You Can Change
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Pushkin. You've probably heard a lot about electrified vehicles lately. Well, Toyota has electrified options for every lifestyle. We've got hybrids, no plug needed. But we also have plug-in hybrids, if that's your thing. You can even go 100% electric in the Toyota BZ4X. With so many options for reducing carbon emissions, Toyota is electrified diversified. Oh!

Learn more about our Beyond Zero vision for the future at toyota.com slash beyondzero. I love working at Yale and living in New Haven, Connecticut. But being a happiness expert means I travel a lot. Just in this upcoming semester, I'll be headed to Nebraska, California, and Amsterdam. But while I'm away, my home is usually just stuck there empty. I hate to think of my lovely yard just sitting there empty while my entire house could be earning me some extra cash. If you travel a lot,

should consider hosting on Airbnb. Maybe you live in a different area for part of the year because you're a snowbird, or perhaps just due to your work commitments. You could host on Airbnb to make some extra cash. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. Here's to the magic of summer, to ice cold lemonade on a hot afternoon, to the smell of burgers on the grill. The Chinette brand is all about maximizing fun this summer and minimizing cleanup hassles. That's why Chinette Classic, Crystal, and Comfort Collections are part of every summer gathering.

And since Chinette Classic plates and bowls are compostable and Chinette Comfort Cups are made with at least 80% renewable materials, you can feel good knowing your summer gatherings are leaving less of a mess behind for future generations. Here's to making each weekend, and long weekend, unforgettable. Here's to us. All of us. Find a local retailer at MyChinette.com. No, I'm not nervous. Okay, well. I'm nervous. My heart's over here.

One fateful day every spring, high school seniors who've applied to Yale University are invited to log on to a special website to find out if they made it in. Okay, I'm doing it now. Hold on. Stop. Okay. Only about 6% of applicants will get good news. But for that lucky few, it's time to celebrate. Some students even post their reactions on YouTube. It's kind of a thing. Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!

When students find out they got into Yale, that all their hard work has finally paid off and their college dreams have come true, they are understandably really, really, really excited. But once students start attending college, all that joy, all that relief they felt at getting in, it fades pretty quickly. I've seen this firsthand, both as a professor of psychology at Yale and as head of one of the residential colleges.

In the last five years, rates of college mental health problems have skyrocketed nationally. Over 60% of college students report feeling overwhelmingly anxious in the past year, and over 50% say they felt completely overwhelmed in the past week.

Rates of depression in 20-year-olds have doubled since 2009. Which is crazy. Our country now has more than twice the number of young people in serious psychological distress than we did just 10 years ago. More than twice the number. I was horrified when I first heard these statistics, and I really wanted to do something to help. So I did a little digging, and looked at more and more of the research. And I started to realize, it's not just college students.

Many of us feel like happiness is increasingly out of reach, like we're doing everything right, but something just hasn't clicked. I know that feeling well because at the time, I was experiencing it myself. I mean, I wasn't clinically depressed, but I felt like something important was missing, like I was doing something wrong, like I wasn't as happy as I could be or should be.

A Yale University professor is teaching students around the world how science can help them lead a happier life. So I decided to develop a new class on the science of happiness, a class I called Psychology and the Good Life. Life lessons that could help students and all of us be happier. The course was my attempt to pull together everything I could about the latest science of happiness and how to achieve it.

I packed it all together in one convenient set of lectures, taught it to my Yale students, and even threw it online for free. Now her teachings are spreading well beyond campus. More than 138,000 people around the world have registered for the online version of the class. But the class also taught me an important lesson: happiness is something that all of us can acquire.

but we need to go about it the right way. We need to go after the right things. That's where the science and this podcast can help. If you want to learn what researchers are discovering about happiness and how these lessons can make real improvements to your well-being, then I welcome you to join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for the first episode of The Happiness Lab.

