Hi everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome back to Work in Progress. Today's episode is all about it progress. That is because today's guest is a bona Fide award winning scientist and one of popular science magazines Brilliant ten, Dr Laurie Santos. If you haven't heard about her or listened to her Ted talk about monkey economics, you should absolutely check it out. We will link it in the stories for this week's episode. Pause the episode, honestly look it up. You will not be disappointed because Dr Santos is fascinating. She is a psychology professor at Yale University who has created the most popular course in the university's three hundred year history. In addition to that and her featured Speed Your Status with Ted, Dr Santos has been featured by just about every news platform and periodical you can think of, from The New York Times to The Today Show to Oprah Magazine. She's even a recipient of the Genius Award from the Liberty Science Center. Her desire to educate has expanded to include the Happiness Lab. It's a podcast series that she created to reevaluate the things we think will lead us to a happier life and how wrong we are about them A whole lot of the time. There is so much to learn from and about Dr Santos, and I am going to try to cram as much as I can into the time that we have together so that we all can grow enjoy I am so excited, and I have to say I've actually never done this with a guest. You know, we record your intro separately and we could just get to dive into conversation, but I actually really want to begin our chat today with an explanation of your podcast, The Happiness Lab, because I think it's going to be a great kickoff for people who are tuning into this episode, going what is this professor going to tell me? Because when I read the description of your show, I thought, yep, sign me up. I'm ready, and it reads so beautifully. It says for everyone at home. You might think you know what it takes to lead a happier life, more money, a better job, or Instagram where the vacations, You're dead wrong. Yale Professor Dr Laurie Santos has studied the science of happiness and found that many of us do the exact opposite of what will truly make our lives better based on the psychology course she teaches it Yale, which is the most popular class in the university's three year history. Laurie will take you through the latest scientific research and share some surprising and inspiring stories that will change the way you think about happiness. I feel like everyone's ready. We're ready to come to Yale, We're ready to take the course. I also feel they need to confess that in the beginning of the pandemic, when we were in the initial you know, two weeks of the first lockdown, I was in a panic at home. I hadn't had a day off like that since two thousand three, and I didn't know what to do. And so I thought I should take a course. And I started looking up things on Coursera, and I signed up for your class. And then I reorganized my spice cabinet. I labeled every shelf in every cabinet in my house. I ordered a new label maker so I could see if it was as good as the old label maker that I had, because it was the new thing everyone was talking about in the reviews. I did everything but sit down and take a class, let alone, a class that could perhaps teach me to be a happier person, And so I'm a little curious what that says to you in terms of psychology and perhaps how apt we all are out avoiding our own happiness. Yeah, I mean, I think you're not alone. I won't speak to the number of people who signed on and didn't even take look at a single video. It happens, um, But yeah, no, I think I think so many of us want to do something to improve our flourishing, but we're not sure what it is, right, and we gravitate towards the easy stuff, the fun stuff. I'm gonna buy a labelmaker, you know, I'm gonna do whatever, often buying things or or kind of getting stuck in hustle culture, right like I'm going to go for the next accolade that will make me happy or bump up my salary or something. We have these theories about what will make us happy. But I think one of the reasons the class is so important is because a lot of those theories are wrong. Right, Like, we're it's not like we're not putting work into our happiness. We're going for it. We're just kind of going about it the wrong way, and often at an opportunity cost of things we could be spending our time on, so not to get to thirty feet, But would you say that that's what leads to certain chronic behaviors that cause stress, whether it's you know, addiction, alcoholism, overspending, infidelity, you know, the sort of list of things people do where that you then hear them tell their story and they say, well, this is what ruined my life. Do you do you do you see those things correlating? Yeah, I think they really do. I mean, I think one of the misconceptions we have about happiness is that we're supposed to be happy all the time, right that if I'm having some negative emotion, I'm failing at something. I've done something wrong. I think, especially for parents, this comes up a lot where it's like if your kid is sad, it's like I have failed that, you know, I must must fix it, must give something, a cookie, something to fix it. And so I think a lot of those coping behaviors you talked about from addictive substances like workaholism, you know, even refreshing your relationship when maybe you know it wasn't the point to do that. All of those things are seeking something to make us feel different and I think if we were just able to sit with sadness, anger, frustration. You know, you talked about the pandemic like those were normative responses to the weird thing that happened in normative responses. Now, you know, like nineteen months on in the midst of this, and I think we just kind of need to allow ourselves to go through those negative emotions more than we quite expect. It's interesting that you say that I I actually loved I got to have a conversation about that in my first long term job, a show that I worked on. My character and her partner kind of struggled with that and had a conversation about happiness being a mood, not a destination. And it makes me smile. And I think about that, you know, being able to sort of model the conversation for an audience, and then it makes me think about how much I loved the movie inside, you know, letting all the feelings be complete characters and knowing that they all mattered. I thought it was such a beautiful message to give to kids and their parents. Yeah, and this idea, you know, I think one of the beauties of that movie is you see that there's an importance to sadness, that we need anger, We need these kinds of things, and we need that message because again, our instinct is to just shut those off, right, they don't exist, just pretend, right. But really, what the research shows is that to get through those emotions, to kind of get to the other side of joy and all the things we want to get to, we need to make room for some of those negative emotions. We need to allow them and maybe even sit with them sometimes, even if it feels uncomfortable. M I have so many questions for you, and I ran right into them instead of asking you the first question that I normally ask people, so I should probably do it. Now. I get to sit across from so many people whose brains and careers I'm fascinated by on the show, and so many people, I mean truly around the world know you as the Happiness Doctor. But I'm so curious about how you became The person sitting across from me today was Lorie at eight or nine or ten? Happy kid? What what were you into? Curious about where did you grow up? Can can you kind of paint a picture of your your little life? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, So, I mean I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is you know, if you read your Moby Dick, it's the town where you know Ishmael sales off. So it used to be this kind of rich whaling town. Now it's a lot more lower income and stuff. I grew up, I think a pretty curious kid. I don't think I knew I wanted to be a happiness grew but I was always fascinated with the minds, the minds of animals, the minds of people, and things like that. Um my real interest in psychology started when I went to college and the class that I wanted to get into, which was a pre law class, because I thought for some reason I wanted to be a lawyer. Very strange but now that I thought that, But that class was and I didn't get a spot, and my adviser said, well, try intropsych and so I tried psychology. And you can say, like almost in some ways the rest is history. I really got taken by it. I mean, just so just this awe of the fact that there are these answers that we can look to for these puzzles of the mind. You know, why we fall in love, what happens when we sleep, why we make the dumb decisions we do, right, Like, there's a whole scientific approaches to understanding these things, and I was just really taken by you know, I started in doing research even as a college student and kind of been on track ever since. But for most of my time as a psychologist, I studied what I call my day job question, which is sort of what makes the human mind special? Um. I was really interested in human uniqueness, and I studied that by looking at monkeys