The psychologist explains why successful, wealthy, and beautiful people don't feel happier.
Two years ago, Yale University psychologist Laurie Santos began to wonder why students seem so detached from each other. As a good teacher, she linked her observations to data - and this caused her anxiety. A college health assessment found that 42% of college students felt too depressed last year to go about their business normally. Several other surveys have suggested that older people also have a hard time finding happiness and connecting. Santos, a decision maker, began teaching a course called Psychology 157: Psychology and the Good Life in the spring of 2018. She wanted to understand what social sciences can teach people in terms of pursuing, achieving and maintaining happiness. Her course was based on work on behavioral economics and taught about the unconscious prejudices and misconceptions that make us less happy - at home, at school and at work.
To say that the course has become popular is to say nothing. About 1200 people signed up for it - about a quarter of the total number of Yale students. Then Santos began to be invited to appear in the media, at the World Economic Forum in Davos and in companies. In the fall of 2019, she launched The Happiness Lab, a podcast series featuring five-time world figure skating champion Michelle Kwan and musician David Byrne. The work and ideas that Santos discusses - for example, that higher paychecks don't necessarily make you happier, that good grades in school correlate with low life satisfaction, that happiness depends on leaders - serve as a lesson for people who run organizations, manage people, or just want to find ways to maintain balance and peace of mind.
Strategy + Business: We are spending record amounts and time on health, and yet obesity rates continue to rise. Is the situation similar with happiness? More seems to be written about how to lead fulfilling lives than ever before, and yet the data shows that we are becoming less and less happy
Santos: Unlike diet and exercise, happiness is something that we, as a species, have been obsessed with for a very long time. Aristotle wrote about eudaimonia over 2000 years ago. The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. However, I think that now more and more people are really thinking about what they can do to be happier. And research certainly shows that we may be on the wrong path. Even this notion of taking care of yourself … You can't go to any women's website and not see the term "taking care of yourself." But all research shows that happiness isn't about taking care of yourself. It is about being open to others and being guided by others in your experience.
S + B: It's tempting to blame many of our troubles - whether it's electoral security or the decline of civic debate - on the rise of social media. Are social media making us less happy?
Santos: We have relatively little data on this, but in my opinion, there are important hints that changes in happiness are indeed related to the development of social media. Take the rise in depression, anxiety: we have no evidence of a causal relationship, but there seems to be some kind of connection here. Mental health statistics, especially among young people, are really terrible. A recent National Assessment of Health in US colleges shows that over 40% of students feel too overwhelmed to handle their tasks. More than 60% say they are extremely worried. Another 60% feel lonely most of the time. And more than 10% admit that they seriously thought about suicide last year. This is different from when I was in college. This is even different from what happened five or 10 years ago.
S + B: And this applies to people in their early 20s who come to work?
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Santos: Yes. Our systematic student data is better because we can get them to fill out surveys. But in a recent YouGov poll, 30% of millennials said they are single most of the time, and 30% simply don't have a single friend to turn to if something happens.
S + B: Why did you start teaching a course on happiness?
Santos: I first launched it in the spring of 2018. Classes started in part because I am the head of Silliman College [at Yale]. In this capacity, I live on campus with the students. And I personally observe what kind of life students live. They are much more preoccupied these days and much more future-oriented than they were in my day. So I decided to collect everything that social science has to say about how to live better, happier, and prosper. I assumed that this course would be one of many others on campus, with 30-40 students enrolled. Professors receive lists when students enroll. Basically, these tables have zero to 100 rows, because that's the largest size for a group. But my listings grew from zero to 1000. As a result, about 1200 students signed up for the course. Almost one in four Yale students. And outside the university, they quickly learned about him. Almost every lecture was attended by a film crew from major international or national media - for example, The Today Show or CBS News.
S + B: Experts in behavioral economics talk about recognizing biases and then creating structures and incentives to overcome them. Can we do the same with happiness?
Santos: Research on happiness is very similar. One of the successes of behavioral economics has been the realization that our intuition about loss or risk often fails us. And the shocking results from happiness studies suggest that our gut is just as wrong when it comes to what makes us happy. We strive for a lot of things, thinking that they will make us happier, but that doesn't work. At least not in the way we think. And we lack the motivation to do what really means a lot to happiness.
S + B: What are these things that people think they make them happy?
Santos: One of the main ones is money. People often choose jobs based on where the highest salary will be. More money makes you happier if you live below the poverty line. Research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, two Nobel laureates in economics, shows that more money adds happiness in the United States until the annual income is about $ 75,000. And then, even if your salary doubles or triples, it will not improve your inner well-being, if measured by standard indicators.
One more thing is material goods. We think that a new home or a new car will make us happy. And so it will be, but for a very short period of time. But then we adapt and get used to it - much faster than we think. Oh, and one more thing that is very important to my students. We think good grades will make us happier. It turns out there is a correlation between high school grades and well-being, but it's a negative correlation. That is, the children who receive the highest grades are the most unhappy. They also have the lowest self-esteem and the lowest optimism.
