It’s not surepraise to anyone that the pandemic has had a huge impact on our mental health. The virus has loneliness, depression, and anxiety about running around the world. So this week we are sitting with The Happiness Lab host and professor of psychology at Yale University, Dr. Laurie Santos, to learn some scientific strategies we can use to confront ourselves and even find happiness. Listen to how dr. Santos discusses how techniques such as reframing and mindfulness can help us to be more resilient in the face of tragedy, and how we can become better at accurately judging the things that provide our joy.
Dr. Santos is a professor of psychology and principal of Silliman College at Yale University. She is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that hinder better choices, and her course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” recently became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years.
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Highlights from this week’s episode
From the Dr. Laurie Santos interview:
How to determine which types of online social interaction are most beneficial to your mental health:
So one way we can think about it is: how can we get closest to what we are naturally built for? But another way is to just think carefully about what feels good. I think this is what we all need to do more and more. It’s like just after you had a certain interaction, how did you feel when you browsed through your Instagram feed for an hour? How do you feel afterwards? If you’re like me, it could be: ‘I feel a little rough, a little apathetic’. How did you feel after the Zoom happy hour? Well, you know, some days I’m enriched and I feel good … If it was like an hour I was a happy hour from Zoom, like millions of hours for work, meetings like Zoom, I feel a little nasty . I had to get up and move around. The answer to what feels best is therefore going to change. And that’s OK too. I think the key is to pay attention to how it feels, because the things we predict are not going to feel good [always] necessarily feel good.
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On the strategy for emotional resilience inspired by the Greek Stoic philosophers:
Epictetus began his book with the idea that there are two things in the world: there are things you can control and there are things you cannot control. The fact that the vaccines are not rolling out as fast as I would like, the fact that my students are not sure if they can stay on campus this semester, the fact that I can not see my friends, everyone I have can not control. But here are the things I can control: my reaction to those things, you know, whether I call a friend or not, whether I pull out my yoga mat and do a good workout because it will make me feel good. These are the things I can control. And what the Stoics say is that if you focus on the things you can control, no one can force you to have a negative emotion.
How we can pursue happiness in the wrong way:
[T]that is the problem with this idea of pursuing happiness: it is not that we should not pursue happiness. It’s just like that when we go about chasing it, we do it wrong … if we really want to focus on what makes us happy, it’s usually things that are much simpler than we think. These are things like taking time to keep up. [T]time for a social connection, your body moving, getting enough sleep … When you feel after things, it does not feel like you are chasing happiness, you are just doing the things you normally have to do as a human being. But it seems that in the end it can bring a lot of well-being.
To hear more about the science of happiness, we recommend listening to the full episode.
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Episode Transcription