and looking at dogs and studying how they make sense of the world. Monkeys are a nice population to do that with because they're kind of our evolutionary ancestors, so they give us some evolutionary hints into what was going on in the human mind. And dogs are useful just because like they live with us. They're like in our houses with us, right, you know, they tell us how the environment shaped us. So it's kind of a nature nurture combo. When you say you were setting human uniqueness, is that related to humans as a unique species, you know, a unique group on Earth? Or does that reference how unique we all are in relation to each other? Or or is it both? I think a little bit of both. It's it's more the former question, right. I mean, it's this question of, like, you know, why are you and I doing this podcast over this technology of the internet and zoom and computers with microphones using human language, trying to teach people about happiness this idea of pedagogy, when literally no other species is doing anything like this, like slime molds and binobos and dogs, they're all very similar to us in terms of their biology. But why aren't they doing any of the kind of crazy creative things that humans do? And what like ability is? What kind of cognitive abilities, how we think, how we make decisions? What what's different about us that we get to do that stuff and they don't? And so so that was my day job for like several decades, and I published in that and that was the main thing, and the interest and happiness came out of a new role that I took on Yale's campus. I became a ahead of college on campus, which is this kind of funny term for a faculty member who lives on campus with students. Um So I live in a residential college. It's kind of like a dorm or if you know Harry Potter, it's kind of like a you know, like Griffin door slitherin kind of like a you know, school within a school kind of thing. And so I became this head of college. I moved on campus with students, and all of a sudden, I saw this college student mental health crisis up close and personal. It was watching students still and watching students experience extreme depression, suicidality, panic attacks, even students who weren't experiencing clinical mental health issues we're talking about. You know, I'd ask, how, how how's the week going? You know, I was like, oh, if I could just get to mid terms, right, you know, I'm so stressed out. And it was I was just watching them sort of fast forward their life because they were so ground down by hustle culture, and so the happiness and truest kind of came out of like, well, what can I do to help these students? They were just struggling so much with their mental health. And sometimes when I say that people, I worry everyone listening is like, well, I'm not going to send my kid to you, you know, like Yale sounds terrible, but it's not Yale. I mean nationally, right now, over of college students across the US report being too depressed to function. Most days, more than sixt of college students say that they feel overwhelming anxiety, and more than one intense says that they've seriously considered suicide in the last year. So if I'm teaching a college classroom with a hundred kids, that means a few of them, maybe ten of them, are thinking, you know, that's terrifying, you know. So so yeah, so I just realized, like somebody had to do something, and so I kind of retrained in this work on the Science of Happiness in order to teach a class to students, really to give students strategies of like, hey, you know, their research shows you can do stuff right, like you don't you don't have to feel this way. Their strategies you can use to feel better. And that's kind of when the class went a little bit viral on campus. It was a new class. I expected to teach, you know, thirty or forty kids, but I walked into a classroom with a quarter of the entire Yale campus in it. Over a thousand students showed up the first day of class. So that was a little surreal and weird, but it showed that the students were they were voting with their feet, they don't like this culture of feeling stressed and anxious. And I think they were really they really resonated with this idea of an evidence based approach. I wasn't just giving them a bunch of platitudes. I'm like, hey, here's what this study says. You know, look at this neuroscience paper. Like they were really seeing what the science showed they could do to feel better. And that feels thrilling because so many people everywhere are talking about overwhelmed and anxiety. I mean, I spent last week moving the week you and I are talking anyhow, I spent my last week moving and worth noting moving third biggest life stressor after death of a family member and divorce right after that. Right, we don't realize moving can be so And it was by far the the most organized move I've ever had, and this sort of joyous experience and all of these things. And yet today, which was sort of my first day back into normal work life, I just I woke up ten minutes before my alarm, gripped with anxiety at a headache, and I just thought, what is what? What it's done? Why do I feel this way now? And I almost got the sense that it was like all the adrenaline and stress was leaving my body and just making me feel terrible. Is that a thing that happens or do we just talk about that like it happens. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, anxiety, stress, all this stuff. Like you know, we are physical beings, right, Like this is going to exist in us in some rich way. You know, when you are feeling anxious, when you go through a life stressor and yes, you know again moving it's worth mentioning is huge life stressor that comes with an activation of your or flight response. This like part of your nervous system which reacts as though there's like a tiger about to jump out and grab you. So different things happen. Your body like sends like adrenaline to all your systems, so like your body is like ready to flee away or you're getting ready to like fight or kind of get attacked, right, Like, it's not a good feeling. And when you turn on your fight or flight system, that's at the expense of a different system, which is known as our rest and digest system. Like that's the system we use for like digesting our food and like sleeping properly, and like our sexual functioning like we basically, whenever we're under stress, we kind of shut that system off. And that works because the fight or flight system was built to like get turned on, like oh, tiger, you turn it on and then you run away from the tiger and you're good. But modern life has these moments where you know, you probably had to plan moving for like three weeks or maybe longer. Right, Like, you've been activating that system straight for way longer than that system was ever meant to be active for, you know, so even you know, maybe when it's over, when you finally have time to process, your body is like, dude, we are like bumping all of these stress hormones, like what's going on, and yeah, your tummy is gonna hurt. You're not going to be able to sleep, like you know, that's that's just the biology what we're wired to do. Wow, I am so excited to get into all of this stuff. I think it's fascinating that you've found your way here because you were living among your students and seeing their experiences in real time. That's so incredibly rare. And I think about what could happen if CEOs of major companies spent time with their at mid level workers with their largest the largest portions of their workforce. If you know, I always wonder what it would be like for me, And you know, my profession always being away somewhere, moving by the way all the time, UM to go work on a set somewhere, and the powers that be are never there, but they have expectations set for those of us that are, So you know, we'll do sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hour days. You know, the crew has even worse turnarounds than we do. Everything's very high stress. And I think, you know, I wonder if the people demanding X number of pages get filmed per day we're here, if they would agree anymore. And I guess it's really striking me that that's what's missing in so many spaces, is that the people who could offer a solution are often not in the space that needs problem solving. So I think, what an amazing moment it was for your students to have had that, and obviously for it to change the course of of your life. When you think about being a child, curious and and all of the things that that you were, does your experience with your udents that's now given you a larger lens for all of us. Really, does it in any way make you nostalgic for your childhood years or versions of your child self? Yeah, I mean definitely, And in fact, this is something I've been working on in a recent episode of my podcast. I'm trying to find more fun, and that's caused me to look back a lot at my youth. I was like, I used to have fun all the time. I used to just do goofy stuff. I don't you know, maybe it's a little bit of a different generation, but I didn't grow up in the same generation of you know, helicopter parented kids who are shuffled off to soccer practice. I just kind of goofed around outside and did whatever and whatever creative pursuit came. And you know, I've been reflecting