often in some very formalized psychometric survey where I ask you about your life experiences and your life satisfaction and so on, but ultimately I don't really have a way objectively to find out if you're happy. You have to tell me. And the problem with animals is as much as we ask them, they tend not to tell us directly. Lacking verbal language, it's really hard for us to find out whether or not animals are happy. And so I think that's been the main limitation of why there's not a whole field of animal

• 6:11Laurie Santos?

  well-being research that's as robust as the research in humans is very hard for them to tell us.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  But if I know a psychologist, I won't stop them.

• 6:18Laurie Santos?

  That's true. That's true.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  So you begin with animals, and then I think it's in 2018 you launched this great course, Psychology and the Good Life. I'm sure you've answered this a million times, but I'm curious how That came about, had you taught on well being prior to that point? What was the impetus? And then I'd be particularly interested to know how the courses changed as you've taught it. Because I believe you're still teaching it now.

• 6:40Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, that's right. The pivot to thinking about well being came with a pivot in my role at Yale. So for most of my time at Yale, I was a professor at the front of a classroom, much like this. I interacted a lot with students, but I was a little bit distant from them. I was kind of, you know, teaching them, but didn't really see closely what was happening in student life. That all changed when I became what's called the head of college on Yale's campus. These are faculty members who live functionally in the dorm communities with students. Yale is kind of like one of these weird colleges like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like Gryffindor and Slytherin, these like mini colleges within a college. I was head of Silliman College, no relation to Slytherin, even though it sounds very similar. But that meant that as a faculty member, I, for the first time, was seeing student life really closely.

• 7:23Laurie Santos?

  I was eating with students in the dining hall. I was hanging out with them in the coffee shop. And I just didn't like what I was seeing. Like, I was seeing this so-called college student mental health crisis up close and personal, where the stats when I first started were that in 2018, more than 40% of college students reported to be being too depressed to function most days. Not just Yale students, but nationally, more than 60% said that they were overwhelmingly anxious. More than 1 in 10 had seriously considered suicide in the last six months. This was a staggering amount of suffering that was happening on campus, and it was happening in my community, right? I'm this benevolent aunt who's hanging out with students, trying to make this community great. And I was just watching my students suffer from panic attacks or worse.

• 8:06Laurie Santos?

  And that made me really question what my institution was doing in terms of mental health. I was kind of like, you know, we, as faculty members, assume that you students are learning, you know, computer science or Chaucer or whatever we're teaching you. And how can that be true if more than 2/3 of you are too anxious to function most days? Or if you or your teammate or your roommate is seriously considering suicide? It just seemed like there was this disconnect between what we were expecting students to be learning and the real level of suffering that I was seeing in the community. And so. I was just like, I have to take action. And being a nerdy psychologist, there were limited ways that I could take action. But I could teach a new class. And I had already had a little bit of experience in this field of happiness science, or what psychologists call positive psychology.

• 8:51Laurie Santos?

  I had done some work with Marty Seligman, who's often thought of as like the leader of the field. So I had a bit of background in it. And so I thought, you know, let me just teach a new intro class. I'll just make a new class about this stuff. But the difference with this class that I was teaching is that I wanted it to be practical. I wanted it to be a skills learning class where students were learning strategies they could use if they were feeling burned out or stressed and so on. It was a new class on campus, though, so I thought I'd show up and 40 students would be in a classroom, which is typical for a Yale psych class. I did not expect the only place to teach it on campus would be our concert hall. There was also the football stadium, but to be fair, January football stadium is not an awesome spot to teach a twice a week class. So, yeah. Yeah, so that's the history.

• 9:33Laurie Santos?

  It really came out of seeing this need on campus and recognizing that we, as, I don't know, university presidents, it felt like we weren't doing our job. We were just like pretending it was fine and kind of holding it aside. And I really wanted to give students skills they could use.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  So interesting. You know, it's funny, my late godfather was close friends with Lorraine Siggin's, who was director of mental health at Yale for years. And I remember Lorraine saying at one point, her office was seeing more than half the undergraduates. And that one had told her that he had mortgaged his childhood in order to get into Yale. You know, that realization of the stress that we put our young people through and the stress they take on, it's just overwhelming. You know, you make a point that I often try to highlight, and that is that all this talk about happiness in the news and, you know, elsewhere, it's not necessarily a good sign, right? It reflects a kind of underlying anxiety and unhappiness, which is, I think, says a lot about our time. Has that course changed? I mean, so that's the initial impetus, but has it evolved? Have things gotten better?

• 10:32Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, a bit. One of the things that's changed is the focus that I've had, right? The nice thing about having a quarter of the entire Yale student body in your classroom is that you can see what works, what they resonate with, and what's working less well. One of the things I consistently hear from my students about The stuff that they take away with them in the course. What I'm most interested in is like, what are the strategies you're gonna use? You heard about all these different strategies, kind of menu of different tools you can use to feel better. Which are you actually using? Which are you putting into effect in your own life? And the ones I consistently heard that students were using all the time were strategies that we had to regulate and navigate self-talk, right? The stuff in your head. I'm not good enough. I'm screwing up. I should be doing more.

• 11:13Laurie Santos?

  That like hustle culture voice that's out there in society that gets embedded in your head. That's the thing that I think my students needed some help with. And so we talk a lot about strategies you can use to gain more self-compassion. Strategies you can use to get some psychological distance from the problems that are coming up in your life. And those were the tools that I think my students were using more and more. And so the class has shifted to focus more on some of those things. I think when people classically hear about the work in positive psychology, they hear things like meditate or write in your gratitude journal. And those things are great. But I think what my students really needed help with was like, when I'm beating myself up, how can I talk to myself in a healthier way? And those really resonated.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  So some basic cognitive behavioral therapy, basically.