It was a cold Saturday night. I had just gotten home after driving hundreds of miles to record one of the interviews you'll hear later this season. I was pretty exhausted and really, really psyched to be home. But when I unlocked my door, I noticed a strange piece of mail at my feet, an envelope addressed to me. The stamps and postmark were foreign, but the letter inside was written in English. Dear Miss Santos, my name is Clemente, and I live in France.

In the letter, Clément explained that he was feeling defeated by life. He didn't have the career, relationship, or family he'd yearned for. He said he felt trapped in a tunnel of desperation. A tunnel with no light and no end. Sadly, this is not the first time I've received messages like this. Since teaching my class online, I've gotten letters and emails like this from people around the world. People who weren't feeling all that happy and wanted to make a change.

Clement's letter was especially frank, though. He told me that he'd pretty much decided that his life wasn't worth living, and that he'd even tried to kill himself. It was at this lowest of low points that he stumbled across my class. To tell you the truth, he wrote, I was not convinced of the effectiveness of this course, and I thought this was hippie Californian well-being crap.

I get this sort of skepticism from lots of people, but the things I'm going to talk about in this podcast really aren't crap, or a bunch of platitudes, or a load of hippy-dippy BS. This podcast will share the latest scientific findings, work that's been carried out by my friends and colleagues at top universities around the world. And what all this research shows is that happiness is possible, even for people like Clément, people who are in serious psychological distress.

The problem, as we'll hear in this podcast, is that we go about achieving that happiness the wrong way. Waiting and hoping that our circumstances will change, that a promotion or a romance will bring us lasting happiness. None of that works. At least, not in the way we think. It's just a lie that our minds tell us. That's what Clement was able to learn. Despite his initial skepticism, Clement decided to complete my online course.

He learned all about the science of well-being and how to put it into practice. It has worked, Clement said at the end of his letter. It has truly worked. People write all the time about how my books have changed their life. I'm talking with Sonia Lubomirsky, a professor at UC Riverside. She wrote two classic texts on the science of well-being, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness.

Her work has helped a lot of people, which means she gets tons of letters like the one I got from Clement. I mean, lots of people say that they wanted to kill themselves and they've been saved by using these strategies. Some people say they got married or divorced because they read something I wrote and now they're happier. So I don't know. It's just weird to feel like you have an influence on people's lives, people you don't know who are total strangers. But bottom line is that it's wonderful.

We're going to talk a lot about happiness in this podcast. So I thought I should start by giving you a definition. Since Sonia is pretty much the world expert on happiness, I thought she would be a great person to help. Essentially, happiness has two components. The first component has to do with the experience of positive emotions, right? So happy people tend to experience more frequent positive emotions, tranquility, enthusiasm, joy, pride, affection, happiness.

But that's not enough. So a happy person also has a sense that their life is good, that they're satisfied with the way that they're progressing towards their life goals. So you really kind of need both of these components to be happy. And I like to think of them as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. I love this definition because it fits really well with how we'll think about improving your happiness in the episodes to come. What you can do to be happy in your life, to feel better a lot of the time,

and with your life, how you can experience more meaning and more satisfaction. I also wanted Sonia to walk us through an even tougher problem. How can we actually measure our happiness levels? Happiness is something that's subjective. I wish there was something like a happiness thermometer, but there isn't, because happiness is something that only really the person inside knows.

Which means that scientists like Sonja have had to come up with creative ways to track people's well-being. In the end, they usually opt for a rather simple approach. The gold standard for measuring happiness is to ask the person if they're happy. So researchers tend to rely on self-report, and we have measures where we ask people, you know, how often do you experience various positive emotions in your life? How satisfied are you with your life? How happy are you? I've used similar measures of well-being with my students.

Here's a pretty straightforward one. I can give it to you now. Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are? From zero, not at all happy, to ten, completely happy. Are you a nine out of ten? Or more like a six? Researchers have checked the validity of these scales in lots and lots of ways. It turns out that self-report score you just gave will correlate with all kinds of real-world stuff.