a lot on how that seems to be a different childhood experience than many kids today have definitely had a different college experience, and a lot of my college students have where they're just so ingrained in work, work, work all the time. Um, I just came from a meeting with a student who was saying, you know, this semester, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to take at least two hours off on some and I was like, two hours off on Sunday is not enough, you know, And so they're kind of like slammed with work. But even as I reflect on my own adult life, I think, you know, there's there's ways that many of us as adults have lost something important about, you know, so many of our childlike qualities, you know, like did you ask your listeners? When was the last time you just spent a whole day doing something fun and didn't feel guilty about it? Right, Like, didn't have that moment of anxiety like I shouldn't be doing this, should be doing this? I feel really guilty, right Like, you know, I think so many of us lose that, and I think we need stronger strategies to get back to that, because again, one of the things we know about having fun in that kind of curious childlike way is like you're reducing your stress hormones. You're literally changing your hormonal balance by having fun, and like, of course you are, because you're putting your body, you know, and that rest and digest fund state, and that feels good. That's such an important point. When was the last time you had fun and didn't feel guilty about it. Yeah, I think, you know, we just assumed that we're supposed to be working. We we kind of I joke with my students that we often spend time shooting all over ourselves, get it, like shooting all ourselves? Yeah, and you know, I think we do that with even our leisure time, right, Like we finally, you know it so overwhelmed. We never get a break. We finally get a break and either were too burned out to do anything fun. We just want to like PLoP down and like do nothing, you know, like just mindlessly click through channels or something. Or we we have the opportunity to do something fun, but we feel so guilty about it that we can't like shut off the stress hormones because the whole time we have this voice about like don't you have something to do Monday? Like did you send that email? You know, it's hard to even be present in those activities, and you're right thinking about what you said about your childhood being free enough to just play. It was different. We didn't have devices attached to us that we're binging and tinging and asking for our attention all the time, and so much that we were supposed to keep up with it was slower, and I am and I think we we've lost something as adults not having that. I definitely I think children have lost something not having that. Now, have you ever spoken about that with your family? Because I imagine as as shocking as it is for us in our generation, it must be even more shocking for our parents to look at people the age of your college students and think, what is their life? Have they ever known a life without this? And I think, you know what's funny is sometimes we get, in an odd way, the opposite reaction, right. You know, there's a lot, you know, if you look at the news media, there's a lot made of like, oh, these snowflakes, you know, these like students, And you know, I hear that terminology and I sometimes ask like, well, who do we think made them snowflakes? Like it wasn't like they plopped here and chose that, right, They were kind of, you know, faced with a situation that's really different than ours. You know, if I grew up with cell phones binging all the time and expectations about perfection and getting into these perfect Ivy League universities, right, like, I think it's like there's a reason they kind of wind up being so stressed out. Yeah, the the just the difference, the divide. I I even remember when the initial you know, no Kia phone that you had the text on T nine like dick h you know, my grandfather just was was so appalled. You know, what do you need that thing for? You just be here, make a plan with people for the weekend. It really is such a different time, and I wonder I know this has felt around the world, but it seems to be especially intense in this country with the as you said, the the expectations of Ivy League schools and Wall Street jobs and this sort of you know, American exceptionalism. And my father is an immigrant and my mother's mother was an immigrant, and we talked so much sort of about the differences in what's going on in our communities and different portions of our family around the world. And I know that you were born to by national family and the your father's side of the family came from Cabo Verde. Correct, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, So I'm curious did that multinational familial experience infuse different aspects of culture and your upbringing than these issues we're seeing ourselves swirling inside of here in specific today. Yeah, I mean I think you know, when you grow up in a multinational family, like you get I think you get a few things. One is you recognize that, like nothing said in Stone, that there are other ways to do things that you know, like you know, we college when you're sick in the side of the family, but in the side of the family you have a beer or something. You know, like you kind of get like a little bit of different cultural worlds. And I think what that can show you is just that there are other paths. There are there ways. And I think if you look at a lot of traditional paths, you know, traditional cultural paths or even traditional religious paths and things, what you find is that they look different from the modern version, right, like much more infused with social connection, much more infused with ritual, much less focused on individuals, and more focused on the family, the community and these things. And in some ways, those quote unquote old school like cultural practices, those seem to be honoring the kinds of practices we know to be good for well being, right, you know, this act of like promoting social connection at all costs, Like my dad grew up and you know, you go visit your mom every day, you know that every weekend, like we went in to visit my grandma, you know, at least once a week, right, And like those practices can feel outdated sometimes or unnecessary in the modern you know, the fast paced, modern world. But the science shows is that they're they're often there for a reason. When you dig into some of these older practices, they tend to be the things that are really promoting our well being. And I think sometimes in the modern world we lose these sometimes at our peril. The ritual that you mentioned, the community, I do really feel like it's something we miss and I would imagine part of it is because we've moved around so much as a culture. We're so much more mobile than we used to be, you know. I I grew up across the country from my grandfather. We made regular trips every year. But I I love our ability to move around and experience each other's worlds. And and I also, on the flip side, worry sometimes that we're losing our connections, you know, our our threads, and I look forward to hearing what ways you might suggest that people create them just before we move into the present research from your story, I'm also struck by the connection, which I think is pretty rare. You know, I've interviewed so many people who have gone to some of the Ivy League schools that you're talking about and who have studied in fascinating places around the world. It's it's pretty rare to have a guest whose undergrad and graduate education happened at the same place. And I'm I'm struck by it because we're talking about places and routines and ritual if you will. And you went to Harvard and stayed there through a master's and a doctorate. What do you think drew you to that place and what do you think kept you there? Yeah? Well, I mean I think Harvard is a good school. Lots of people apply, you know, it's like the reasonable destination university. But part of it was that I was focused on this question, is the studying this idea of like humans being unique, and particularly studying at the time, I was studying monkeys, and you know, there are not many like different laboratories around the world that we're doing that, and so I wound up sticking a ound in part just because that was the lab that was doing this stuff, and I, you know, really like the area. I kind of really had fallen in love with Cambridge in Boston, and so it did feel like how I do feel like, you know, I kind of tend to be an old soul in that sentence, right, you know, I stayed for a really long time in the same spot where I did my undergrad and graduate work, in the same spot. I've been at Yale now since two thousand three, which makes me feel very old. And that's kind of rare and academia to to stick around in one spot for like so long. And so I think I have seen that putting down roots can be really powerful, and that that transience can feel yucky, and especially that transience you know, as an academic, that's true, really right, you know, people again, they do their dissertation in one spot and then they move on to a different place, or they you know, start off at one university as a professor