S + B: So what makes us happy that we neglect?
Santos: One key thing we neglect is the importance of free time. There is a lot of research on what scientists call time supply. The work of Ashley Willans, a professor at Harvard Business School, shows that the more money we give to get time, the happier we become. So if you pay someone to do the laundry or use money in other ways to get more free time, it will make you happier. The problem is that we often spend time making money, so the opposite is true.
Another important indicator of happiness is how much time you spend with other people and how much time you spend with people you care about. There are also many works showing that we are happier when we focus on others - we care about others more than about ourselves. People who donate more to charity and people who spend more time volunteering are generally happier than those who don’t.
S + B: Your podcast tells how the brain tricks us into what we need to be happy. Is this one big lie? Or is it a series of interconnected lies?
Santos: I think this is a series of interconnected lies. As with our cognitive biases: it's not just one bias. There are many simple examples of how the mind deceives us when it comes to predicting what will make us happy. For example, we forget how much we can adapt to the situation. Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert calls this "immunity neglect." We forget that we have a psychological immune system that protects us when something goes wrong. If something bad happens, then we can deal with it. And too often we build our lives to protect ourselves from any difficult situations. I will stay in this terrible marriage because divorce will be too difficult. Or I'll stay in this terrible job because two years without a paycheck will be terrible for me. We make decisionswithout realizing that we are much more resilient than we think.
S + B: What incentives can lead us to behave towards happiness?
Santos: We don't have motivational mechanisms to find social connections. I can see this in my students. I remember the cafeteria was the noisiest place on campus when I was studying. Students now sit in the dining room wearing large Bose headphones and look at their phones. Those with headphones can strike up a conversation with strangers in the dining room, but instead they put on headphones and sit by themselves. In the podcast, we share this hilarious study by University of Chicago Business School professor Nick Epley, where he gets passengers to interact with the people sitting next to them. People expect it to be awkward and awful. But it turns out that they feel much more positive than they thought. And introverts too.
S + B: Can you talk a little about the difference between happiness and mindfulness that is in vogue everywhere, especially in the workplace?
Santos: Research shows that mindfulness contributes to happiness. And that "mind wandering" leads to a lack of happiness. Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth conducted a study in which they approached participants at different times of the day and asked them, “What are you thinking? How are you feeling?" And it turned out that people don't think about what they are doing a little less than half the time. This is a terrible result, because whenever your mind wanders, you don't feel as good as you might if you were focused on the present moment.
S + B: If I want to be happier, is mindfulness work a necessary first step?
Santos: Necessary - it says loudly. There are many paths to happiness. But definitely one of them is to be more mindful and more aware. It is no secret that Buddhist monks and others who spend thousands of hours practicing mindfulness experience a certain calm joy. Research by Yale University professor Hedy Kober shows that meditation can help even beginners. Even in the first couple of meditations, you have decreased activity in those areas of the brain that wander.
S + B: Yale students have most likely already won the genetic and socioeconomic lottery. They have a lifetime and endless possibilities ahead of them. What is the problem?
Santos: They did what 94% of the people who went to Yale couldn't do - they did, right? And they are unhappy anyway, much more unhappy than I expected. I think this is because my students often have to give up everything that leads to happiness - communication, rest, breaks, awareness - in order to get to Yale. And they really have to prioritize one thing that we know negatively affects happiness: grades. Achievement doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. The guest on my podcast was Clay Cockrell, a therapist for people worth more than $ 50 million. And he says all of his clients are unhappy. One of the reasons for unhappiness is that they feel guilty. Well, like, “I'm super rich and I'm still miserable. Why don't I feel satisfied?"
S + B: In recent years, companies have been investing in a culture of happiness. They encourage people to completely dissolve in their work. In large companies, lounges and yoga classes have become commonplace. Is the concern for the well-being of employees a responsibility of companies? Is this a good business idea?
Santos: It is often thought that there is some tension between making employees happy and achieving some balance. But most research on happiness shows that happy people perform better. They are more creative. They are more willing to spend time at work. Companies often think that the only way to get people to work harder is to pay them more. But there are many other ways to motivate people, such as instilling a sense of unity in them, giving jobs that make sense, or expressing gratitude. A study by Adam Grant of Wharton Business School found that call center workers start taking twice as many calls after they receive a supervisor's appreciation for their work.
S + B: You said that a sense of unity is an important factor. In a company, it is usually a common cause to try to increase sales or profits
Santos: It's just one metric, and it might be a metric that resonates with certain people, but not all. Making money for some unnamed shareholders is not a motivation that fits well with our inner psychology. So there may be more effective ways to motivate people. Marty Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are exploring what are called character strengths and doing what you love. Do you like learning? Do you want to help people? Research shows that people are happiest at work and perform best when they approach work in terms of the best use of their strengths.
