[CYMBAL ROLL]
LAURIE SANTOS: You know, it's worth
saying that it might seem a little bit surprising
that we're talking about happiness at Zeitgeist
because, if you talk to laypeople on the street
and you ask them about happiness, which I do,
what you'll often hear is folks say,
well, I'll be happy once I'm successful.
I'll be happy once I'm making some money.
I'll be happy if I'm in the C-suite.
I'll be happy if I'm an Instagram influencer.
If I could go to Google Zeitgeist,
then I would be happy.
They don't say the last thing.
They do say influencer.
But what's weird is that all of you in this room
are those things.
And you know this is a talk on happiness,
and you haven't skedaddled out to go surfing.
You're sticking around to see what I'm going to say.
And that should be surprising.
But it's not actually surprising to me,
because I actually hang out with a whole host
of successful folks who also struggle with their happiness.
I'm a professor at this lovely school at Yale University.
I've been teaching there for over a decade.
But in just the last couple of years, I took on a new role
on campus.
I became a head of college.
So I live in this beautiful quad with students.
I see them in the dining hall.
And I was seeing the college student mental health crisis
up close and personal, where, right now,
not just at Yale but nationally, over 40% of college students
report being too depressed to function most days.
Over 65% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious.
And more than 1 in 10 has seriously
considered suicide in the last year.
So if you have children who are in high school or college,
that's the population you're dealing with.
If you're an employer, this is the population
that you're going to be hiring in the next three
to five years.
This is the crisis that we're dealing
with in terms of mental health.
And it was a crisis that I was facing in my community.
So I wanted to do something about it.
And being a nerdy professor, I said, well,
what I will do is I will develop a class where I teach
students strategies they can use to kind of hack
their happiness.
We know lots of strategies we can engage in.
We just have to put them into effect.
But it was a new class on campus.
I didn't know many students were going to take it.
I thought 30 kids would show up.
You kind of heard an intro.
[LAUGHS] The punchline was, like, way more than 30 kids
showed up.
A quarter of the entire campus decided to take this class
and learn what they could do to feel happier,
which was a logistical nightmare that we don't have to get into.
[LAUGHTER]
But I hope you're all saying, this class sounds great.
Could I potentially take this class?
And the answer is yes.
In the next 17 and point 48 minutes,
I'm going to try to do Zeitgeist first.
I'm going to give you a whole Ivy League
class in 17-plus minutes.
That unfortunately means we've got
to speed through super fast.
So I know the break is coming up,
but hope you're all with me.
We're going to do a listicle version.
I'm going to go through the top five insights
that I teach my students, starting with the insight
that I think is most important, which
is that, if you want to take the science seriously,
you need to realize that our minds kind of lie to us when
it comes to happiness.
It's kind of a strange notion, but the idea
is that we're walking around with these big brains,
fantastically smart, but these brains actually
have intuitions about the sorts of things
we can do to feel better.
If I do this, I will feel happy.
If I get this thing, I'll feel happier.
And what the science has shown is that,
by and large, many of those intuitions
about the things we could get that would make us happy--
they just seem to be wrong.
Let's take some really basic ones.
Money-- the intuition is if I just get more of this,
I'll be happier.
And that is true if you are living at lower incomes.
But the evidence from two Nobel Prize-winning psychologists
suggests that if you're earning about $75k right now in the US,
doubling or quadrupling your income
won't have any impact on your happiness.
It's just what the data suggests, right?
You can go out and study people who
have all the stuff that money can buy,
like fancy planes and all these things.
And what you find is they're no happier, on average,
than the average person who's earning $75k.
This is true not just of material possessions,
but of accolades.
I think we're always constantly in this race
to get to the next thing, to get to the next promotion,
to get to 11 on whatever we're going for in life.
But the data really suggests that once you get to 11,
it's not going to work in the way you think.
This is what researchers call the arrival fallacy.
I'll be happier when I get there,
but you're never as happy as you think.
And you might say, like, that sucks.
It should be the case that good things in life
do bring us happiness.
What's going on?
And that's big insight number two
that I want to walk through, which
is that there's this bias of the mind that's
known as hedonic adaptation.
And it's what's messing us up in terms of happiness.
What is hedonic adaptation is that we adapt
to our hedonic circumstances.
Or perhaps, more colloquially put, we just get used to stuff.
Wonderful things in life, they're
wonderful when we first get them.
But when they stick around, their wonderfulness kind of
wanes, right?
This is why money doesn't make us as happy as we think.
And we can study hedonic adaptation
in money, which is what many psychologists do.
One of my favorite studies asked the following question.
What if I could give you an annual salary check right
now every year for the rest of your life
that was so high you'd never need a dollar more?
How much would you need?