• 11:59Laurie Santos?

  I mean, what we do in the class really is the kind of skills building that you learn with a good therapist, right? Cognitive behavior therapy is really changing your thought patterns, changing your relationship to your thought patterns, finding ways to regulate your emotions better. That's functionally the tools that we're teaching in a classroom. And I think that's important. It is the case that sometimes for certain issues in life, you need a one-on-one therapy session to gain these skills. But these skills are also, I don't want to say they're not hard because they're hard to put into effect in the moment, but they're pretty straightforward. And this is one of the insights that I've had teaching this stuff is like, we should be teaching this stuff earlier and earlier because none of this stuff is rocket science. Like these basic emotion regulation strategies are ones

• 12:44Laurie Santos?

  that I think we should be teaching definitely in middle school, but maybe even earlier.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I mean, Yale's done wonderful work introducing these kind of emotional skill building into elementary schools, right?

• 12:55Laurie Santos?

  And I think it can come earlier and There's been so many cool opportunities that came from teaching this course that I didn't expect, but one of the most cool ones was that I got to work with Sesame Workshop, which is the group that runs Sesame Street, and think about how we can get these strategies out to little, little kids. And what I realized is like, oh, my gosh, one of the strategies I teach students is this idea of affect labeling, which is like, just give a label to what you're feeling. I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling lonely, whatever it is. A word can help you get some insight into exactly what you're feeling, and it can also help you get some insight into how to fix it. The fix for when you're feeling lonely is totally different than the fix for when you're feeling

• 13:38Laurie Santos?

  overwhelmed. But if you're just like, I don't feel good, then you don't know what to do. But that's a strategy that you can teach a three to five-year-old. Maybe not with big words like overwhelmed and frustrated, but you can try. In fact, Elmo was teaching kids about frustrated. That was one of the words that Elmo was learning. So it's like, if we could just get that stuff in earlier, we'd be giving people tools they could use.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Well, you know, my five-year-old daughter then taught me, and I got that education a little late perhaps, but still got it nonetheless. So thank you. We, human beings, are really bad at knowing what will make us happy, and we make bad choices accordingly. And you, Lori, are not shy at all at pointing out what people do wrong in terms of pursuing happiness. And, you know, while we have you, can you give us a few quick tips on what not to do?

• 14:22Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, because I'm staring out at a bunch of undergrads, it looks like. I'll give the one that my college students get wrong the most, which is the connection between money and happiness. Most of you are here at a place like Dartmouth College because you want to like earn a lot of money later on. And turns out, there is a connection between money and happiness, but that connection only exists if you really don't have any money. If you're currently living below the poverty line, and I give you more money, yes, that's going to make your life a lot easier. You will be happier. But this connection between money and happiness seems to level off. Researchers fight about exactly where it levels off. Back in a very famous paper in 2010, folks thought it leveled off around $75,000 in modern-day money that probably is equivalent of like $100,000.

• 15:07Laurie Santos?

  And $10,000, people fight about whether the slope after that point is totally flat, or whether it goes up a miniscule amount over time. But the point is like, it just isn't helping your happiness that much to get more money after a certain point. And that's one that I just feel like is so hard to take into account. I'm looking at a room of students, and I imagine some of you are seniors and thinking about different job offers. Maybe you're lucky enough to have multiple ones. And my guess is the first thing you look at is what's the salary? And you're twiddling about like, ooh, which one should I pick? And maybe I'll get $5,000 extra dollars or whatever. And it's just not going to matter at all. What will matter? What is your social connection going to look like at work? One of the biggest predictors of happiness overall and happiness at work is that yes

• 15:49Laurie Santos?

  or no answer to the question, do you have a best friend at work? Another big predictor of your happiness at work is whether or not you have a lot of free time. This is some lovely work by Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School on the power of what's called time affluence, the sense that you feel wealthy in time. So much more important to have time wealth than monetary wealth. Even interestingly, at lower incomes, actually, because we're talking with so many folks at public policy here, Ashley's pushed the policy that one way to solve the kind of happiness crisis and so many other crises that come up in low income populations is actually to give low income individuals more time back, right? Because if you're thinking about what happens if you're low income, you're driving Uber, or maybe you don't even have a car, so you're commuting two hours to work and so on.

• 16:32Laurie Santos?

  That if we could solve the time crisis, we might actually help them psychologically and maybe even monetarily down the line, too. But this isn't how we think. We're not like, if I want to be happier, let me find a life that gives me lots more time. We're just like, money, money, money, achievement, achievement, achievement. And it's not going to move the needle in the way we think.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  So money, not unimportant, but not as important as people think.

• 16:54Laurie Santos?

  It's so insidious for the way our mind works, right? Because it is important for a while. Like, if you're an undergrad and you're not making any money, or like me when I was like a poor grad student, it was the case that, you know, in grad school, I was earning enough that I was not below the poverty line, but more money was definitely making me happier. I wasn't at that threshold yet. So you learn that reward relationship. You're like, oh, my gosh, more money, more happy. But then when it levels off, you stop realizing. That that's the case. And so what happens when you're getting more money and it's not moving the needle? You don't think, oh, I must have been wrong about that relationship between money and happiness. You just think, oh, I was wrong about the amount of money I need. I need way more money to be happy. In fact, one of my favorite surveys, this is Sonya Lubomirsky cites this in her book is

• 17:36Laurie Santos?

  you ask people who are earning $30,000, you know, is that enough to be happy? Those folks say no. They say, OK, what amount of money would you earn that like if you were getting that amount, you'd just be happy? And this was years ago, but folks that are earning $30,000 say, well, if I could just get $50,000 and I'd just be happy. I wouldn't ever need another penny more. But you do the same survey with people who are earning $100,000. You ask them, is that enough? They say no. You say, how much do you need? Those folks say, I need $250,000 to be happy. Now I'm looking at smart Dartmoor students who can do the math in their head and you realize, wait, it's not like you get there. It's like the ratio, the difference between what you think you need and what you have is going up as you get more money. It's not going less, right? And so I think this is the insidious thing about money is we don't realize like, oh, I was wrong. It must be something else that I need. We think like, it's still money.