but might not get tenure and then have to move. And so you know, you really are in this culture where it feels like people aren't necessarily going to stay for the long haul. And I worry about the fact that that's country beating to some less flourishing than we could have in the academy. M Yeah, you don't have a chance to grow deep roots. Yeah, and what we know is like the deep roots matter a lot, I think, you know. Again, a misconception we have is like we want to keep all our options open, right, like we want we don't want to get stuck anywhere. How can I live in one place in this you know, big wide world for our whole lives. But what we know is that people who commit, people who are dedicated to one thing, people who put their roots down, like they tend to be happier for a bunch of reasons. Right. Once, once you decide you can really engage with a place, you learn about it in a different way. Once you decide, Like all the other choices that weigh so heavily on our minds all the time, they're gone because you just picked one, right, And so we we forget that sometimes those choices can hurt us. And I get it, you know, I have the same intuition. You know, if you ask me, do you want a Netflix with ten shows or do you want a Netflix with like a Netflix number of shows, I'm like the Netflix number of shows, like obviously more choices better, you know, I don't want to like get pinned down, but then if you look at my actual happiness when I'm like, you know, scrolling, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through like billions of movies, I'm not feeling happy. I'm feeling apathetic. I'm feeling fomo for some movie I didn't pick, and so on. Just the act of choosing can reduce some of that. When you think about roots and the kinds of choices and perspectives on choice, you're you're able to advise us on. I guess the question moves in two directions going back. I wonder if you had a favorite you know, professor or mentor at Harvard and what you might have learned from them that now you, having been at Yale for all of these years since two thousand three, might be passing on to your students. Each Each place feels like it has a very nice root system. M yeah, I mean, and that's like the beauty of these institutions. And there's some problems with you know, three hundred year old institution, like they're not built on the structures of social justice that we'd love them to be built on today, but they have these amazing deep roots. You know. I remember being at Harvard and realizing, like you know, Kennedy was here. You know, like these like if Emerson was here, you know, like these famous people that walked through the same halls that I did, and the kind of excitement and kind of interesting pressure that came with that, it was really cool. But in terms of favorite professors, you know, I think back to taking a really early class in psychology, I think I was only a sophomore at the time, with a professor by the name of Nancy Campwasher. She taught at Harvard at the time at the time now she teaches at M I T. And she was just like so cool, you know, at the time, like a really young professor, and she studied neuroscience, which like in the nineties was this kind of new cool thing, and she was just kind of really interestingly badass. Like you know, it's just like the kind of professor that I really wanted to be, or the person I want like when I thought, like when I want to grow up, I want to be like Nancy Campisher. And it's it's interesting and humbling to think that I could potentially be having that sort of effect on students, you know, when I hear that I have other students who were college students with me and worked in my lab and then now have gone on to their own professorships. And to see that they made that choice because they saw that inspiration in me is like just incredibly humbling and so touching. So now I'm like a academic grandma, you know, because my my students have their own students at different university and so kind of getting my academic progeny out there. It's really cool. I think about it as an academic ripple effect. Really, you know, was the beginning for you the way that it can move. Do you feel like she was your biggest supporter in the early years of your work. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I was lucky enough to have lots of supporters, but she's definitely someone you know, I've stayed close with and stayed in touch with and expressed to her that she'd such an impact on my work, and so that's pretty cool. Now, that's so neat. So when you think about the forward end of the root system being at Yale and the light bulb moment of seeing what was happening with so many students, and I think about it as the micro example of the macro problem we see, as we mentioned earlier, So much stress and overwhelmed and burnout, and I mean, it's it's an unbelievable experience to feel overscheduled to the minute and burnt out all the time, and like you don't have enough time to eat and so you drink coffee all day and then eat fast food at night. I mean, I know there's so many people nodding along as you are and as I am. We're all just it's a nod party today. I know the students were the spark, but what was what was the gateway into moving into happiness research? Yeah, well, I'm and I think you know, part of it was the spark was the students, but I think, you know, if I'm being honest, you know, another thing that really scared me was that I saw a lot of their behavior in myself. I'd meet with them and be like, what's going on? Like, oh, if I could only just get to the weekend, you know what I mean? And part of me would think, man, you're nineteen, you want to fast forward to mid terms, like you know, you only got one shot at being a sophomore in college. Just like love it and savor it. But then I was realizing that when they were saying that I was saying, like, yeah, man, if we could just fast forward to in terms, like we'd all be happier. Like I wasn't making good choices. I was over scheduling myself, like I was kind of feeling burnt out and feeling overwhelmed, like I was also for going sleep, for going social connection, to just pack my schedule to the brim. And so I realized I wasn't being a good example for them, and so part of learning these strategies was for them, but also part of it was really for me, so that I could have strategies to do better for myself, but then also to be a good role model to my students. What do you think is the truth about happiness that takes most people by surprise the first time they learned it? And is it the same one that took you by surprise the first time you learned it? Interesting? Yeah, I think for me and definitely for my students, is just this idea that you know, we think circumstances are the kinds of things that make us happy, that if we were rich, had the perfect job and or the perfect part, or the perfect accolade or the perfect grades or what have you, that that would make us happy. But the studies show that by and large, circumstances don't really matter for happiness all that much. And it's important to say a caveat right, Like, you know, if you're you don't have enough money to put food on the table, or roof of your head, if you're in like a traumatic abusive relationship, yes, switching your circumstances around is going to matter. But for a lot, if not most of the people listening to this podcast who can put food on the table, you know, are in fine relationships whatever, Like changing your circumstances isn't going to matter. More like switching your job is probably not gonna matter if you can put food on the table, right, Like buying some new gadget is not going to make you as happy as you think. And you know, in some ways we know that it's kind of in some ways common wisdom, but it's not like common practice. Right when I'm having a bad day, I want to like change something, like maybe I should change my job, or maybe I should buy myself something or treat myself or whatever. And the research seems to show that none of those things things seem to work, or at least they don't seem to work as well or as powerfully as we think. In other words, we think changing these circumstances will really change our happiness a lot and for a long time. And if anything, it changes it, if it changes it at all, it changes it only for a tiny bit, and for a very short time. You know. When the package arrives, I'm like, oh, my new whatever, There's a moment of like, but then that will always like, you know, thirty seconds, and then I'm back to my email, you know, much more quickly. I feel like my brain is exploding with little fireworks of thoughts and questions and I'm have answers for some of them. If I hadn't chickened out and I had taken the class, which now I feel like this is the swift kick in the ask that I need to do it version today, the private, private tutorial. But well, I mean that would be heaven. But I do. I love homework. I love a curriculum. That's the thing I missed the most about school is a syllabus. So I'm into it. Uh. I actually realized a couple of years ago diving into my own mental health and you know, really wanting to learn tools and and kind of expand my ability to understand myself and others. I loved doing traditional talk therapy, but getting into a coaching program I loved even more. I was