And so we can ask folks who are earning
different amounts of money, what if you're earning $30k?
Is that enough?
These folks say no, but if I was earning $50k annually,
I'd never need another cent.
So we should find the folks earning $50k,
and they should be totally thrilled.
Researchers do one better.
They find folks earning $100,000.
These folks should be like, it's piling up in my living room.
I don't know what to do with it.
But they don't, surprisingly perhaps, say that.
They say that what they need to feel happy is $250,000.
And you're all smirking, which means you're great at math,
even in this late part of the afternoon.
It's not that you get to the destination as you get more.
You get further away from the destination.
That's hedonic adaptation in action.
And it works not just for money, but all the things
that money can buy.
Your house kind of sticks around.
You get used to it.
My colleague Dan Gilbert at Harvard
often quips that when we buy a new car,
we want one that's going to last.
But in terms of our happiness, that's the worst thing
a car can do because it will stick around to disappoint you.
It'll just be this boring car that sucks over time.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's not just the money and the material goods in life.
Every kind of mountain we get to the top of,
we're constantly immediately kind of bored
with that mountain we're at and looking to the next one, which,
in some ways, is good.
It means we kind of keep pushing.
But it's really terrible for our happiness
because we don't really enjoy the journey.
And so you might be saying, this sucks.
Hedonic adaptation sounds pretty crappy.
What can we do to fight it?
We can't shut it off, but we might
be able to do things to fight it in certain ways.
And the science suggests that one powerful way
we can fight hedonic adaptation is
to take time to appreciate the kinds of things
that we do have, to be grateful for the journey,
to be grateful for the stuff we have.
It's nice if you're sort of naturally
in a mindset of gratitude.
But if you're not, there's a quick hack
you can do just to bring yourself into that mindset.
The quick act of, for example, scribbling
down three to five things that you're grateful for every night
sounds very cheesy and hippy dippy.
I guess we're in California, so it's cool for hippy dippy--
but sounds like, eh, so hippy dippy.
Evidence suggests that, in as little as two weeks,
this will statistically improve your life satisfaction, just
a simple act of scribbling down a few things
that you're grateful for.
But really hacking hedonic adaptation
is our top tip number 3, which is
that we need to start making sure
that we're investing in the stuff
that we're not going to get used to.
And that means your money and your time.
What's the stuff we get used to?
We talked about it-- cars--
going to stick around to disappoint you.
But it turns out if you invest in experiences, things
like going on some cool trip, engaging in like some fun
concert, watching cool stuff, going to art, delicious wine--
these are things that don't last long enough for you
to get used to them.
Or maybe that's because I'm academic.
You all are C-suite, so maybe you
buy bottles of wine that lasts like months long.
Mine, I'm going to drink it pretty quickly, right?
It's not going to stick around to disappoint me.
And that is a good thing about experiences,
that evidence suggests investing in experiences will continue
to boost your happiness.
But another thing we can invest in that we forget
is the power of time.
There's a lot of work in social science
right now about what's called time affluence-- not wealth
affluence, but this subjective sense
that you're wealthy in time, that you can--
you're not sort of feeling what a lot of us
experience, which is time famine,
where you're starving for time.
You don't know where you're going to squeeze
in that next meeting.
And time famine has a huge hit on our well-being.
In fact, one study found that if you self-report
being time-famished, that's as bad a hit on your well-being
as if you self-report being unemployed.
And we just-- we're reminded of 2008
and all the unemployment and all the devastation
it did to our well-being.
Just being too busy causes that same devastation.
And you might be saying, that's really bad because I'm busy all
the time, whether it's with child care kind of stuff
or just pushing yourself towards those accolades or that money,
which we just saw aren't-- isn't going to work
for your happiness, bracketed, but push, push, push, push,
push.
That means you don't have any time for yourself.
So how can you hack your time affluence?
Well, one strategy is to use the money that many of you
have to get back more time.
Evidence suggests that spending money to get time back
can be a powerful way to improve your overall time affluence.
And it's a good way to spend your money
to get back happiness.
But my favorite hack toward getting time affluence
is to make good use of the time we actually have.
It turns out, if you do time-sampling studies of people
nowadays, they have, on average, more time than they
did 10 or 20 years ago.
We don't predict that.
We think we're busier than ever.
But the time study suggests we're not.
The problem is that the time we do
have is broken up into really stupid pieces of time,
like that five minutes when the meeting ends early
or the 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep.
That's what researcher Ashley Whillans
calls "time confetti," little pieces of time that
are floating around.
And you get them, and you don't think they're that important.
So you kind of fling them around, right?
You check your email or do something stupid.