• 18:21Laurie Santos?

  I just need way more than I think.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  It's time to take a quick break. But Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

• 18:37Laurie Santos?

  You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. I recently pulled my fall clothes out of storage and I was so excited to see my black Mongolian cashmere full zip hoodie that I got from Quince. It's soft and warm and perfect for cozy nights. I love it so much that I now have a gray one in my quince.com cart right now. And when I buy that new gray hoodie, I know I'll feel good about my choice because everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe,

• 19:20Laurie Santos?

  from warm, reasonably sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app. For app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah, that's fair." We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body. But when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated.

• 20:05Laurie Santos?

  The good news, it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their Blueberry Almond Granola, for example, starts with whole-grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great. Gut fuel is in the bag. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

• 20:50Laurie Santos?

  An anniversary gives you reasons to look back. But the most valuable kind of experience is one that you can harness to help you move forward. Case in point. MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be. That was the motivation behind MassMutual's Living Well Rider. Now available with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance, it provides policy owners with access to wellness benefits at no additional cost. 175 years comes with a lot of knowledge.

• 21:33Laurie Santos?

  Today, MassMutual is proud of using that knowledge to help people live well, so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness.

• 21:46Laurie Santos?

  Research shows that a good night's sleep can put a smile on your face. And that's because sleep is essential for happiness. Enter Dr. Teal's magnesium spray. A proprietary blend of topical minerals powered by pure Epsom salt and natural Dead Sea salt to help you get ready for bedtime. When you need a reset after a long day, make Dr. Teal's magnesium spray part of your nighttime routine. It's an effortless way to relax your body and your mind. Dr. Teal's magnesium spray comes in a lightweight, fast drying formula. Just shake it up, generously spritz on the soles of your feet, and massage until absorbed. 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.

• 22:31Laurie Santos?

  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. For wellness you can feel, find Dr. Teal's magnesium spray online and in your local bath aisle. Dr. Teal's, yep, you needed that.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  So, pursuing happiness through money maybe doesn't quite work. That's one of the wrong pursuits, right? What should we be doing? How should we pursue happiness?

• 22:57Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, well, here's one that I think with your focus on the 18th century, you will love, which is another thing we get wrong about happiness is we think happiness is about us. It's about me, me, me. And I think this is especially true in the modern individualist culture where we find ourselves and at a school like this, to be honest. Many of you students are here because you focused on your studies and what you needed and getting your stuff up. It wasn't, what are you doing to help the country? What are you doing to help the world? What are you doing to help your brothers and sisters? It was like you, you, you. And the research just consistently shows us that this is not the path to happiness. And I think this is something that modern culture gets so wrong. If you go on TikTok, you will see somewhere something about self-care or treat yourself or me, me, me, right?

• 23:41Laurie Santos?

  But if you look at the happiness research, that's just not what predicts people's happiness. Happiness is about being other oriented. So, controlled for income people who donate more money to charity are happier than those who self-report not donating anything. Same with volunteering for your time, controlling. For that amount of free time you have. It just seems like doing stuff for others makes you happier. Those are correlations. So you could be like, well, maybe it's that you're doing nice stuff for other people makes you happy. But it could also be that just if you're happy, you do nice stuff for other people. And we know that's an effect. It's what's called the feel-good-do-good effect. If you're like in a good mood, you want doing nicer stuff for other people. But there are also studies that, you know, they're very cute. They force people to do nice stuff for others. And then they test what happens to your happiness. And what you find is that even when you're forced to do something nice for other people,

• 24:25Laurie Santos?

  you wind up feeling better after doing that. And so I think this is one that we consistently get wrong in the modern day. And as I said, Darren, this is one that I think you'll appreciate because of the forefathers. You know, they were good about individual pleasure, but they also got that even just the whole concept of happiness was about everybody's happiness. And this is something we really miss today.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, one thing that comes very clear is when people in the 18th century talk about the pursuit of happiness, they don't mean the pursuit of quanta of pleasure. They mean the pursuit of a life well-lived. In order to sort of access that, they draw really deeply on wisdom traditions. So in their case, Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as religious traditions, right? And I was, while you were speaking, I was thinking of that wonderful Chinese proverb, and I won't get it quite right, but it's something to the effect that if you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. And if you want to be happy for a lifetime, then help others. And that gets at the way in which so many of the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions have, you know, deep lessons about how to pursue happiness embedded in them.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  And I've heard you say, a little bit like John Height, who talks about the kind of modern truth and ancient wisdom, that, you know, much of what positive psychologists do is to reaffirm or validate insights that we've already known, but they've just put a modern kind of scientific imprimatur on them, which is important, but nonetheless, the knowledge itself may not be new.

• 25:49Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, and I think that that's a really important thing to do, right? I think my scientist hat sometimes is embarrassed, right? Because it's like we positive psychologists and psychologists and behavioral scientists in general have got out and tested all these things that scholars have been talking about, you know, since the time of Aristotle, or like, oh, my gosh, it turns out that. Habits really good to form or doing nice things for other people makes you happy. Mindfulness and being present, that's awesome. Folks have been saying that for like thousands of years. And so on the one hand, it's like, really? This is the modern science is like, you're just showing us what these folks were saying forever. That's now true. But I think it's important to do because it didn't necessarily have to be that way. And sometimes the ancient traditions were just wrong. Right. Think of your favorite ancient tradition, you'll realize some of it, we just don't really subscribe to in the same way today.

