Dr. Laurie Santos is one of the world’s foremost experts on happiness and human cognition. Laurie is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab, one of the most popular podcasts in the world; with over 100 million downloads.
In addition to her work on the evolutionary origins of human cognition, Laurie is an expert on the science of happiness and the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. Her Yale course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. The class became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of four students enrolled. Her course has been featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine. The online version of the class—The Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org—has attracted more than 4 million learners from around the world. A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds, and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, is a top-3 Apple podcast which has attracted 100+ million downloads since its launch.
Q: What does happiness really mean?
[Laurie Santos]: I think we can define happiness in all kinds of different ways, and we could have a really long discussion about what it actually means. I’ll give you the social scientist’s definition, which is basically about “happiness in your life” and “happiness with your life.”
So, what do I mean by that? When we talk about happiness in our lives, we’re talking about the positive emotions we experience—things like joy, laughter, and contentment—and making sure our positive emotions outweigh our negative ones. It doesn’t mean we never feel any negative emotions; it just means we try to keep a pretty good ratio of positive to negative overall. That’s being happy in your life.
But there’s also being happy with your life, which is how we think our life is going overall. Researchers often call this “life satisfaction”—basically, are you satisfied with your life? These two parts match what researchers describe as the affective (how your life feels day to day) and the cognitive (how you think your life is going) components of happiness. For me, if we can find strategies that boost both of those aspects, we’ll end up improving people’s happiness.
Q: How do our brains lie to us about happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: It’s not so much that there’s a selection advantage to our brains lying to us—in fact, if anything, it’s probably bad that our brains do that. I think it happens more as a byproduct of other features of how our brains work. For example, there are a lot of situations where different parts of our brains just don’t communicate well. Philosophers call this “information encapsulation,” meaning certain areas of the brain do their own thing independently of others.
Think about visual illusions: you can measure two lines and see they’re the same length, but they’ll still look like one is longer than the other. I think a lot of the biases we bring to happiness, and the misconceptions we have about what makes us happy, fall out of similar processes. There might be a part of your brain computing your relative salary, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m not doing well compared to everyone else,” and it can’t see that you’re actually doing okay in absolute terms.
Money is one example of something that doesn’t make us as happy as we think. Another normal feature of our brains is that we get used to things over time—this is probably evolutionarily advantageous, so our neurons don’t keep firing at the same level when the same stimulus sticks around. But it also means we adapt to good things in life more quickly than we expect. You get a new tech gadget and love it at first, but then you get used to it or bored with it. You get a raise, and for the first week it feels awesome, but then it doesn’t have as much impact as you thought it would. Researchers call this the “impact bias.”
So yeah, I think these are all cases where our brains lie to us. It’s not because they’re doing something insidious or that there’s some advantage to messing up our sense of happiness—it’s just the normal processes of our brains sometimes go awry, and we end up not appreciating what we have as much as we could.
Q: What are your views on the happiness industrial complex?
[Laurie Santos]: For sure. So many of the things our culture pushes us to pursue for happiness don’t actually work the way we think they will. Material possessions, more money—if you’re on social media, you get this strong sense that you should go after more of everything and then you’ll feel better. For the college students I work with, it’s grades and academic achievements: land the perfect job and you’ll be happy forever, right? But in practice, these things just don’t have the impact we ultimately expect.
We also don’t really have cultural mechanisms that emphasize what truly matters—not so much the hustle, but the rest. The social connection. The deeper forms of connection we get from meeting people face-to-face. I think we just don’t have enough cultural messaging encouraging us to go after the stuff that really boosts our well-being.
Q: What are some of the core pillars of happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: I often joke with my students—you’re English, so I think you’ll appreciate this—that happiness is like a hot cross bun with four “prongs” or pillars. The first is our behaviors. We want to go after behaviors that make us happy, such as improving our social connections, doing nice things for other people, and taking care of our physical well-being by sleeping more and getting a bit more exercise.
The second prong is changing our thought patterns. We know certain thought patterns really matter for happiness, like cultivating an attitude of gratitude—truly noticing what you’re thankful for—and practicing mindfulness, being present in the moment. Even developing self-compassion, where you talk to yourself like you’d talk to a kind friend, can make a huge difference.
Prong number three is about regulating our emotions. Our emotional world is crucial, and we need to find ways to bring in more positive emotions—especially ones we don’t expect, like awe—and also manage negative emotions in a healthy way. We’re not trying to get rid of negative emotions altogether, because they’re important evolutionary signals, but we do want them in a dose that helps us take action rather than overwhelm us.
Finally, the fourth pillar is paying attention to our bodies. That includes focusing on your breath and doing activities that activate your parasympathetic nervous system—our “rest and digest” system—such as relaxation practices. All these prongs matter for happiness, and they’re all interventions we can try, regardless of our circumstances or genetic background. They’re simple changes that can really improve our well-being.
Q: What are some of the most common saps on our happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: I think social media is a great example of this. It feels a little bit like social connection, but I often joke that it’s the “NutraSweet” version—it seems good but doesn’t deliver the psychological benefit we expect. In fact, our use of technology can be a big opportunity cost on a lot of the stuff I mentioned earlier, especially true social connection and being fully present. How often are we checked out of what’s happening around us because we’re looking at our phones?
Sleep is another big issue, particularly for young people. We’re seeing higher rates of sleep deprivation than ever, partly because technology provides a constant distraction. And it’s not just social media—it’s technology and screens in general. Netflix once joked that their only real competitor is sleep, which says a lot about how these platforms fight for our attention in ways that might not be steering us toward genuine happiness.