It predicts detailed timetables of your hour-by-hour emotional experience and what your family members would say if I asked them how happy you were. Your score even correlates with how often you smile in daily life. The upshot is that these seemingly simple questions are much more rigorous than a silly BuzzFeed quiz. They really are scientific instruments.

Using metrics like these, researchers have learned that our happiness levels matter more than we think. It looks like happiness might not just be sort of associated with things like more money and better health, a longer life, more creativity, better relationships, but it looks like that happiness might actually cause some of those things. We think that the good things in life, being rich, feeling healthy, having lots of friends, lead us to feel happier. And they do, to a certain extent.

But it turns out that the causal arrow goes in the other direction, too. Feeling happy leads to good life outcomes. Happier people are more likely to get married. Happier people live longer. They're more creative. They're more likely to be called back for a job interview. Consider the case of money. We assume that wealth brings happiness, but the science shows we might have it backwards.

One recent study tested whether a person's happiness level as a teenager predicts how much money they'll be making as an adult. The scientists track seventh graders in the U.S. for decades. Teens who report the highest level of life satisfaction at age 12 wind up having a salary that's 10% above the average when they're 30 years old.

But seventh graders who report being really unhappy have incomes that are 30% lower than the average. Those teens are still affected by their sad moods more than a decade later. But happiness early in life doesn't just lead to more money later on. It also leads to stronger relationships.

One of my favorite studies is called the yearbook study. Women who showed more genuine what are called Duchenne smiles in their yearbook photos when they're about age 21 were more likely to get married at age 27 and had more fulfilling marriages at age 52. So it's kind of amazing if you're sort of positive and happy when you're in college, you're more likely to have a good marriage 30 years later.

Those aren't just isolated findings. The positive effects of happiness are everywhere. People who report feeling lots of positive emotions are less likely to show cold symptoms when they're exposed to a virus. And one famous study of nuns found that 20-somethings who expressed the most happy feelings in their diaries are four times as likely to live into their 90s as those who didn't express as many positive feelings. I believe that the research is pretty strong that happiness does matter.

All these results make me incredibly worried about the college students I work with. They seem to be unhappy all the time. They constantly make themselves miserable, stressing about grades. They become so anxious about their job prospects and future salaries that they have panic attacks. All this stress over their future lives is more than just unnecessary. The science suggests it's deeply counterproductive.

The research shows that if my students were able to work on being happier, on feeling better now, those job prospects and salary levels might fall into place more naturally than they expect. So if we really want our circumstances to improve, we may need to start focusing on improving our well-being rather than all that other stuff. Which raises a critical question. Can we actually improve our happiness?

The science suggests that there is a genetic component to happiness, but we have to sort of understand what that means. So identical twins are much more alike in their happiness levels than are fraternal twins. And that suggests that there is a genetic influence on happiness, just like there's a genetic influence on weight or blood pressure or whether you're going to develop depression or schizophrenia. Just because something is heritable or has a genetic influence doesn't mean that we can't change it. The way I see it is that

If someone has a disposition that leads them to be on the more unhappy side, they can become happier, but they have to work harder at it. There's this myth out there that happiness is something either you either have it or you don't. And I just think that's wrong.

And this suggests something really important, a premise that forms the basis of this entire podcast. There is no real biological barrier to being happier. We can change. We can all feel more joy. The problem, though, as we'll hear after the break, is how we go about changing those happiness levels.

Because even though the science shows we can improve our well-being, it doesn't work in the way we often think. Winning the Nobel Prize doesn't make you happier. Winning the lottery doesn't make you happier. It's not the things we imagine. It's not the shiny baubles that makes us happy. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

I recently traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to visit my in-laws. The Midwest weather was perfect, and my husband Mark and I got some quality time with family we rarely get to see. We shared long, lingering breakfasts, and even got to toast marshmallows over a bonfire. In short, it was pretty much the perfect summer family trip. But while I was away, my house was just sitting there empty.