• 26:35Laurie Santos?

  And so I think that that stuff is really important is asking the question, are we doing it right? And sometimes when we look, we realize we're doing it wrong. This one isn't so much an ancient tradition, but it's another thing that's really popular in the culture right now. It just drives me so crazy. Is the TikTok trend about manifesting? You all, the undergrads are nodding like, oh, I'm just gonna like, I want to get good grades this semester. So I'm just gonna manifest it. I'm just gonna envision it, right? Turns out it's not just that manifesting is neutral or that it doesn't work. It actively causes the thing that you want to get further away. How does it do that? Well, it does that through a funny trick of the mind. It does that through the way your mind. Images different rewards and the way your reward system works. So let's say I want to get fit, right?

• 27:20Laurie Santos?

  This is something I've been thinking about. I've been trying to go with my trainer, go once a week. I want to get a little bit fitter, right? So I manifest, I think like, oh, how awesome it would be if I was fit. Oh, my gosh, my clothes would fit better and like, I have stronger muscles. What I'm doing there is I'm vividly imagining that I've already gotten the reward, that I've already put in all the work I need to put in. And I have that good thing already. And a funny thing about our minds is like, when we image stuff really closely, there's part of our brain that thinks we already got that. There's a wonderful study by Carrie Morwedge and colleagues that that tests this directly with food. He either has you imagine carefully putting quarters into a slot like you're going to do your laundry. Or imagine slowly eating one M and M at a time. And you do this for a while.

• 28:05Laurie Santos?

  And then the experiment is that you come out and there's a bowl of M and M's. And the question is, how many M and M's do you eat? And what you find is that when you've already imagined really carefully eating all these M and M's, the last thing you want to do. Is need more M and Ms. You kind of have envisioned what that reward would feel like. So you don't need it anymore. You don't need to take the action to get it. And research by Gabrielle Ottingen and colleague finds that the same thing happens with manifesting. If you manifest, oh, my gosh, I want to get great grades. Part of your brain thinks you got those great grades. So you don't take as much time to study. You don't work as hard. She finds that students who manifest getting fitter actually go to the gym less often. So it's not just that manifesting is like, oh, it doesn't work. It's like this woo woo thing. It's actively bad. But the good thing is that there's a way you can do it better.

• 28:49Laurie Santos?

  Gabrielle Ottingen shows how this works, which is just in addition to kind of thinking very vividly about the reward. You also think, hmm, what are the obstacles that are getting me to that reward? And you imagine that and you're like, oh, I don't have gym shorts or I like, don't have my books to study. Or like, there's four parties this weekend and I'm never going to have time to read the book I need to read. That causes you to think about how you can overcome those obstacles. You can use manifesting well. It's just that like the TikTok version drives us astray. And so the whole point of that is that it is the case that sometimes science goes out and they study things that are out there in the public ether that scholars have been thinking about for a while. And they're like, yep, everybody was right. But sometimes we look and we realize that the popular wisdom is just wrong.

• 29:32Laurie Santos?

  And that's where I think science can help us get on a better path.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  That's wonderful. And it's a perfect segue to where we want to go next. This last autumn in October, Professor Danny Blanchflower, who is here in the audience and colleagues put together this wonderful conference with the United Nations around the crisis in youth well being. And as Danny has shown and others like Jean Twenge and John Height, who are also at the conference, that crisis is real. And moreover, it shows up in the data at right the same time that the cell phone becomes kind of broadly accessible. And so I'm wondering if you might want to comment and I'm hoping you're not sponsored by Meta. I'm hoping we're not sponsored by Meta.

• 30:07Laurie Santos?

  One thing we have Metta sponsorship, but yes. So I think it's important when talking about technology and social media and cellphones and how they're affecting our wellbeing, to remember that cellphones are just a tool. It's just a technology. We could use it in all kinds of different ways. We could use our phones to call a friend, to donate money to a good cause, to do a meditation app. It could be used for good stuff. It's just the problem is, we don't tend to use it for good stuff. Basically, all the different strategies I talk about, about how to feel happier, if you look at how we tend to use technology, it leads us astray. Let's take the one that I find most ironic, which is social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social.

• 30:50Laurie Santos?

  Quickest intervention, other than getting a dog, you could do to be happier is to get a friend, or talk to a human, or be socially connected in any way. Our phones were built to literally do that. It's a phone. The whole purpose of a phone is to call someone. How do we normally spend it? Staring at it while ignoring the people in real life around us. Deep irony that these tools that were meant to help us connect often help us not connect. And there's some lovely work by folks like Liz Dunn and others showing just how much phones steal our attention when we're around other people. Liz does this lovely study where she puts people in a waiting room. Imagine Darren and I, who are sitting up on the stage, we're in a waiting room together. We could just chat with each other, but if we have our phones out, what are we gonna do? We're not gonna chat with one another.

• 31:32Laurie Santos?

  We're gonna look at our phones. And Liz just does this clever study where she measures how much smiling happens between people in a room together, you know, maybe the basest, tiniest unit of social connection. And she finds like a 30% reduction in smiling when people have their phones available to them in this waiting room, right? Imagine that 30% multiplied by our whole society walking around on campus and this kind of stuff. So we socially connect less. Another big one, especially for young people, you sleep less because you have your technology out. I think the most evil thing cellphone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in cellphones because it gives us an excuse to have it right near us in bed. And then, when we wake up in the middle of the night, we look at it and we are tempted by it and so on. I think it also makes us way less present over time. But mindfulness, kind of noticing where you are, just being in your space, so much

• 32:17Laurie Santos?