Take, for example, working as a toilet cleaner. Doesn't sound very nice. But when cleaners rethink their job to fit their strengths, they like it better. If, for example, a cleaning lady in a hospital thinks that “every toilet I clean helps a child with cancer,” she will not only love the job, but she will do it better. If you work for a pharmaceutical company, you may be concentrating on selling more drugs this quarter, or making drugs that will help people with dire illnesses. These motives are often much more effective than the extra couple hundred dollars a week.
S + B: So spending time with people you like, being able to disconnect and feeling mastery over time are all conducive to happiness. Whether you're sitting at the checkout at Walmart or working as a CEO, you are under pressure to stay connected. And feeling like you're always lagging behind or unresponsive at work can escalate. How can you get rid of this tension?
Santos: The tension comes from the existing attitude that you always have to be in touch. Businesses can set specific standards so that rest, relaxation and mindfulness are considered part of the corporate culture. Or it could be the other way around: if you didn't log into your email at 9:00 pm Sunday night, then something is wrong. The second approach leaves out the data from many studies that show that people actually perform better when they have a little free time.
In this podcast, we cover simple things leaders can do to create a more effective culture. Wharton's professor Segal Barsad is working on what she calls affective spirals. The idea is that if there is a negative person in the workplace, then the mood of the whole team deteriorates. But Barsad reminds us that sometimes we ourselves are such negative people. If we get angry about being in a traffic jam in the morning, we will pass this mood on to colleagues without even realizing it. The flip side of the coin is that we can be a voice of calm or a moment of joy in our workplace. And Barsad is sure that leaders have a special influence, because everyone pays attention to the boss. So if the leader is able to bring positive emotions, then suddenly the whole team feels better.
S + B: Throughout most of history, the goal of the job has been to earn wages that cover expenses and support a family. People did not perceive work as a means of self-realization. So why bother with happiness in a factory or office?
Santos: There’s another funny misconception: we think we’re much happier when we’re on holiday than when we’re at work. But in many areas of activity, work brings a person into a state of flux, and you enjoy it more than watching television or other leisure activities. There is research showing that when you do something interesting at work, you say you feel good. And at home, in your free time, you get bored watching Netflix, and you feel apathy.
S + B: Businessmen love metrics. What metrics can we use when we talk about measuring happiness?
Santos: There are two standard measurement methods. One of them is your cognitive well-being, your satisfaction in life. All things considered, how do you think your life is going? How do you feel in your life, namely: do you experience a lot of positive emotions. Do you laugh a lot? Are you smiling? Crying? All of these metrics are subjective, but I think even people who are obsessed with metrics understand that they should be subjective. People know how they feel when things are going well.
S + B: Companies often conduct surveys to find out if employees are involved. If you were designing such a survey, what non-obvious questions would you include in it?
Santos: Are you satisfied with your job? Overall, how satisfied are you with your life on a scale of one to five? There are standard, affordable surveys that employers can use for this kind of thing. In my course, we use one of these, called PERMA, which addresses different aspects of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement.
S + B: In many workplaces, collective efforts are organized around achieving a goal with rewards, incentives, and consequences. Does setting goals, individual or collective, and then striving to achieve them promote happiness?
Santos: There is a lot of research showing that goal setting helps you perform better. If those goals align with what makes you happy, so much the better. I think people strive to be positive when setting goals, especially in the business world. But research shows that for effective goal setting, you also need to think about the obstacles to your goal. People who are looking to lose weight and who mostly fantasize about how wonderful life will be when they lose weight actually lose weight the least. That is, the positive must have some basis in reality.
S + B: In organizations, does happiness come from the upper levels or from the lower ones?
Santos: There is a lot of data that shows that from above. People look to the leader to find out how things are going. Should I be anxious or happy about this development? They also try to understand norms by looking at leaders. Is it the norm in our company that we can take days off, or is it the norm that we work until we drop? There are different ways companies can communicate these norms and practices. For example, you might have one conversation at the beginning of the year and never come back to this question. Or, a norm can permeate all of a company's business practices, all of its space, all of its messaging. Employees notice the difference. They know that in words you promise that you can take your time and do everything calmly, but in practice they have to work to the point of exhaustion. People can tell what principles are actually respected in the company.
S + B: Are you happy?
Santos: Yes. I am very happy. And I became much happier when I started teaching this course for two reasons. First, the joint research on happiness gave me real meaning in life and a purpose that I did not expect. Secondly, I need to adhere to the principles that I am talking about myself, otherwise it will be just embarrassing, and my students will reproach me if I do not do what I tell them. Everyone can improve their well-being by doing the right thing, but doing so requires changing their behavior. You can't go to the gym once and say, “Okay, I did it. Now I'm in shape. Many happiness practices - the time it takes for awareness, the time for gratitude, communication with people - work the same way. You just have to do it over and over again.