That short trip would have been the perfect time to host my house on Airbnb. Hosting on Airbnb is a great way to make a little extra cash when you're not actually using your house anyway. If you travel for business and your house just sits there empty while you're away, you could host on Airbnb so others can enjoy your amazing property.

Or maybe you live in a different city for part of the year because you snowboard or you have work commitments. Your house could be earning you some extra cash rather than just sitting there empty. You can use the extra money you get from hosting for your own future travel. Hosting on Airbnb can be a great side hustle. Plus, it's flexible, and you can host on your own terms. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host.

The fall is creeping up on us, but we don't have to give in just yet because summer doesn't stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can still get out and enjoy 60 miles of beaches, eat in the South's newest foodie haven with over 2,000 restaurants, and have endless fun at hundreds of attractions. Hold on to that sweet summer feeling a little longer at the beach. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Plan your trip at visitmyrtlebeach.com. That's visitmyrtlebeach.com.

Hi, Dr. Laurie Santos here. Sometimes it's the little things that create happiness and peace of mind. What value do the right benefits bring to your employees? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success.

So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve. The Hartford Group benefits make managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies. The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered.

So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits. Okay, sweet. So we're recording. So my name is Bob Waldinger. I'm a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. I met Bob at a workshop on the state of well-being in America run by the Arthur Blank Foundation. I nervously asked if I could grab a few minutes with him in the gardens outside.

I felt like I was meeting a rock star. Not because Bob has one of the top 10 most watched TED Talks of all time, but because Bob is the director of what is perhaps the coolest study of human happiness ever conducted.

I direct a study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It is, we think, the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. It's a study that began in 1938, so 80 years ago. The project started as an attempt to learn about all the possible factors that lead to high well-being later in life.

The researchers started by recruiting a group of subjects who enjoyed every privilege imaginable. Harvard College sophomores from the classes of 1939 to 1942, their deans chose them as among the best and the brightest young men and thought they would be suitable subjects to study how people develop as healthy young adults.

But the researchers also wanted to study not-so-healthy development. They recruited 456 boys from the poorest neighborhoods in Boston, and not just from the poorest neighborhoods, but from the families that had the most trouble. Familial mental illness and domestic violence and lots of other social problems. And so they wanted to follow these children to see what happened to them over time.

Two groups of subjects from very different backgrounds who'd be followed in as much detail as was humanly possible. The researchers collected health information from the participants' doctors. They surveyed the subjects every two years, asking them questions about their lives and their happiness. In later years, they added blood tests, chest X-rays, echocardiograms, and even brain scans.

the men were followed through their entire lives. Which means scientists can now explore how the men's physical and mental health changed across different life stages. We can see how subjects felt when they got married and had kids, or got divorced or widowed, or had their first grandkids. We can look at how well-being evolves as participants started new jobs, or when they reached different career milestones, or even when they retired. The study was also big enough that it included some amazing individual subjects too.

We're not really supposed to know their identities, but one of the study's participants served in a presidential cabinet. One was a longtime editor of the Washington Post. And one became president of the United States. Yep, John F. Kennedy was one of the study's participants.

The study has now even extended beyond the original sample. Researchers have begun following the men's children, which means the research will now be able to capture multiple generations of both men and women. Bob was captivated from the moment he heard about the study as a young med student. My predecessor, George Valiant, lectured to my first-year medical school class.

And he told us about the study. And I'm basically a voyeur. I like hearing about people's lives and what they do. So when George started talking about this, I just thought, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever. And then fast forward about 20 years, Dr. Valiant took me out to lunch one day and said to me, how would you like to inherit the study of adult development? And that's how I started out.

Bob has now served as the Studies Director for more than 15 years. He's watched the original generation of subjects transition from their late adulthood into their elderly years. 268 Harvard undergraduates started. Only about 12 are still living, and they are in their mid to late 90s.

456 inner-city boys started, and about 60 of them are left, and they are around the age of 90. Hundreds upon hundreds of data points, a nearly complete picture of health and well-being across many different life paths.