  Evidence that this boosts our happiness. We never have moments to be mindful. You know, probably even some of you walking over here, Darren, you and I are talking on this beautiful spring day where Dartmouth's campus is just gorgeous right now. Guessing some of you didn't even notice that. Why? Because you were staring at whatever was going on in your phone, right? Not to mention all the anxiety provoking information about the news and everything else. So it's just a technology. It's just one that we tend to use in ways that make us miserable. And the coolest finding that I've heard most recently, this actually I learned on a podcast with Mamouche Zamarudi, who's a journalist who has been thinking a lot about the effects of technology in the ways people typically thought about about attention and all this stuff.

• 32:58Laurie Santos?

  But recently she's become interested in the way technology shapes our physical body, not like what we're thinking in our mental health, but our physical health. And she talks about research showing this connection between our core muscles and our adrenal glands, like our stress system. And if you think of the way we often sit when we are on our phone, I will demonstrate for those of you who are not on your phone right now, it is like this. It is in what I'm hunching over in what's called the cashew posture. It turns out that this is a posture that is literally stimulating our stress system. And Zamarudi actually claims that like maybe a lot of the mental health crisis that we are getting with our phones is actually just the way we are sitting in our physical bodies and our physical presence. So

• 33:42Laurie Santos?

  everyone in the room right now is now straightening up and like getting into the right position. But yeah, she argues that we might be able to solve some of this if we think about the way technology is changing our very posture.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Neither of us are policy people. I'm a historian, you're a psychologist, and yet we're here under the auspices of the Rockefeller Center Public Policy. Our director is right here. So I feel obligated to ask a question about public policy. If you were advisor to a king for the day, what would you tell them about things we could do at the macro level to improve well being in the United States?

• 34:15Laurie Santos?

  I'm so glad you asked me that because sometimes a lot of this work comes off as saying the following thing. Here are these strategies you can use as individuals to feel happier, write in your gratitude journal, you know, use these self talk. Strategies. And that's it. Good. We can ignore the fact that there's many structures around us in governments and companies and institutions that are actively making it harder to be happier. And I think that that's just a misnomer. It is the case that we can use individual strategies to get happier, but it would be so much easier to employ those individual strategies if we had the institutions and governments around us helping us. And we, as psychologists, don't often get to pontificate about that. So I'm excited to pontificate about that. What do we know about the policy implications of what we've learned in happiness?

• 34:59Laurie Santos?

  We talked about this connection between money and happiness, where money after a certain level doesn't make you happy, but money under a certain level really, really, really doesn't make you happy. I think the happiness science is super clear about the powerful impact that a universal basic income could have on both levels. If you give low-income people more money, it will necessarily make them happy. If you have to tax higher-income people to get that money, it's going to have absolutely no effect on their happiness. It's just super, super clear. Another big policy implication is that social connection really matters for happiness. I think there's many ways that public policy can influence social connection. Here, I'm channeling great folks like Robert Putnam and others who've long talked about

• 35:41Laurie Santos?

  the power of things like third spaces, literal spaces that aren't work or school or something or home, places where you can get together with other people. These are things that governments can do, is just make it easier for people to have these spaces. And in empirical cases where people have done that, we've seen huge impacts in terms of more connection, more happiness, but I think even like more conversations across the political line, which can help a lot. Finally, we talked a lot about the power of time and the importance of time affluence. I think this is a lever that public policy can use that it often doesn't think about because we forget the importance of time. But even things like a four-day work week, which even economists are now telling us, wow, a four-day work week makes workers more productive.

• 36:25Laurie Santos?

  They get more of the bottom-line stuff done, and they also have time to rest and do other things can be super powerful. Finally, I'll say that I think one of the things we forget is that Being happy leads to doing nice things for others and kind of doing what the forefathers wanted, which is like being good in terms of your civic life, living a good life, not for yourself, but for everyone else. There's lots of new work just showing that a really great way to get people to fight for what's good in the world, to fix the structures around them, is just to make sure they're in a positive mood and feeling happier. This is some lovely work by Kouchlef at Georgetown that asks the question of, well, who's going out and like doing the stuff? Who's going to like climate protests?

• 37:08Laurie Santos?

  Or he was doing this work around the time of the Black Lives Matter. And he's like, who's going to those protests and like fighting for social justice? And what he finds is it's not what you think. You might assume like, who's going to a climate protest? It must be somebody who's really anxious about climate. Turns out, no, it's the people who are least anxious, the people who have the most positive mood. They're the ones getting out to do the stuff. And in some ways, you didn't need to know that study to know that fact. Like, if you think of when you're just feeling overwhelmed and in a really bad space, you're not out there trying to fix the world, you're just like trying to deal. But it does mean that this connection between individual happiness and civic happiness is an important one. But if we give people the tools and the skills to promote their individual happiness, it's going to give them the bandwidth to fix the bigger stuff.

• 37:52Laurie Santos?

  And so I think policymakers need to realize that it's not just that welfare at the individual level is a policy goal. It might be a policy tool to help people to do better more broadly. It's time for a break. But Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

• 38:15Laurie Santos?

  You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. I recently pulled my fall clothes out of storage, and I was so excited to see my black Mongolian cashmere full zip hoodie that I got from Quince. It's soft and warm and perfect for cozy nights. I love it so much that I now have a gray one in my quince.com cart right now. And when I buy that new gray one... Gray hoodie, I know I'll feel good about my choice because everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe.

• 38:58Laurie Santos?

  From warm, reasonably sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah," that's fair. We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body, but when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated.

• 39:43Laurie Santos?

  The good news, it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their blueberry almond granola, for example, starts with whole grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great. Gut fuel is in the bag.

• 40:26Laurie Santos?

  Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. An anniversary gives you reasons to look back, but the most valuable kind of experience is one that you can harness to help you move forward. Case in point, MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be. That was the motivation behind MassMutual's Living Well Rider. Now available with eligible MassMutual whole life insurance, it provides policy owners with access to wellness benefits at no additional cost.

