Working a little bit less winds up making
everybody more productive, which again, we don't think.
We think it's like number of hours at your desk
is going to somehow predict like how much output you have.
But we are not machines as much as we'd like to think we are.
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So let's talk about compensation because in all of the research
that you see externally, but we do extensive surveying of job
seekers all the time, and that consistently comes up
as one of the top reasons that people look for a new job.
You've talked about the fact that might or might not
actually be correlated with happiness,
and therefore might or might not be the best strategy.
What does your research show?
Salary matters if you're not making very much.
If you're living below the poverty line,
if you're not making enough to have a reasonable existence
where you feel safe and secure, definitely getting more money
matters a lot.
And if you're in that situation, yes, you should switch jobs.
You'll be much happier.
But I think a lot of us are know that relationship probably
exists, the really low incomes.
And we extrapolate it out past when it continues to matter.
And continues to matter these days.
There's evidence at least from a 2009 study,
that if you're earning over 75k in the US right now,
then doubling or tripling your salary
won't matter at all for your levels of stress,
for your levels of positive emotion, and so on.
It's not what we think, but it's what the data really show.
And you know 75k in 2009, maybe it's a little bit more now.
But it's not the level that we think.
In fact, if you looked at the kinds of compensation that
really do matter for people's happiness,
it's things like giving people back access to a little bit
more time.
While there's not really that much evidence
that wealth, affluence, like monetary affluence
boosts our happiness.
There's a lot of evidence that time affluence--
this is the term that social scientists use--
really matters for our happiness.
And the opposite feeling, what are those term I use before,
time famine, where you're like feel
like you're starving for time.
You're literally starving for time.
That's a recipe for really reduced well-being.
I think we need to kind of get in the mode of realizing
that yes, we have to put food on the table.
We have to earn a living.
That matters.
And we should do that fairly and with living wages.
But once we get past a certain point,
it's kind of not going to matter that much for our lifestyle
as we think.
We have this ladder that we climb
going through middle school to get to high school.
You get to high school, you get to college maybe.
You do some graduate work.
And then you end up in work.
And then it never ends.
So hopefully, for many people, there's
an opportunity at work to find your place in the world.
And what is the role of work in happiness on both sides.
Yeah, I mean, I think work can be
an important spot for happiness in a lot of different ways.
I mean, one is it takes up a lot of our time.
It's going to be probably a third of our time,
if not more if you have sleeping and out of time of work.
And so if we're not maximizing our happiness there,
that's just a lot of time lost, just statistically
in our lives.
And there's lots of evidence that at work you
seem to enjoy the journey most if you're
engaging in tasks that allow you to use what are known
as your signature strengths.
What are signature strengths?
Well, researchers go out and they
look at what are the kinds of things people value.
And they think about all kinds of strengths
that you can have, that might be good for the world,
things like bravery or humor or creativity or social expertise
and empathy or a love of learning.
You can probably come up with some on your own, just
like good positive valuable traits for people to have.
But it turns out that there's some
of those traits that resonate particularly well with you.
And there's evidence that if you use those strengths at work,
if you find ways to infuse them into your normal job
description, you wind up happier at work.
You wind up performing better at work.
Your managers will say, oh, my gosh,
you're doing so much better.
But in addition, you start to not think of your job
as a job or even a career.
You start to think of it as a calling.
Work-life balance is actually maybe not the best way
to look at it that you prefer to think
of it as work-life harmony.
Can you talk through that for the folks that
haven't heard this?
And what does that distinction mean to you?
Yeah, I mean, I think they're two problems with this idea
of work-life balance.
One is if you really think through the metaphor,
you can put in your mind balance,
you see scales, almost judges' scales, work over here,
life over here.
And I think we get the implicit sense
that if we want to invest in work and work's going up,
that the balance is over the life balance is going down.
That's why I like this idea of work-life harmony
rather than work-life balance.
It's not a zero sum game.
If you invest in your mental health,
if you are feeling better, you will work better too.
We talk to our customers all the time.
And one of the things they look at and they say,
gaps in a resume are a real problem or job-hopping,
someone who moves around every couple of years as opposed
to staying somewhere.
But if people are making these decisions
for their own mental health and for creating
more work-life harmony, what if any advice is there for how
someone can navigate those conversations
with a prospective employer about why that resume might
include these gaps?
Say you're in tech, and you realize
I'm not trained enough in the latest technique of programming
or whatever.
I need to get some training to do that a little bit better.
That might be seen as a really good thing.
Wow, you independently identified a spot
where you needed to build your skill set up.
And you did that.
I think we need to start thinking about mental health
in the same way.
This is not being weak.
This is not like-- this actually is taking care of yourself
in a way that will allow you to perform better.
It matters for the bottom line, that rest and taking
breaks and these kinds of things matter for increased
performance later on.
My hope is that soon, as you look at somebody's resume,
you're like, whoa, you took a couple of months
off to take a break.
That shows me that you're not going
to come here and get burned out and be a drain on my health
care system and be a drain on what's happening.
You took time off to protect yourself.
You're coming back energized.
And that's who I want to hire.
Dr. Laurie Santos, thank you so much for joining us today.
And thank you so much for the work
that you do and your research, which really, I think,
will help more and more people be more happy in whatever it
is that they're doing.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.