And so you're probably wondering, what did the study find? Some of what the study has found is absolutely no surprise to anyone. We know that smoking is bad for you, and it turns out in our study it was really bad for you. We know that alcoholism is terrible. It takes a toll on your health. You die earlier. It takes a toll on your marriage, on your job, on your relationships. Again, no surprise.

What was the big surprise? It's all the things we think make us happy, but don't. Wealth does not make people happy. Having your material needs met does make you happy. Once you get there, making more money doesn't make you appreciably happier. But that's not the only misconception we have about what makes for a happier life. The other thing is achieving more at work. There's a reason why

We have this cliche, nobody on their deathbed wishes they spent more time at the office. It's a cliche because it's true. Our men, as they were looking back on their lives, as they were at the end of their lives, said that the things they were proudest of were...

Building a family, raising healthy children, having a strong relationship with a partner, teaching their grandchildren to sail. I mean, these were the things that they talked about. They didn't talk about what they'd achieved at work or how much money they'd made. Bob's studies showed that the keys to happiness don't involve what we often put time into to become happier.

Financial achievements so we can buy cool stuff or working harder to achieve more in our careers. In fact, his results show that health and happiness often comes from the things we sacrifice while spending more hours at work. The surprise was in our finding that one of the strongest predictors of staying healthy and happy in your life was having good relationships with other people.

When we think of happiness, we often think of self-care. But Bob's study shows that focusing only on yourself and turning too far inwards is a recipe not only for misery, but for physical health problems as well. We didn't believe it because initially we thought that there couldn't be this strong of a connection between mind and body. How could...

The quality of your relationships determine whether you got type 2 diabetes or whether you got arthritis or whether you got coronary artery disease. That seemed unfathomable. The big message of Bob's study is that we consider many of the things that actually matter for happiness to be, well, unfathomable, or at least way lower on the priority list than they really should be, according to the science.

And if you listen to the rest of the episodes in this season, you'll see the same pattern time and time again. Our minds just suck at predicting the kinds of things that will really make us happier. And that means we end up putting a lot of time and effort into improving our happiness using strategies that just aren't going to succeed. I can't stress enough how amazing the Harvard study is. It delved deeply into the lives of some of America's most privileged and some of its most vulnerable.

and pretty much proved that the rich and powerful have no monopoly on well-being. That may go against your intuition, but it's true. Though there is a caveat, one I asked Sonia Lubomirsky to weigh in on.

I would add that everything that I say applies to, let's say, the average listener of this podcast. That's, you know, people who are already relatively comfortable. You know, they're not in dire straits. If your situation is very bad, if you live in poverty, or if you're in an abusive relationship, or if you live in a war zone in Yemen, then, of course, changes in your life circumstances are going to make a huge difference to your happiness.

If your circumstances are truly awful, then fixing them really will improve your well-being. But I'm guessing your circumstances really aren't all that bad. You, average podcast listener, probably aren't in the kinds of awful situations Sonia is talking about. And that means that changing your circumstances won't help in the way you think. Note that this doesn't mean your circumstances are perfect.

All of us have situations we want to change, ones we think will make us happier. I'm not happy now, but I'll be happy when...

I moved to that city I've always wanted to live in, or when I get married, or when I have a baby, or when I get that job I've always wanted, or when I get a raise. The idea that happiness lies in money or sort of changing your life in some way, doing something new with your life. I mean, I think that is a very strong idea, again, kind of rooted in this concept that we always want change and progress, even if we really know that it's a myth.