like, oh, there's homework. I have to answer questions and write things and fill out of it. I love this, So I have anyhow, that's very tangentle, but I'm I'm I'm very down for the class. I I'm curious how you began once you started researching in this area specifically, how did you begin to put together out of this world of research, this breadth of information. How did you begin to create a curriculum? Where do you start with something like that? Yeah, well there there had been other classes like this at other places, so I did kind of stand on the shoulder of giants kind of thing. But the way I conceptualized it was the first thing we have to do for students is help them with the misconceptions, right. And I think this is one of the big puzzles. That's something I talked about on my podcast, The Happiness Lab a lot, which is our slogan is like your mind lies to you about what makes you happy, right, you know, the ideas you you read like you're dead wrong, right, And so we really started with the misconceptions what are the things you think are going to make you happy but don't really work? And we walk through things like the perfect job, of the perfect salary, the perfect grades, lots of likes on social media, like just buying things, materialism, Like we just kind of go through all the misconceptions first, and then I think if you learn that stuff, then you get curious about like, Okay, why do our minds, Like why are they so dumb? Like why do they suck so badly? Why did they get it wrong? And so then we kind of walk through some of I call them dumb features of the mind that kind of lead us astray, and then we turned to like, okay, if those don't work, what are the things that really allow you to experience happiness? What are the things that are really going to work? And then in the end we kind of turned to like, Okay, that's all well and good, but you know, how do I put this into practice right in the modern world where we're feeling so time strapped and overwhelmed and so on, Like, how can I make these behavior changes so that they'll stick so miss memory? That's a really interesting idea when you talk about the way that your mind lies to you and misleads you. I'm curious about how missmemory fits in because you're exploring both memory and miss memory and the current season of the Happiness Lab, and as you're referring to the way that you're unpacking all of these things, I wonder what nostalgia has to do with that, because when I think about some of the behaviors we're talking about. You know, you said the package comes and three minutes later, I'm back to email. Do you think nostalgia has to do with our desire to find something? Well, oh, remember when I was a kid and I got that sweater and it made me so happy? Maybe now if I get a sweater. Is there is there something about nostalgia that's mixed into these lies about what makes us happy? Or or do those operate in sort of separate verticals? Yeah, I mean, I think there are real mistakes of memory and prediction that lead us astray when we're thinking about happiness. The biggest one is that there's lots of evidence that we're bad at predicting what emotions were going to experience when something happens, not the like direction of the emotions like we know, you know, root now probably negative, like you know, when the lottery, probably pretty good, right, you know, we have the valence, right, but we don't really understand the magnitude or the duration. And that means that like we're just really bad at predicting, right. You know, So you get you're a college student, you got the perfect grade. What's that going to do to your happiness? A lot of people predict like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna be so happy, like it's going to be amazing, but you forget, like there's other stuff going on. There's a party you didn't get into and the other like it gives a blip of happiness, but not as big as you thought and not for as long as you thought. But then the reverse, you know, you're a college student predicting what's gonna happen if I get a bad grade? You know, you think about that and you think, oh, I'm going to feel so terrible, like this is going to be awful, like it's going to ruin my week. But like, actually you get the bad grade, there's a million other things going on. You immediately rationalize that you have all these like kind of process that kick in they say, well that was stupid. The professor sucks, like I don't care, you know, like you just don't feel as bad about it as you think. And this is a problem of what's called affective forecasting. Like we're just bad at forecast saying what our emotions are going to look like. But the key is that even when we get evidence that we were wrong, you know, like, oh, like I made that prediction about my grade, but I'm kind of fine, Like that doesn't really update in our memory. And that's I think a spot where memory leads us astray, like you know, nostalgia kind of lead us astray in a different way. But like the key is that, like our memories don't really pick up when when we kind of got through something fine, but we forget that this possible, you know, it don't mean where I see this A lot is in like breakups. You know, your first breakup, you you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm never going to get over this. I'm gonna love this person forever, and you know, I'll be sad and depressed and eating ice cream out at the car end forever. Like gradually you get better, but then breakup number two comes in you don't say well with breakup number one, like you know, got fine. You know it took a while, but I was okay. You just think, no, this one is different, This one I'm never going to recover from. And so we kind of our memory doesn't register our resilience. Our memory doesn't register how fast we get over things. And that means that we just don't realize that we're as resilient as who we are. It means we don't sometimes take risks that we could be taking because we're so scared of how things will go, because we think back and be like, oh, everything went, so, you know, we don't remember that things went better than we expected. That's so interesting that we underestimate our own resilience. Big fireworks, big brain fireworks on that one. I wonder about creating a better relationship to that resilience, or or even just to our own ability to accurately perceive our feelings and our circumstance. You speak a lot about the three blessings exercise. Is that designed to kind of put us back in right relationship with how we're feeling and what's going on around us. Yeah, so the three Blessings exercise sounds really maybe powerful. It Really it's the write down three things that are going well, like write down things three things you're grateful for. And then I say that, and you're like, oh, what's that going to do? But but this, the research shows that that does a lot. In fact, if you do that every night for two weeks, the research suggests you'll show significant improvements in your well being even just after two weeks of doing it. And the reason is that it's kind of redirecting your attention what you're paying attention to to, like the good things in life. Naturally, our brains find the negative, right, which makes sense over evolution. Right, if you're walking through a forest, you don't need to notice the flowers, but you do need to notice the tigers who are going to attack you, right, And so our brain is ready to find the threats, the negatives, the spots where we should be scared or anxious or frustrated. It's not prone to find the joyous things. But like with just a little bit of training, you can get a lot better at that. And that's I think what the three Blessings exercise does. It kind of tunes your mind to some of the good stuff. In one of my recent podcast episodes. I interviewed this guy, Ross Gay, who's a poet who wrote a book called the Book of Delights, UM, and he decided for every day for a year, he'd write an essay about something that delighted him, and he would kind of call it out in the world. When he saw something delightful, he'd yelled delight and he sticks his finger in the air, and he said his mind got tuned for delights. At first he was worried he wouldn't be able to find them, but over time it was like, that's a delight, and that's a delight, and which one am I going to write about today? He'd basically like completely retuned like a tuning fork, what he paid attention to and switched to the positive stuff. And I think, you know, we can all Maybe we're not going to write an essay every single day about what delights us the last maybe you have a lot of time on your hands, that'd be great, UM, But you know, all of us, can you know, scribble down three things that we find as blessings in our lives can be pretty fast and have a really profound effect. One of my favorite episode arcs of your podcast is one where you discussed giving yourself a fun intervention, and you mentioned earlier that you're really trying to lean into fun and play. So can you explain that concept as well a bit to our listeners, because I I think everyone is is jotting down, you know, this practice of three moments of gratitude. Um, it's interesting. One of my best friends and I did that for a while. Um. She was postpartum and having a tough time, and I just said, Okay, every