• 41:08Laurie Santos?

  175 years comes with a lot of knowledge. Today, MassMutual is proud of using that knowledge to help people live well so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/Wellness. That's massmutual.com/Wellness. Research shows that a good night's sleep can put a smile on your face, and that's because sleep is essential for happiness. Enter Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray, a proprietary blend of topical minerals powered by pure Epsom salt and natural Dead Sea salt to help you get ready for bedtime. When you need a reset after a long day, make Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray part of your nighttime routine. It's an effortless way to relax your body and your mind.

• 41:51Laurie Santos?

  Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray comes in a lightweight, fast-drying formula. Just shake it up, generously spritz on the soles of your feet, and massage until absorbed. 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. For wellness you can feel, find Dr. Teal's Magnesium Spray online and in your local bath aisle. Dr. Teal's, yep, you needed that.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Well, I have more questions than I have time, and I'm mindful I want to open it up to folks. The Dartmouth tradition is that a student asks the first question, and so if there's a bold student...

• 42:37Speaker 04

  Hi, thank you for being here. My name is Mia. I'm a first-year student. I was wondering, what do you think the relationship is between comparison and happiness? And... To what extent can you really separate your happiness from evaluating it in comparison to someone else's? Like, how can a college student derive their own happiness without thinking, "Oh, I'll be happier if my life looked like so and so's"?

• 43:03Laurie Santos?

  Totally. So here's another dumb feature about how the mind works when it comes to happiness. And how the mind works just in general, is it not just true of happiness, it's just like human mind writ large? We don't think about anything in objective terms. We only think about stuff relative. We're here in this room with kind of brightish, artificial lights. When you walk outside into the slightly darker hallway, you'll feel like, "Oh, my gosh, it's so dark." It's not that the hallway is dark, it's just it's brighter in here. You don't think of the light in terms of its objective properties. You think of it relative to another space, right? This is just how we think about everything, including our own level of whatever. Our grades, our beauty, our salary. We can't even understand them in objective terms.

• 43:47Laurie Santos?

  We only can think about them in relative terms. And our brains have this other insidious property, which is that we tend never to do that relative comparison towards things that we're better at. So we tend to look at the person that makes us feel worst about ourselves. My favorite nerdy example of this is a sports example. Researchers looked at Olympic medalists on the stand and their emotional expressions. So the gold medalist, super happy, really excited, right? What about the silver medalist? They're not just like ever so slightly less happy than the gold medalist. If you do analyses of their facial muscles, what you find is that silver medalists are showing emotions like contempt, deep sadness. They're not like a little less happy, they're miserable. Why?

• 44:32Laurie Santos?

  They just feel like a total loser. They're just looking to the gold medalist and feeling awful, right? You can be in objectively the best circumstances in life, and if your mind finds the one person that's better than you, it's going to look to that person and do it. I consulted very briefly for an NBA team with basketball players, which is funny because like I don't know anything about basketball or anything about sports in general, and so I have to figure out ways to talk to these basketball players. We were talking about the insidiousness of social comparison, even at the highest level in the NBA. And I was asking them who their comparison points were. I was like, who's your comparison point for like salary right now? And at the time, they were like, oh, it's Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison point for like three point shots? And they're like, Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison for height? And they're like, oh, it was like Taco Fail or something.

• 45:17Laurie Santos?

  I was like, why is it not Steph Curry for height? Because if you know basketball, Steph Curry is pretty short. And they're like, well, I didn't think about him for that. But like, you thought about him for every other comparison. Why is that not? So like, even at the highest level, we pick the awful stuff, right? So I think one way to deal with comparison is just to have some grace about it. It's just the way your mind works for everything. Of course, you're going to compare. But you need to realize that you can shift that process a little. And this is why I love to nerd out and tell this Olympian story, because there's a third data point that I haven't mentioned. I talked about the gold medalist and the silver medalist. I didn't mention the bronze medalist. Researchers analyze their facial expressions. And it turns out, they're ecstatic. They often, in some of the analyses, are showing more positive expressions than the gold medalist. Why?

• 46:02Laurie Santos?

  Their comparison point isn't gold. They were like multiple seconds or multiple points away. Their comparison is like, oh, my gosh, if I just messed up a little bit more, I would be going home empty handed. And so the joke is, you have to find not the silver lining, but the bronze lining. You literally have to look at, could it be worse? Is there another comparison I could find? And that intentional energy takes work, but it's possible. So little grace, everybody does it just the way your mind works. But if you look carefully, you can detect that objectively, you're not doing so bad.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Strive in life for third place.

• 46:37Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Professor Blanchflower.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  Thank you. I'm Danny Blanchflower. That's exactly the theme I was going to try and think about. Darren and I were in Scotland for the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth. And if you read the first page of A Theory of Moral Sentiments, he says what you just said. He actually says, actually, we compare ourselves to others and we care about the well-being of others for the guy who wrote about markets. So the relative thing is really important. Even, I think, in macro sense, it's really important. I'll just tell you, a Nobel Prize winner, who's remained nameless, called me one day, and I'd written about relative things. And he said, I can buy anything that I like, but I still care about the salaries of my colleagues. But this is a big deal, right?