But the evidence suggests, if you
could make good use of your time confetti,
ideally use it for something that's
going to improve your well-being,
you'll not only get a boost to your well-being,
but you'll start to feel a little bit less time famished.
And that lack of time famine can really improve your well-being.
So find those little scraps that you're throwing around
and do something good with it.
In fact, researcher Ashley Whillans
recommends making a time confetti wish list--
so like a to-do list that you have, but not to work to-dos,
but what you will do when you get some time.
And you can invest in lots of things with your time confetti.
But a fantastic thing to invest your time confetti in
is social connections, the other thing we should really
be investing in.
Every available study of happy people
suggests that happy people are more social.
They prioritize time with their friends
and family members and the people they care about.
And they're also just other-oriented, generally.
They kind of are happy in part because they
care not about their own happiness
but about other people's happiness.
And that gets to our fourth insight,
which is that this idea of self-care that we hear a lot
about--
I think it's a bit of a misnomer because if you
look at happy people, happy people aren't so focused
on themselves.
They're constantly focused on other people.
But this isn't the cultural message we get these days.
If you watch "Parks and Rec," you've heard of treat yourself.
I bet in the Goop store you could probably
buy a pillow or something that says "treat yourself," right?
But this is what we think.
We think, if we're having a bad day,
we want to invest time and money in ourselves.
But if you look at studies of happy people, that's
not the way happy people are spending their time.
Happy people are constantly doing things for other people.
Now, you might say, that's because they're happy.
I feel crappy.
I don't want to help anybody else.
[LAUGHTER]
Fair enough.
I'm with you.
But there's experimental evidence
that if you force people to do nice stuff for others,
they, in turn, will feel happier.
One of my favorite studies by Elizabeth Dunn
and her colleagues does this in a cute way.
They walk up to college students on the street, hand them $20.
It's an awesome study for college students
to be in because they're like, (EXCITEDLY) $20.
But the key is that the researcher tells the student
how to spend it.
She either says, by the end of the day,
you need to spend this money on yourself,
or by the end of the day, you need
to spend this money on someone else.
Do something nice for somebody else.
And what she finds is, at the end of the day and even
at the end of the week, students who
spent the money on somebody else were happier,
which is pretty cool.
But spending on others doesn't just increase your happiness.
It's also a fantastic way to reduce stress.
I bet when Sanjay comes up later,
we're going to hear about the connection between stress
and stress-related illnesses, all these bad things it
does to our body.
That's a consistent relationship--
stress bad, bad effects on our body.
But if you pull out people who self-report that they spend
a lot of time doing meaningful things for other people,
you don't see that relationship as significantly.
In other words, people are stressed.
They experience stress.
But they don't have the stress-related illnesses
just because they're kind of focused on other people.
So it's good for our happiness, but it might also
be good for our longevity in our bodies too.
And so that's top insight number 4.
We've got to get out of this kind of self-care mindset
and go to a mindset of being other-oriented.
Now we get to the final tip, which might be the hardest.
But it hearkens back to something
that Amanda was talking about and Blessing
was talking about earlier.
So I love that they kind of set me up so nicely
for this, which is that, if we want to be happier,
we need to be present for the good and bad parts
of the journey.
We already talked about how we're not
so good at being present for the good parts of the journey,
right?
Hedonic adaptation means get to this point on the mountain,
you just want to go to the next one, right?
You're not there to savor and be present and be
grateful for the good things.
But an even bigger problem for our happiness
is that we don't like being there for the bad things.
We really kind of want to avoid emotions that sort of look
like this.
Problem is, I don't know what your emoji list looks
like lately, but mine has a lot more of these ones
in the last couple of years than it does the positive ones.
We ought to call a spade a spade.
This is a tough time.
We are all feeling anxious and frustrated.
There's real scary stuff out there.
It's normative to feel bad.
Problem is, we don't like feeling bad.
And so our instinct is to just shut off the bad feelings
as quickly as possible.
Suppress our emotions, stiff upper lip, whatever expression
you want to use--
our mind, this kind of lying mind,
thinks that's going to work.
But the evidence suggests it doesn't
work in the way we think.
In fact, one study by the Stanford neuroscientist James
Gross had people in a laboratory task watch
sad videos on YouTube and told subjects, whatever you do,
make it so that no one knows you're feeling sad.
Try to suppress that emotion as much as possible.
What happens?
Well, these subjects wind up showing cognitive changes.
They actually do worse on a memory test later on.
They do worse on a risk-taking test.
So if you want to screw up your risk-taking
in an economic sense, one really way a good way to do
that is to suppress your emotions.
But you also see physical changes
when subjects do this task.
You see signs of cardiac stress in these subjects
who do this simple laboratory task of suppressing
a sad YouTube video.
Imagine what we're doing thinking
about Ukraine and the economy and all this stuff all
the time, right?