day, we're going to text each other three things were grateful for. And we did it for I don't know two months, and it was great, and then we got busy, and then she was feeling better, and and I'm realizing in this moment that we should just do it forever. Um. So I'm I'm saying that I suppose for accountability, and also to say I tested this on myself and it does work totally and I just forgot. But I this feels fun to realize that I've guinea picked this on myself. And and so I want to know about your fun intervention because basically I would also like to volunteers tribute for that awesome. I think we need as many fun volunteers as possible. Well, if you want to sign up to be a fun volunteer, you should check out the website how to Have fun dot com, which actually is not mine, but the journalist Katherine Price's website. Um she's doing. She's writing a book called The Power of Fun. And that's kind of where I got my fun prevention. I even though I was the one who needed the fun prevention, I was kind of finding most of my life was work and I hadn't tried new fun things in a while, and I didn't have time for leisure. And then when I finally had time for leisure, I was so burnt out that all I could think to do was like PLoP down and watch Netflix. And nothing wrong with Netflix. I think that can be incredibly relaxing, but it might not be like fun. Like like when you think in your life, like you know, think of a memory that you would describe as like so fun. Very few people I think think like, yeah, that one Netflix show I watched was like so fun. You know. We think of like social things or times when we're being rebellious or goofy or trying something new, often with friends, right when we were really in the moment, when time flew by right, like that's fun. And I had the realization that I hadn't gotten a lot of that in my life recently, for better or for worse. And so Catherine was trying to help me find some fun and we did it first actually by this this process of paying attention to delights and too blessings, and part because she thought, one problem with fun is that we're just too distracted. Right, Fun really requires being present, being in the moment, like being in flow right, so time can fly by, and with the incessant dings in real devices or the dings in my head like you should do this, or you know, like that that voice that kind of calls you out of the moment, I realized I needed to work on those, and so Catherine gave me some delight homework. I had to find my own delights out there in the world, and it was a good way to kind of train my brain to notice good stuff instead of that incessant chatter of what I should be doing, um, And so it was pretty helpful. But a second thing Katherine made me realize is that I kind of needed to try new things because probably, like a lot of adults, I've kind of gotten away from the things I used to find fun like as a kid. You know, there's all these things we do for fun as a kid, and we feel like, well, we shouldn't spend our time on that anymore because we're the grind. Time is money, like we should be working, working, And so Catherine convinced me to try some new things. So um as part of this podcast episode, I even took a surfing lesson, which, for those that know me, I mean like I'm like an Ivy League academic forty something not very in shape, Like surfing was not like high on the list of expected things that I should be doing with my time, but it wound up being super fun amazing. Why do you think it's important for adults to purposefully seek out fun and and dedicate a practice of novel joy in their day to day lives. So many good reasons that come out of Catherine Price's book, But to kind of, you know, steal her thunder just a little bit. I mean, first of all, it's just fun, right, Like you know, like if you when you look back on your life and you're kind of going through your memories, I think you'll look back with joy on those so fun times in a way that you for something that was just relaxing, like the leisure that felt so fun leaves an impact and like for a life well lived, you kind of want that. You know. Second, it's just fun, right, Like it just feels good, right, So we want to fill our lives with things that feel good. But fun has all these benefits for our mental health. It can reduce our stress hormones, like literally change the hormonal balance and our bodies. It can allow us to feel a little bit more present, you know, mindfulness. We know being in the present moment makes us happier, so we kind of get that from fun. And also fun allows us to engage in a little bit of play, right, and we know that play, even separate from fun, is really good for us. Um. You know, there's a reason animals tend to play when they're like little kids. It's related to brain development. And there's evidence suggesting that adults who play more have evidence of this brain neurotrophic factor, which is like proteins that are associated with brain growth. Right, So you're kind of keeping savvy and cognitively sharp in your old age, right just through the act of playing more. There's also evidence if you look at like super smart, super successful people, a lot of them spent a lot of time having fun, like doing some other hobby just for fun. So the inventor like a Richard Fineman, you know, the famous physicist, he played like bongo drums, And the inventor Claude Shannon had like all these crazy I don't even remember all of them, like weird hobbies that he had. And there's there's evidence from creativity research that Nobel Prize winning scientists, if you compare, well, what made them different from non Nobel Prize winning scientists right, Like they're all at the same level doing stuff. Turns out the Nobel Prize winning scientists were more likely to do something on the side that was weird, to have fun, like they had these weird hobbies. So it's it might be bumping up our cognition and our decision making and our performance in ways we don't expect. So when you when you amass all of the things you've learned from Catherine and through your own research and your own experiment months with fun in your life, how much of that sort of personal growth do you feel informs your class which just to brag about you again for a moment, I will just remind the listeners is Yale's most popular class and over three years. Uh, how does it all come together? Yeah? Well, I think the students appreciate that I never claim to be the guru that I have all the answers. I'm very real with them where I'm like, look, I'm on this struggle too. I'm suffering from all the stuff that you're suffering from, and I have to take my own advice in my own medicine. And I think there's something that resonates with them by me being real like that. Right, Like, I'm going through this too. I'm kind of self experimenting. I'm trying to figure out whether or not these things work for me at the same time as I'm asking you to do the same thing. And that means that, you know, they see that I'm kind of a student too, you know, like we all are right because even though I teach this class, I haven't changed those basic intuitions, right like those I'm still human, those misconceptions are still there. I'm just switching my behavior around to be a little bit better. I really like that idea that you can change your behavior. But something about you saying my brain is my brain, the misconceptions remain. Actually didn't mean to rhyme, but here we are. I think that's actually quite freeing because so many of us do carry that misconception of well, once I learn it, I'll be better. Once I solve this, ill feel happy. And I really love that you're saying it's not about solving anything. It's about just training yourself to do something else, and then what isn't working for you will get smaller. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it, because I think but to have your change just hard, right, Like, really changing our habits and changing our behavior is tough. And what ultimately matters isn't what the misconception is. Like, what matters is kind of how we act on it. So when you look at the big list of things that really do matter for our happiness, they include things like taking time to sleep, taking time to exercise, you know, stuff that's common wisdom, but isn't common practice. Right. We all kind of know it, but we don't necessarily like do it. And you know, this is something I struggle with things. This is that we're talking right now. It's the very beginning of the semester we're in, like the first week of classes, things are frantic and busy, and like it'd be so easy for me just to drop my normal like workout routine this week, like and get that you know, hour and a half back. That would be amazing. But I'm like, actually, this is the time that I need to double down on it. It doesn't feel like it like it definitely feels like I'd prefer to do something else. But knowing the science saying like, Okay, I don't believe my intuition tells me I don't need to do this, but let me try ultimately, And if you take time to mindfully notice you notice, oh, I do feel better at the end of today. You know we're just talking and I did a bunch of podcast episodes. I'm going to be dead tired. I'm going to feel the need to like PLoP down and scroll through Netflix, not talk to anyone, like just but like the