• 47:23Speaker 05

  So if you think in macro terms, we've seen GDP rising, income of the nation rises. And if you look at happiness, it's as flat as a pancake. Well, what happens is people compare themselves to others. If I get a BMW, this is work of colleagues of ours. If I get a BMW, it makes me happy. But if you get one, I'm not happy anymore. So I mean, this is, this is literally true. And there's, there's evidence, also a lot of famous paper finds that if I get a 10% rise in income, that's fine. But if I get no rise in income and everybody in the neighborhood gets a 10% rise, I'm worse off. So these comparators are really important. And I know you talked about it on an individual level, but I obviously, I, I think it's really important for us to think, perhaps to your connection on smartphones.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  When I was a kid, and I was 12, I'm old now, I was 12, I compared myself to my sister and my school colleagues. Maybe what we've got here is the smartphones has changed the comparator group. The comparator groups are not real, right? If I'm comparing myself to my sister or to Darren or something, that's fine. But in a sense, the connection of the real things and the smartphones is the smartphones changed the comparator group. And until we can do that, the individual things you've talked about fall flat. So I'm just trying to think about, how do we actually get people to compare themselves to real things?

• 48:44Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Because if I've learned anything about the happiness work I've done, it's what you said, relative things matter.

• 48:49Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, no, I think this is such an important point, right? It's comparing yourself, you know, if you're a student here to everyone at Dartmouth, but it's also comparing yourself to literally everyone on the internet. And of course, what's happening on the internet is completely curated, especially when it comes to beauty, you know, physical looks and so on. It's like all bait up. And I think in the age of AI slop, which we're moving towards, we're going to have even more comparisons that don't even exist, right? And so it raises this interesting question of what we can do. Again, being a psychologist, I think of the individual strategies that we can use. And the idea is like, you have some agency over whether you pick up that phone and look at TikTok. You can mindfully notice, how is it making me feel when I do that? If I leave TikTok hating my Body and demanding I go to the gym and feeling bad about my grades.

• 49:34Laurie Santos?

  Like, try to notice when are these comparisons coming up? And are they really real? This is a strategy that journalist like Catherine Price, who has this really lovely book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, where she argues, you don't necessarily have to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to like couples counseling to figure out like a healthier relationship with it. You know? And she has this strategy that she uses. It's an acronym, W W W, which stands for what for, why now? And what else, right? Why did I pick up my phone? What am I using it for? What else could I be doing? But the reason I like this W W W strategy is it's a moment to be mindful. Why did I pick up the phone? How am I feeling when I'm using it? If it's making you feel totally crappy, if you have all these social comparisons, it's a hint to like maybe pop off that stuff. Or take a moment to read and realize like,

• 50:19Laurie Santos?

  a crappy thing about our mind is that we don't have a lot of control over what other reference points, these social comparison points we use. We just soak up any that we get and especially ones that make us look bad. And that means that we're constantly affected by other folks. And when those other folks are real and around us in our peer group, that's one thing. When those other folks are fake people on the internet with photo filters and whatever, it's just so much worse.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Question right here.

• 50:50Speaker 06

  I was wondering, because I'm a cognitive science major, given that like people started using AI sometimes as a substitute for mental health, like counselors, like AI can lead, as long as you prompt in the way, it can lead you to do self harm. Do you have like any suggestions? Because even when you like Google something, it's usually AI based answers too. Like, I don't know your perspective.

• 51:18Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, no, I love this question because I think more and more we're going to be needing to think about how these emerging technologies like AI and L L Ms are affecting our happiness. On the chatbots and advice or chatbots and therapy, or even chatbots and friendship, chatbots and relationships. I just did an episode with Jean Twenge and she was talking about how it's likely that Most like middle schoolers will have their first romantic relationship with a chatbot. Because it's just easy, it's frictionless. You can talk to them about sexy stuff without having to talk to a real person. And we just haven't thought carefully about this stuff at all. But on chatbots and therapy and chatbots and friendship, I think you've identified a lot of the problems,

• 52:02Laurie Santos?

  which is that these tools aren't necessarily so hot at distinguishing between good advice and bad advice. And sometimes, especially since a lot of the tools are built to kind of agree with you a little bit. You know, if you say, oh, I want to do this terrible self-harm-y thing, sometimes they're prone to kind of, oh, that sounds great. I think these tools are getting better, especially as awful as these incidents are coming out. But yeah, it's dangerous. I worry too about the idea that social connection can seem a little friction-y. It can be hard. Many of us are feeling lonely. And that people are really turning to these tools just for friendship, advice, companionship. And there's some new work coming out of Liz Dunn's group that finds that at first, that's helpful.

• 52:47Laurie Santos?

  Like in the moment, it makes you feel less lonely. But long-term, it makes it harder. It makes you more lonely. So I think it's a kind of like a nutrisweet of connection where it feels good. It feels sweet in the moment, but it's not giving you the nutrition you need. Another thing I'll say, just because I'm in a room of lots of students, that I worry about a lot with AI, that I think we're not thinking about, is the impact that cognitive offloading is having. That you let your chatbot just do your response paper because it's a little faster. Or you let your chatbot like kind of write your essay or do that hard thing because you kind of feel the friction of doing the hard thing. You're having some resistance and you just offload it to that. There's lots of work by folks like Mickey Inselect and others showing the power of effort. The effort feels good.

• 53:30Laurie Santos?

  We don't like to do it, but once we get through it, it feels nice. We like to have our own ideas. We like to push through things. And that's why for those of you who do the New York Times Wordle in the morning, you don't just like look on one of the many sites that just has the world answer and type the world answer in. You try to push through it. That feels good, right? But we are not thinking of the consequences of this kind of offloading. For an entire generation's academic work, for an entire generation's stuff, where there are cognitive benefits of pushing through something on your own. And I think we're not tracking the happiness cost of that. I see it a little bit in my students. Professors can tell when you use the LLM. They're like, OK, this was LLM written. And I'll be like, oh, what did you think of the paper? How is that idea? They're just not as into it.

• 54:15Laurie Santos?