Q: What is the role of negative experiences, on happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: For sure. I think there’s a big misconception—sometimes called “toxic positivity” or “good vibes only”—that a happy life is one where we only experience positive emotions. But that’s just patently false. Evolutionarily speaking, our negative emotions serve a really important purpose: they cue us to take action. The same way physical pain tells us something is wrong when we touch a hot stove, emotional pain signals that something in our life needs fixing.
Anger often means there’s a norm or rule being violated that we need to address. Sadness arises from loss we need to acknowledge or heal. Loneliness tells us we’re missing social connection. Overwhelm—which so many of us feel—warns us there’s too much on our plate, and we may need to make some serious changes.
If we tried to live without negative emotions, we’d actually be worse off, because those feelings help steer us toward what will ultimately make us happier—we just have to listen to them. The problem is that we often don’t. When we feel overwhelmed, for example, we might ignore it and keep pushing forward instead of looking at our schedule and removing things that aren’t essential. We might scroll on social media or reach for a snack just to avoid the discomfort.
The key is allowing and acknowledging our negative emotions so we can understand what they’re trying to teach us. They often nudge us toward the behaviours and thought patterns that really can help us feel better in the long run.
Q: How does our ‘scorecard’ in life impact our happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: Money is a perfect example of how complicated this can be. If you’re living below the poverty line and can’t afford food or shelter, then yes—getting more money is definitely going to make you happier. The problem comes when we take that truth and extrapolate it way beyond the point where it’s still useful. A famous study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton back in 2010 suggested that around $75,000 (in 2010 dollars) was roughly the point where additional income stopped boosting happiness. Once you hit that threshold, making more money didn’t seem to increase happiness much further—but most of us don’t see it that way. We still think if we won the lottery and suddenly had $100 million, we’d feel exponentially happier.
You mentioned the idea of a “scorecard,” and I think that’s where we go wrong. We often don’t measure our progress objectively; we measure ourselves against others. Whether it’s money, success at work, grades for my students, or even physical appearance, we hold ourselves to some shifting standard. Sometimes it’s how someone else is doing; sometimes it’s how we used to be. Now that I’m middle-aged, I hear friends say things like, “My neck doesn’t look good anymore.” They’re comparing themselves to their younger selves, and of course it feels bad. These scorecards just lead us down a path of dissatisfaction, when in reality most things that truly matter for happiness can’t be measured in any meaningful way. We should be more mindful of living in the moment rather than keeping tally marks that don’t really serve us.
Q: What are some of the practices we can introduce in our lives which contribute to happiness?
[Laurie Santos]: A lot of the things I’ve mentioned already—like social connection—can have a huge impact on our happiness. Even talking to a stranger on your commute can boost your positive emotions and leave you feeling more satisfied with life. Meditation and gratitude are two other “mindset hacks” that don’t just improve happiness but bring a bunch of other benefits, too. For instance, gratitude is linked to better sleep quality and might even reduce inflammation. We sometimes forget how connected our minds and bodies are, so when we shift our thought patterns, we’re also changing the way our bodies respond.
Another big one—beyond social connection—is doing nice things for others, which circles back to that “scorecard” idea. Usually, that scorecard is all about me, me, me, rather than tallying up what we do for the world or for other people. But research shows that helping others not only feels good, it can also lower inflammation and even help reduce high blood pressure. These are exactly the kinds of practices in my “hot cross bun” analogy that have solid evidence behind them. In clinical trials, when people try these activities or shift their thought patterns—versus not doing them—they consistently show improvements in both life satisfaction and positive emotion.
Q: How do we hack our brains to look at long-term happiness, and not just short-term?
[Laurie Santos]: …we don’t necessarily want to chase just that super immediate hit. But actually, a lot of the strategies I mentioned do have pretty immediate benefits. If you strike up a conversation with a stranger on the train and really pay attention, it feels good right away.
The real issue isn’t that these happiness-boosting strategies lack an immediate payoff. It’s that we don’t crave them in the same way we crave other things. I mean, I don’t exactly crave talking to a stranger on a train the way I crave checking my email or jumping on Reddit the second I’m free. That’s what feels like a true “craving,” and that’s where the problem lies. It’s not that our “liking” systems are off or that we have to wait to enjoy something—it’s our “wanting” systems that are out of sync. They push us toward activities that aren’t actually going to help our happiness, almost systematically. But when we do go out of our way to try those better options, it turns out they can work in ways we don’t expect.
Q: What do we know about happiness from other species?
[Laurie Santos]: Yeah, it’s fascinating but also hard to test—asking people if they’re happy is tough enough because we rely on self-reports, and even then we have to be sure we’re measuring a valid construct. Trying to gauge happiness in a rhesus macaque or a dog is even trickier.
If I had to pick the one thing I’ve learned from animals—especially from studying monkeys—it’s related to a thought pattern we already know helps boost happiness: mindfulness or presence. Monkeys often get a bad rap through the term “monkey mind,” which in Buddhist circles refers to a mind that jumps from thought to thought without ever settling. But honestly, I think that’s an unfair insult to actual monkeys. When they’re grooming, they’re just grooming; when they’re eating, they’re truly focused on eating; and when they’re gazing at a beautiful view, they’re fully taking it in.
In contrast, humans have minds that can leap between past, future, and all sorts of hypothetical scenarios. Monkeys don’t appear to do any of that—they’re firmly grounded in the present moment. So if anything, I want to cultivate what I’ve really seen in my research: the true “monkey mind,” which stays right here, right now, most of the time.