Overcoming this strong but mistaken idea is what this podcast is all about. But the second step is harder. Happiness doesn't involve changing everything in your life around. That's the good news. But as we'll explore after the break, there is some bad news, too. It's not easy. It takes work. It's kind of like if you want to lose weight or be healthier, right? You need to change your diet or go to the gym. And same thing with happiness. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

I recently traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to visit my in-laws. The Midwest weather was perfect, and my husband Mark and I got some quality time with family we rarely get to see. We shared long, lingering breakfasts, and even got to toast marshmallows over a bonfire. In short, it was pretty much the perfect summer family trip. But while I was away, my house was just sitting there empty. That

That short trip would have been the perfect time to host my house on Airbnb. Hosting on Airbnb is a great way to make a little extra cash when you're not actually using your house anyway. If you travel for business and your house just sits there empty while you're away, you could host on Airbnb so others can enjoy your amazing property.

Or maybe you live in a different city for part of the year because you snowboard or you have work commitments. Your house could be earning you some extra cash rather than just sitting there empty. You can use the extra money you get from hosting for your own future travel. Hosting on Airbnb can be a great side hustle. Plus, it's flexible, and you can host on your own terms. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

The fall season. We don't have to let it happen yet. Because summer doesn't stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can still get out and enjoy 60 miles of beaches, eat in the South's newest foodie haven with over 2,000 restaurants, and have endless fun at hundreds of attractions. Hold on to that sweet summer feeling a little longer at the beach. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Plan your trip at visitmyrtlebeach.com. That's visitmyrtlebeach.com.

Hi, Dr. Laurie Santos here. Sometimes it's the little things that create happiness and peace of mind. What value do the right benefits bring to your employees? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers, but it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success.

So let the experienced professionals at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve. The Hartford Group benefits make managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies. The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered.

So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits. Right now, I'm out of breath because I'm on my daily hike at a local state park. I always love going on the hike after the fact. It's usually not what I'm thinking when my alarm goes off. Every morning when I throw my sneakers on, my brain tells me that I'd be happier staying in bed or even sitting on the couch or watching the news.

But I know the science, and the science shows that I'll be healthier, more fit, and probably even happier if I get a bit of cardio in every morning. So I try to get on a hike every day, or at least as often as I can, even though my mind often thinks otherwise. The science of happiness works a lot like the science of exercise. It's not enough to know what you need to do. You've got to go and do it. You need to put that science into practice, and you need to practice it regularly.

I generally say that I'm about an 8 on a 10-point scale. I think I'm pretty happy. Even a happiness expert like Sonia Lubomirsky knows firsthand that reaching an 8 and staying there...

takes conscious effort. I do have to work at it. I mean, a classic example is sometimes I'll get together with friends and it's so great. It's so much fun. And we think, why don't we do this more often? You know, but then it takes like months for us to sort of get together again and to plan it. And so even when we know what will make us really happy, we still kind of don't do it as often as we should. I have to kind of put it in my to-do list to make sure that I create times that I spend with those people. So it's a very deliberate act.

It'd be so nice if happiness came easily. Like, we hang out with a friend once and we're happy for good. But that's just not how human well-being works. Women's magazines will often call me and they'll say, can you give me some five-minute happiness strategies?

And I'm like, there are no five minute happiness strategies. It's true with any kind of goal in life, right? It's not going to happen in five minutes on Thursday, right? It's going to be, you know, maybe a lifelong effort. And so, yeah, so like creating habits, I guess, would be one way to put it. It's important to create habits that you maintain over the course of your life. There's no quick fix for happiness, but science shows there is a fix if you put in consistent time and effort.

If you want to become happier, there are now a number of sort of strategies or different kind of daily activities that people can engage in that have been tested in research. We just need to pick the strategy that works for us.

If you listen to the rest of the episodes in this season, you'll learn a bunch about these sorts of activities, what my students and I call rewirements, habits that science has shown really can change your well-being over time. The ones that I tend to focus on, and actually quite a bit of research is focusing on, are gratitude and kindness, or what's called pro-social behavior. Those are two activities, or you can call them strategies, that have been shown to make people happier. But it's not just gratitude and kindness.

Science shows us lots of really simple habits we can add to our lives to feel better. We can take more time to connect with the people we care about, or just chat with a stranger we meet on our commute. We can try to reduce the exhausting choices we make on a daily basis. We can count our blessings. We can become more accepting, both of the bad emotions we feel and the obstacles we face in life. We can stop focusing on the end goal and think more about the journey.