  They just don't engage with it in the same way. There's something interesting being lost about that connection. There's obviously a learning cost and other kinds of costs. I'm really interested in the like, that little happiness boost, the little flow boost that you get from working hard on something. I think more and more over time, we're going to lose that. And I worry that that's dangerous.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  What's true of Wordle, by the way, is also true of learning the conjugations of irregular Latin verbs, just so folks know. Let's see. We are almost out of time, but I think we could probably take one more question if somebody wants to fight it out. Yes.

• 54:50Laurie Santos?

  It seems like comparison is this thief of joy. But we're taught that ambition is really important. And economically, ambition and productivity are kind of these things that our society prioritizes. So how do you reconcile that mindset of it's OK to be a bronze medalist with the idea that we want people striving towards being gold medalists? One way to reframe your question is to ask, well, what are the things that get us to be gold medalists in whatever field? What are the things that cause us to be A-plus students? The best worker? Like, whatever achievement you want to pick, how do I get there? And I think our minds have this assumption, which is like,

• 55:34Laurie Santos?

  you just work to the point of absolute burnout and kill yourself and push yourself and hustle, hustle, hustle, and you'll get there. And I think that what we're learning is like, that's just not how it works. Even if your goal is just achievement at all costs and you don't care about your mental health, it might be that by prioritizing your mental health, you get to that achievement more. And we see this in the context of our physical health, I think, a little bit better. Here at Dartmouth, so I know a lot of you are athletes and you probably, if you're on a team or you work out, have heard about concepts like active rest, where like, if you just kill yourself and keep practicing. And push yourself 110% for working out all the time, you're going to get an injury. Like, your body's not going to be able to handle it. If you want to be optimal,

• 56:18Laurie Santos?

  you have to have moments of rest and scale back and this kind of thing. My read of what's happening in the performance literature is that we're learning the same thing about mental health and burnout and so on. That if we just push, push, push all the time, even if your goal is just the like full performance goal, you're not going to get there as effectively by doing that. Four-day work weeks, people perform better than the five-day work week. Like, taking time off, sleeping and resting makes you perform better. There's lots of evidence for the power of sleep and grades, that if you take an hour off of studying to sleep, you'll probably do better and perform better over time. There's also evidence, though, like a different achievement bottom line, which is just the capitalism achievement bottom line of like make as much money as possible, where researchers are learning that, in fact,

• 57:03Laurie Santos?

  the act of taking rest, focusing on happiness, doing the stuff that I'm talking about, seems to matter. My favorite study of 2025, people have like the Spotify rap from 2025, and I always say nerdy researchers want their favorite, like it would be great if an app gave us our list of our favorite studies. But my favorite study of 2025 was by the Oxford researcher Jan Emmanuel Denev. And he partnered with the job website Indeed, which I'm sure some of you know, to ask the following question. He's like, you know, on Indeed, they have 15 million rankings of all this stuff about people's workplaces, like their salary and all this stuff. But one of the rankings they have is people's happiness at work. And he's like, oh, these are rankings across 5,000 different publicly traded companies, right?

• 57:46Laurie Santos?

  And so what we could do is the following, we could take per company, the average happiness at work, and look at whether or not that predicts the stock performance of a company. And we could imagine this goes different ways. We could have the theory that like, well, the way you get good stock performance is like, you exploit the heck out of your workers, you make them really miserable, you push and push, but that's how you get to good performance. What Yann Emmanuel Denev finds is just the opposite. Super strong correlation between the happiest companies and the best stock performance. Just a perfect, beautiful correlation. In fact, the correlation was so high that Denev has now made a stock index of the happiest companies, you know, like the S and P 500, where it's like, you can invest in this and it'll get you money. You can invest in, you can look on his website and see this, the top 100 Indeed companies and invest in that.

• 58:31Laurie Santos?

  And he's found that every time in the market from 2021 till I think the last data set was like in 2025, this wellbeing 100 outperforms like the Dow Jones and S and P 500. It's a little investment tidbit from the happiness. There you get that, but a little tidbit to take with you.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Which is why you came tonight.

• 58:48Laurie Santos?

  But my, but my point is, we have incorrect theory about performance, whether it's for companies as individuals, we think push, push, push. That's the way to achieve more. But it might be that the way to achieve more is to rest, to focus on your positive mood, to take some time off. I think even if all you care is your, about is your output, you need a different theory about how to do that well. And so that would be the idea is like, ask the question, what gets the gold medalist to be the gold medalist, right? It might be rest, it might be time off. Look at Alyssa Liu, who we, you know, we've just had this wonderful Olympics, everybody watched her video. I think that's beautiful. But if you know her story, you know what happened was she was feeling burned out. So she took time off. She had people tell her, that's stupid. You're, you're never going to be a good skater, like you're never going to be a good athlete,

• 59:33Laurie Santos?

  right? What happened? She took the time off. I mean, her own kind of account of it is that's why she was able to win, right? So I think that's the message. Even if what you want is to hustle, hustle, hustle and achieve as much and be the gold medalist and the perfect Dartmouth college student, you might do that by focusing on your wellbeing more than you expect.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Wow, that was wonderful, Lori. Please join me in thanking her for one more fifth.

• 1:00:08Laurie Santos?

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• 1:00:50Laurie Santos?

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• 1:01:33Laurie Santos?

  They're hand-blown, one at a time, with the kind of character you only get from a human hand. Something made that slowly has a way of reminding you to savor the moments that really matter. Find yours at simonpearce.com. That's S-I-M-O-N-P-E-A-R-C-E dot com. Simon Pierce, made by hand, one at a time. A BetterHelp ad. BetterHelp is one of the world's leading online therapy services. Now, insurance options may be available nationwide with average copays of just $23 per session for eligible members. But cost isn't the only thing that can hold people back from therapy. Many of us weren't taught how to manage stress or overwhelm. We learned to push through it, distract ourselves, or tell ourselves we'd deal with it later.

• 1:02:17Laurie Santos?

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• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.