science tells me, like, oh, that's the time that I did text a friend and reach out or do something active that will really feel like leisure rather than just feeling apathetic and yucky. Right, that's not my intuition. But because I've seen the studies, I know, well, I need to do something that's a little bit different from my intuition, and then I need to, you know, again, do the experiment. Pay attention, like when you think, oh, actually that kind of felt good. You know, it's like you were talking about with doing the blessings practice with your friends, like actually, now that I reflect on it, that was fantastic. Like why did I stop doing that? Right? Why did we stop? Yeah? This is another another interesting disconnect that I talk with um that I talked about a lot on the podcast Way with my students is like our brains aren't really wired to, you know, really go after all the things that we like all the time, which is kind d of stupid. I mean, if you look at the neuroscientific wiring of the brain, there are all these regions that code what's called liking, which is like the actual experience you get. You know, when I have a really hard work out, I like that. You know it feels really good, right, Um, you know, when you were doing something really fun like that so fun moment, that feels good. But your brain has different circuits for what you might want to call wanting, which is like the craving for those things like whether or not you put effort into going after them. And there are a lot of cases where what we want doesn't match what we like. Like after this, I predict I want like my body is telling me, hey, go, do you know some apathetic thing where I popped down and watch TV? But am I going to really like that as much as the hard pilates work out after this? Like probably not right, and the reverse right, Like I don't have a wanting system that's craving to like meditate in the morning, or like, you know, I have a craving to like eat a bunch of cupcakes or like, you know, salty things after this, and that's gonna make me feel gross, whereas the meditation is going to make me feel rate. And so I think so many of our problems wind up relying on this fact that we don't necessarily want what we like, and we don't necessarily not want things we're not gonna like. It's it's a very poor brain design, but it explains a lot. I think. As you're explaining and teaching all of this to people, and now that the class is available online, you know, be being adapted into a free course. By the way, for everyone listening on course, Sarah, anyone can sign up for What has that experience been like to have this this very universal set of truths but that I imagine feels very intimate in a classroom become global. What what has that been like for you? Yeah, it's been a little strange. And even you know, the online class that we filmed, I filmed it with this small little salon of about twenty students. We filmed at my home, you know, so if you watch it on Corsera, feels you kind of intimate. We've been talking with these students. And what's funny now is three point five million people have taken the class, right, and so it's like this thing that was like, this intimate thing of me sharing these deep truths with the students in my home, you know, have become the thing that literally millions of people are watching. So what it's been like has just been surreal, humbling, powerful. It's really taught me that so many people need this stuff, that need these insights, They especially need them in the midst of this pandemic stuff that we've all been going through. Yeah, so it's just really shown me that this scientific approach resonates and people really need it more than I even even I expected. How do you think that your role as a professor and an educator in I suppose both of these mediums really has impacted you as a scientist. I think it's been you know, really important for me as a scientist in the sense that I you really realize that sometimes when you're like the Ivory Tower and a scientist, you can kind of just get in your head about like the accolade filled version of it. You know. I imagine even in the chainment industry you do this too. It's like let me get the next part, or let me do the next thing, you know, for academics, like let me get to the next grant or the next paper. And I think this process had made me realize that, like, ultimately, these are truths that can help people, right, these are things that we need to make accessible so people know how to use them, so they can put them into effect in their lives to flourish more. And so you know, it's made that work so much more meaningful. But it's also made it so much more important, right. You know, these can't be just findings that are published in some journal somewhere. We need to make sure these things are accessible and people know these things so they can put them into effect in their own lives. Yeah, I think about the truth of societal hurting that we see around us everywhere, and I wonder, how do we begin, all of us as a collective to change that together, and certainly this research it feels like a great way to begin. When when you look at the world around you, whether it's in your physical circle of your academic world, or or perhaps halfway around the globe, who's really inspiring you right now? Oh? I mean I get inspired by so many people. I mean I'm inspired really quite locally by my staff. You know, I have this amazing staff even in my college, who would like do anything for the students in our residential college at Suliman College here at Yale. Just the amount of work they put in the way they've so flexibly navigated the pandemic and all the challenges that poses on a college campus. Like, they are amazing and so inspiring. It's even sometimes hard to think like globally because you know, I have such a passion and inspiration for the kinds of things they're doing on a local level. But even teaching this class has also connected with me with people who are doing these inspirational acts you know, it was actually a student in my class who started a program called Helping Hands, where in the pandemic he was kind of delivering groceries to elderly individuals. And that's incredible that, you know, a student could come up with this and could kind of really change people's lives. So yeah, I mean I see inspiration all over the place, but but often really locally because we I think whenever again, if you train your mind towards these blessings, towards these delights, towards the things that you're thankful for, you know, you can notice thankfulness even in these tiny spaces. You don't have to be like, well, this is amazing, you know, politician or person who's fighting for social justice, like you see it just in your own backyard, you know, and you can be profoundly affected by it. I love that. The reminder to to really look around you and be present, I think is so important. The pandemic has certainly taught me that that's really been my silver lining, is to be more deeply present. And it's also shown me that I can't do as much in a day as I've always thought. It's just not possible. The goals can exist the interests can be there, but time is just not as flexible as I wish it was. And and in your TED talk you actually talk about how important it is that we recognize our limitations, and you talk about how recognizing our limitations might lead us to being able to overcome them as a species, which was fascinating to me. Can you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think we have these dumb intuitions, we make, these mistakes, We have these tendencies that might not be leading us towards flourishing, that might be actually leading us away from flourishing. And I feel like, on the one hand, well, that's annoying that our minds are designed in this dumb way. But by understanding those design flaws, we really can not necessarily fix them, but kind of them up with like gluegy solutions to do better. Right. I don't think we're I don't necessarily think we're ever going to fully overcome all these misconceptions. It's going to be hard to believe. No money doesn't matter for happiness, or I'll just be perfectly happy if some terrible circumstance happens to me. Like it's hard for our brains to think that. But we can know the science enough to structure our days with practices that really will help us flourish a little bit more. And that knowledge is really power. It's not like resetting all these misconceptions, but knowing our flaws can allow us to work with them and and work with them to be happier. Mm hmm. Given the state of us or maybe the world today, what when you look at those limitations that we might be able to overcome, what limitations do you think that we as a species should immediately trying to address. Well, there are lots, you know, I mean, you know any many, but I mean I think one is that there are so many opportunities to do better in the world that we tend not to do because we assume they'll kind of compete with our happiness. So an example is like, if I'm having a really bad day, I get this urge of like I want to treat myself, I want to do something nice for myself. I'm gonna order myself dinner, buy myself something or whatever. And it turns out, if you look at the science, that's not the best way to spend your money to