Now, if you're like me when I first encountered these ideas, you might have the same reaction that our friend Clement had in his letter. You might think these strategies I just mentioned sound like hippy-dippy crap. Because, to be fair, they do sound like hippy-dippy crap.

To me, gratitude seems really hokey, you know, counting your blessings. Oh, I'm so grateful for X, Y, Z. The problem is, as hokey as these strategies sound, they work. That's what the science shows. It used to be when I started out, you know, there are all these cell phone books that are based on nothing. Like, they're just based on anecdotal evidence and people's opinions. We can't just look at anecdotal evidence, right? You know, your cousin told you that they tried it and it worked. Right.

And there are now tons and tons of experiments, randomized controlled trials that are sort of trying to test whether you can get people to kind of change their thinking or change their behaviors in some small or medium ways in daily life that could impact happiness. The problem is most people on the street don't know this stuff. And I wanted to change that. I wanted people to hear what peer-reviewed scientific research shows about becoming happier.

Starting with my Yale students. All right, let's get started. In the spring of 2018, I had a chance to see if teaching my students about the science of happiness could lead them to live happier lives. Welcome everybody to Psychology and the Good Life. I expected about 30 people to take the class, but I wound up with a lot more guinea pigs than I expected. I'm

I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great. Almost 1,200 students enrolled in the class, nearly one out of every four students at Yale. The class was so big, we had to teach it in the university concert hall. That tiny, polite ripple of applause you might get at the end of a lecture? Well, it turned into this. Applause

It was an amazing experience, but it was also a logistical nightmare. I had to find 28 graduate students just to help me grade the student exams. And we needed to book 13 different classrooms all over campus just to host a simple midterm. I jogged over two miles just to get to all the students before the exam ended.

And that was the commotion that came before all the press started. Each night, students have happiness homework. Meditate for 10 minutes. Sleep eight hours. Do something kind. And write down five things that you're grateful for. But don't think it's an easy A. By midterm, I had a major television news crew filming each and every one of my lectures. It was a lot of pressure. But I bet I know what you're asking. Did it work? Did the students get happier?

Well, the answer is, I don't know. At least, I'm not sure from a scientific perspective. Anecdotally, I have dozens of emails from students telling me the class changed their lives. But the honest truth is that I was completely blindsided by the size of the class, which means I didn't get the logistics in place to do the rigorous surveys that would really nail my students' progress down.

In retrospect, I can say that this oversight was really, really freaking dumb. Life doesn't usually give second chances for a scientific opportunity like this, but Yale decided there was a need for this class to be shared even more broadly. So we put it online, completely for free. This time, we could track people's progress a bit more rigorously. But the question remained, would it work?

My manager said, hey, we have this new course with Lori Santos. She's working on it. It's going to be about wellness. What do you think about working on it? And of course, I felt like I had no choice in the matter. But even if I did, I willingly and gladly accepted. This is Belinda Platt, my colleague at the Yale Porvoo Center for Teaching and Learning.

Belinda has been my partner for the past two years, as I've tried to figure out the best way to teach people around the world about the science of happiness. Belinda's amazing. Her hard work is a lot of what's made the online class so successful. But neither of us expected the response we got. I had no idea how popular it would become at all just because none of the other courses that we've worked on

made such a splash. The enrollment is well above 300,000, which is super cool. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. But like with my nerdy scientist hat, I really want numbers. And one of the craziest things about the course is actually like the data that we're getting. When students enroll in our online class, they take a standard well-being survey. The specific one we use is called PERMA.

It's a 23-question survey that measures people's overall happiness, their mood levels, their sense of accomplishment, and even their sense of meaning. Students are asked to take the permaquiz before they start the class and at the end of the course 10 weeks later. Excitingly, we just got our first round of data in, over 1,000 subjects. We finally have a scientific measure of whether learning about the science of happiness can change people's well-being. What did we find? We just have the graphs.