So suppressing is bad.
But you might say, then, what do we do with negative emotions?
And unfortunately, this isn't a talk about getting rid
of negative emotions.
It's kind of heralding the negative emotions, to say,
they're here for a reason.
And we need to pay attention to them.
But we need a good strategy to do that.
And to do so, I think we need to harness our inner Beatle
And when we face negative emotions, we have to say,
we're going to let it be.
Or, as more nerdy social scientists talk about it,
we have to engage in what's known as radical acceptance.
We just have to say, yeah, times are crappy, I'm feeling fear,
I'm feeling frustration, and that's the way it is.
But of course, that's hard.
And so we might need a good strategy to help us do that.
And I'll leave you with one meditation strategy
that I and my students find really powerful.
It's a strategy for radical acceptance
that goes by the acronym of RAIN.
It's one that's been popularized by the meditation teacher Tara
Brach, and it goes something like this.
Imagine that you experience a negative emotion.
You read a frustrating email.
You see some news.
Maybe there's a session at zeitgeist
that you're like, oh, my stomach's feeling not so great.
You say, aha, that Yale lady said to do RAIN.
And you say, aha, do RAIN.
And you start with the first letter of the acronym, which
is to recognize.
Recognize what emotion you're dealing with.
And this is like-- if you have little kids,
you might have heard this expression, use your words.
You tell your kids, use your words.
Use your words.
You're all incredibly creative people.
What emotion is it?
Is it frustration with a side of overwhelm?
Is it pissed with a little bit of sadness and dread?
Get creative and say what it is.
That's the first step, R.
But the next step, the A, is the harder one.
And that is to allow.
You say, I'm just going to allow this emotion
to be there just as it is.
I don't have to love it, but I'm just
going to hang out with it for a little while.
I don't know if any of you live in the suburbs.
But sometimes if you live in the suburbs,
you have that nosy neighbor who-- you're just
outside getting something from your car,
and the neighbor comes.
And they want to talk to you, and you're like,
I don't want to talk to this person.
But you don't kick them out, or you're not mean to them,
like, (GRUFFLY) go away.
I hate you, suppress you.
You just talk to them, and you deal with it, right?
That's what you're doing with your emotions.
You're just going to hang out.
They're annoying.
You're just going to let it be.
Whatever.
But the key is that you give your mind
something to do while you're dealing with that emotion.
And that's the next step in RAIN, the I, investigate.
With some kind of interest in care,
turn on your inner journalist.
What does this emotion feel like in your body?
Is your chest getting tighter?
Maybe your brow's furrowing.
Maybe you have a craving.
You want to take a drink or check your email or do anything
but be with that emotion.
That's cool.
Just notice and pay attention.
And the I step is powerful because evidence
suggests that emotions work kind of like a wave.
Cravings and things work like this, too,
where, as you start paying attention to them,
they feel more intense for a bit.
But then if you're really hanging out with them
and not suppressing them, they will subside, often
in as little as 5 to 10 minutes.
And the I just gives you something
to do while you're doing that.
It also trains you to pay attention.
Like, oh, when I get pissed, this
is what happens in my body.
You can start recognizing it faster without RAIN.
But you don't stop there, because negative emotions suck.
Even once the wave has passed, there's
still one more step to RAIN.
And that's the last step, the N, to nurture.
Negative emotions kind of suck, right?
What can you do to nurture yourself?
Take something off your plate.
Call a friend.
Scribble in a gratitude journal.
Go for a walk on the beach.
What can you do to just give yourself
a little self compassion and take care of yourself?
Again, practices like these don't have great marketing.
They sound kind of cheesy.
But the evidence suggests that practices like RAIN
can reduce burnout in first responders.
They can reduce negative emotion in palliative care workers
who are dealing with death all the time.
So if they're powerful in those industries,
it can be incredibly powerful to kind of find
ways to hang out with our negative emotions,
even if we don't feel like it.
And so that was top insights, my five.
You did a whole Yale class in 17 minutes.
That's amazing.
You can talk to the Zeitgeist folks
about college credits or transfers or whatever.
[APPLAUSE]
But what I hope I've done is to convince you
that, even though you all have all the kinds of things
that many laypeople might think of in terms of happiness,
if you're not feeling happy, you're
not doing something wrong.
It's just your brain is kind of wrong.
Your brain is giving you the wrong intuitions.
But the amazing thing about science and social science,
in particular, is that, if we understand
how those intuitions go astray, if we understand the biases
we're working, with we can hack them.
We can't totally shut them off, but we can work with them
to gain the happiness that we should all
be getting from fantastic circumstances in life,
from all the successes you experience.
Thank you all so much.
[APPLAUSE]