feel better. In fact, you'd be better off spending your money, like, like dollar for dollar in terms of your happiness impact, you'd be better off spending that money on someone else. There's been these studies done where you walk up to people on the street, hand them some money, and you tell them either, hey, spend that money tonight to treat yourself, or hey, spend that money tonight to do something nice for another person. And what you find is that the group of people who do the nice thing for other people wind up happier than those that spend the money to treat themselves. I bring this up to say there are a lot of points in my life I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel terrible. What can I do to feel better? My instinct is often not like, let me do something awesome for somebody else. Let me text a friend who might be struggling and check in on them. Let me donate something to charity, let me like put some time into volunteering for this good cause. That's not my instinct. But if it was my instinct, I'd both make myself happier and I'd probably do something to make the world at large a better place. Right. And so that's a flaw that I think if we understood that, if we understood that doing kind things for others, that treating other people is more effective than treating ourselves. We do that more often because that's the path to personal happiness. Like just selfishly, we do it more often. But it would lead to such a cascade of good effects in the world too. Yes, that's one of the things that I always try to talk to young people about. In particular, if I am speaking out of college or with a group of students and they're asking me about activism, I just say, listen, you're showing up to work, but you you will be happy or than you've been doing anything else when you show up for other people and changes your life. And I like knowing that there's data, when there's science that backs you up in and you know this thing I think in science. But again, you know, it's hard to eat. I know this science. I could quote you the study in the year it was published, but like it's hard to put into effect in your own life. I did this myself in a kind of just a tiny example. So I had my birthday in the first year of the pandemic. You know, now we've had multiple birthdays in the pandemic but at the time, I was like, oh, what was me? I can't go out to eat, you know, like the year one, Like I'm in lockdown? What am I gonna do? This sucks? And so I was like, Okay, let me take a page out of the Happiness playbook, like what should I do? And I was saying like, maybe this is the year I shoake your birthday presents to other people, Like maybe I should do for others like you know, shocker based on what I just said. But I thought it was right before the school year started, and this was when we really didn't know what was happening on campus. So many of my colleagues, who also work as heads of college were like scared and frustrated and it was just like a bad time. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to get each of them a bottle of Champagne's flourge a little right, my other colleagues who are in the same role, and I decided I would write each of them a little gratitude letter of like, you know, this this year has been tough, but I'm so you know, one thing I'm grateful for is that you've been there with me and that you know, like we've been in this together, and and brought them to their house and even telling the story now, I can feel my heart filling up because their reactions happy, tears, returning the fever. Even just a couple of weeks ago, one of them like called me and brought it up. It was like, you know, I was just thinking of that letter you wrote, and like you know how much we've been through since then, Like I have such stronger relationships with all of them because of that act. And I could have blown, like I could have bought that many bottles of champagne for myself and just blown through them, you know, hopefully like with with reasonable separation, but like it wouldn't have given me the joy and the kind of ripple effected joy as you said before that doing those nice things did over time. But like again we get it wrong, Like we get the presents on our birthday. You imagine if all of our birthdays we're giving things away to others. And again, it makes us happy at the same time as it makes the world better. Like the brain didn't have to work like that, but it did, and that's kind of cool. I love that, and that that feels like cracking a code of the brain somehow, you know, quite literally, when I think about how so many of my favorite things I call life hacks. Oh it's a good life hack. This feels like a life hack. And I wonder if if you could solve or uncover or crack the code on on any current mystery about the human mind. Because we're talking about all this data, what what would you want to tackle next? Yeah, I mean, if I had my druthers and going to really understand stupid features of the mind. Yeah, I think. I think. Actually the one I would most want to figure out and figure out how to fix is that disconnect I mentioned between wanting and liking. If I could just get my brain to creave the stuff that would really feel good. If I could creave doing nice things for others. If I could crave it really intense our long meditation class, which would be amazing for my psyche. If I could crave saying no in a way that didn't make me feel guilty. Right, all of those things would be so good. Like brain lead me in the right direction and right now it seems like brains are structured that they don't often do that. And the flip side, if I could say brain for chocolate chip cookies right before I went to bed. Not a smooth move like falling asleep, Like brain, could we not skip the workout this week? Can you make me crave that pilates class just like I craved those cookies. If we could get brains to do that, we'd be we'd be killing it. But right now there's some there's still a lot of room to figure out and understand why the brain is disconnected in that way and what we can do to fix it. Still a bit of a mystery. M that feels exciting. Yeah, it could be. It could be. I mean, right now, it feels like, damnit, brain, do it? Would you get it together? The scientific mystery part of it is fun. Yeah, stop craving sour can and you start craving water. Yeah, exactly, simple, a simple one, right If that would be really nice? I imagine there's so many people feeling inspired right now and excited, and you know who want to sign up for the course. But I've got your ear in this in this moment, lucky for me. So I'm wondering for the folks out there who really look up to you, Is there any advice you'd like to give? Yeah? I mean I think the advice I care most about is that, like, you you can control your own flourishing, right, Like, not a guilty way, like it's on you to like flourish more if you're feeling depressed and anxious is on you. No, Like, there's a lot of our happiness that we really can control if we have the right strategies. We don't, like, our brains are not designed to have the right strategies, So it's nothing you should feel guilty about. But with the right strategies, you can just feel better. And that is so powerful. It's hard, right, Like it takes behavior change, and that takes work, but like the path is there that you really can improve. And that's the piece of advice I share, because wow, that's profound, Like, no matter how you're feeling, like you can use strategies to feel a little bit better. Even if one of those strategies is like allowing and accepting your emotions, there are strategies for that to getting through the negative stuff. Um, but all of it is there for you to control if you understand how to do it. And and and that's real power. Mm hmm. That feels exciting when you look at the landscape of your life, your academic career, your work, your goals that lie ahead. What would you say upon that survey feels like the work in progress in your life right now? Right now? The real work in progress, I would say is two things. One is trying to find as many ways to get this content out and share these insights with other people as we can. Hard at work at the next season of our podcast, The Happiness Lab. That's the work in progress that I'm kind of most proud of and most excited to share with people. But you know, if I think personally like I'm the work in progress, you know, like I'm the one who's really trying to think about my own flourishing and how to put these habits into effect in my own life. And it does constantly take work. That's the you know, I gave the good news before. The good news is like we have so much control over our flourishing. The bad news is, just like other things we have control over, it takes work. Like you can become you know, like incredibly fit, but like you gotta hit the gym right, Like you can learn Italian, but like you kind of pick up a book and like you know, going through a lingo or whatever, Like like all good things, you can do it, but it does take some work. And the second work in progress is really me. I'm trying to put that work in and see what happens on the other side. I like it. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun and I really appreciate you joining all of us today. Thanks so much for having me on the show. U