Here the paper is moving around and the data are

amazing, frankly. So on every different measure from positivity to engagement to meaning to just general happiness, people get better. The gains are really huge. Like on a 10 point scale, people are going up an entire whole point in terms of how much meaning they feel like they have in their life. But on the happiness measure, people are starting at about, you know, a 6.5 on the happiness measure, which is, you know, reasonable. And then after the class, people are saying about a 7.9.

which is so cool. The awesome thing about these data is it suggests people can change. Like this is a 10-week class and people are bumping up a whole point on a happy mis-measure, which is incredible.

Yeah. But why is the course changing people's lives? It's not just that people learn about the science of well-being. Like when we first started teaching the live version of the class at Yale, the Yale students had this hashtag hardest class at Yale. And that was not because the class was hard, like in terms of the grading, but it was really hard in terms of actually doing the practices. Because like, it's one thing to know that you're supposed to do this stuff, but it's another to actually put it into practice. I think that's one of the ironies. Well, I want to know what you're working on. Yeah, um...

Belinda's question caused me to stammer a bit. I'd been so busy with this podcast, I'd been slipping in my own practices. Even that daily hike had turned into a weekly hike. Or bi-weekly. I mean, this is a challenge. This is the thing we talk about in the course. I know all the stuff that I'm supposed to do, but I'm definitely not the poster child for putting into practice all the time. Which is embarrassing as the person who's teaching the course and now running this new podcast. That's right.

I love the ones where they're like, I didn't really believe it.

this, but then it totally worked. Those are the best. Don't you have a favorite one that said like, I thought this was like hippy dippy? Yeah, that's actually one from a letter I got from a learner named Clement. I think he said it was like hippy dippy crap, but you know. Right, Clement.

It had been a few months since I'd received his letter, and I put off contacting him. Because I know how hard it's been for me to stick with these habits. Given where Clement started off, I was worried he might have fallen back into some negative stuff. But in the end, I decided to phone him up. Hello? Hello, is this Clement? Hello, Lois. The international connection was kind of crappy. I had to shout a lot. How are you? Can you hear me?

I can hear you better. Yeah, I'm good. Very good. Very good. But despite the connection, our chat was fantastic. Clement had stuck to his new habits, mostly because he got the important message of this episode. Happiness takes work. Never give up, no matter what. But your course really helped me. Merci beaucoup. Merci beaucoup. All right. Pleasure. We appreciate it. Good. Thank you, Lori. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. I spoke with Clement for probably half an hour, and we covered a lot of ground in our conversation. But the thing he said that stayed with me the most was that he knew being happy wasn't going to be easy. It was going to take a lot of effort to maintain. But he didn't plan to give up trying. And that, for me at least, was pretty inspirational.

If you're now ready for the specifics, if you want to learn more about what those happy people really are doing to feel better, then I hope you'll come along for a journey over this season. In each of the episodes that follow, we'll take a deep dive into a single mistake that our minds make about how to really achieve happiness.

We'll explore lots and lots of simple habits you can begin now to improve your well-being. We'll get to nerd out together and learn more about all the studies that show why these habits work. Plus, you'll meet lots of folks who've put these tips into practice. An Olympic medalist who didn't fall prey to social comparison. An advertising exec who got healthier by ditching the silly choices she makes every day. A Grammy-winning musician who's fighting to make our lives more social again.

a star golfer with the secret to avoiding unwanted thoughts, and a Navy SEAL who realized that her training in negative thinking might be more powerful off the battlefield. Simply put, it's going to be awesome. So I hope I'll see you back here for the second episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And don't forget to tell your friends.

If you want to learn more about the science you heard on the show, then check out our website, happinesslab.fm. You can also sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver.

Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. This is Dr. Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab. While it's crazy hot out, the fall season can creep up on us. We don't have to let that happen yet, because summer doesn't stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

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