transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Cara, at Great Wolf Lodge, there's adventure for the whole family. I'm excited to check out the lodge in the Poconos, which is close to me. And with 23 lodges across the country, there's probably one near all of you too. You and your pack can splash away in the indoor water park, where it's always a toasty 84 degrees. There's a wave pool, a lazy river, and a bunch of massive water slides, including ones your family can enjoy all together.

Speaker 2:
[00:31] They even have adventure-packed attractions, from Magi Quest, a live-action game that kids can play throughout the lodge, to the Northern Lights Arcade. And there's also a bunch of great dining options and complimentary daily events, like nightly dance parties, all under one roof. So bring your pack together at a lodge near you. Learn more at greatwolf.com. That's greatwolf.com. And strengthen the pack.

Speaker 3:
[01:01] It's already hard to engage your second-era system when you're an adult with a fully myelinated frontal lobe and so on. It's definitely going to be harder for kids, but there's still techniques we can use to do that. And I think a big way that we can help the young people in our lives do that better as an adult is to practice it ourselves, right? Is to show that we're regulating our own emotions in real time.

Speaker 1:
[01:31] Hi, Cara.

Speaker 2:
[01:33] Hi, Vanessa.

Speaker 1:
[01:34] We have a very, I'm so happy to say, we have a very special guest on the podcast today. I'm going to do a little drum roll, which I'm sure my mic is not going to pick up. Cara, do you want to do the grand entrance?

Speaker 2:
[01:52] Well, I'll just say that Laurie Santos has been in my house since COVID. She just doesn't know it. My entire family took her course. Two of the four of us may have been more enthusiastic about starting it, but then everyone else got really into it. Laurie, it's so great to be in the same space with you, but we've been in the same space for a long time. Laurie is a professor of psychology at Yale. She's an expert on the science of happiness. This is really important piece. I mean, the ways in which our minds lie to us about what makes us happy. She teaches a course at Yale that I think I read is the most popular course on any college campus anywhere, right? Is that a smile and nod, yes?

Speaker 3:
[02:44] Well, it's definitely, all we can say is the most popular class at Yale, but that's still an achievement. Three hundred years, the place has been around. I can extend.

Speaker 2:
[02:52] It's called Psychology and the Good Life, and it 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, which is, frankly, I think what, I mean, isn't that the goal?

Speaker 1:
[03:09] Well, I mean, that's what we're going to talk about. Is it the goal? If it is the goal, how do we get there? And Laurie, I want to start with the question that we often ask parents and audiences when we speak to them. What do you most want for your kids? And what do they always say? Laurie, never having been in any of those audiences, you can imagine exactly what they say, which is what?

Speaker 3:
[03:39] I want my kid to be happy.

Speaker 1:
[03:40] I want my kid to be happy. And yet, they go about it in very different ways. In some ways that you might say to us are not the recipes for happiness. But before we get to my slightly cynical tee up for you, I'd love for you to define happiness, because it's a very amorphous, subjective term.

Speaker 3:
[04:05] Yeah, yeah. So, I tend to use the definition that social scientists tend to use when they think about happiness, which is still pretty amorphous. But here's what social scientists think. They like to define happiness as having these two parts, being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So, being happy in your life is the idea that you have a decent ratio of positive to negative emotions. Importantly, and I bet we'll talk about this, it doesn't mean you have no negative emotions, but you want your ratio of joy, laughter, contentment to be better than the anger, frustration, sadness, all the negative stuff. You want that ratio to feel good. That's being happy in your life. But there's also the second part of happiness, which is being happy with your life. And that's how you think your life is going. That's all things considered. Are you satisfied with your life? Folks often talk about this as the affective and the cognitive parts of happiness, emotional part and the thinking part. And best case scenario is that you want both of those to be pretty good. And I think that it's a decent definition because we can all think about times where those things have dissociated, right? You know, think back to like, you know, when you first had your baby, you know, you got a newborn like, you know, in your life, maybe there's dirty diapers and you're not sleeping and your boobs are hurting. It's not a great time, right? But with your life, oh my gosh, you have this new bundle of joy, you have a new child in your life, right? And I think we can all think about the opposite dissociation, right? You know, think about some celebrity that has every hedonic pleasure in their life, you know, flying first class and perfect meals and wine, but feels empty inside, right? And so best case scenario to a social scientist is that we're boosting both of those at once.

Speaker 1:
[05:39] When you had Bruce Fleton and Dan Harris, you've been in conversation with both of them and their definitions are interesting to me. And I want to just dig into this a little bit before we get to the heart of the conversation, which is Bruce Fudd defines it as a feeling of comfort. And Dan Harris describes it as, quote, okayness.

Speaker 3:
[06:03] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] And which I was like, okay, but like, where's joy? Where's elation? Where's ecstasy? Like, I'm sort of wondering, it takes out the peaks and valleys of the human experience when happiness is sort of like vanilla.

Speaker 3:
[06:23] Yeah. And I think, you know, there are many things that are wanting from the definition that I shared with you, right? One is that you are losing some of these peaks and valleys, right? It's kind of on average. And that means you could have really, really high, emotional high is really, really low, emotional lows. But if it kind of averages out, okay, you're feeling good. It also kind of misses that the arousal matters, right? Dan Harris' definition of okayness, I think he of course is coming from these meditation traditions, coming from a lot of Eastern traditions, where what you're really shooting for is contentment, or what folks might call equanimity, right? You're just okay with it, right? And that feels really different than a lot of the Western notions of happiness where it feels like something, it's high arousal, it's kind of big emotion, right? And so I think this is the struggle, right? There's so many different ways we could think about these things. But I think almost all of them have some of the same features, which is that we need certain behaviors and mindsets to get there, and we often get those behaviors and mindsets wrong.

Speaker 2:
[07:21] I mean, it does make one wonder if the sort of cortisol surge of it all, or the dopamine hits of it all, have to go along with the definition of happiness, that contentment definition, that I can feel my shoulders come down, I can, right? And to me, given my personality and temperament, that feels very good. To other people, what feels very good is that higher high feeling of what you would describe as Western, sort of more Western style. And it's super interesting to try to figure out, not just what the way the world interprets the word happiness, but actually what you as an individual interpret, because it's got to be different from person to person to person. Can you talk a little bit about your journey through studying happiness and then teaching about it? What's the urgency? Where did that start? What were you seeing in students that made you think, was that it? Was it just the people didn't understand what happiness was or was there more to it?

Speaker 3:
[08:26] Yeah. I've been a psychologist for ever. I'm not going to get into how long I've been doing it because that just sounded depressing but been studying the mind for a long, long time. But my journey specifically to studying happiness started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I became what's called a head of college. Yale has these funny dorms that are also these mini colleges within a college. It's like in Harry Potter where there's like Gryffindor, Slytherin kind of thing. I became a head of college which means as a faculty member, I started living on campus with students in one of these dorms. That means I was really up close and personal with student life. I was seeing them in the dining hall and watching how they experienced life in the courtyard and so on. Honestly, I did not like what I was seeing. I was seeing this so-called college student mental health crisis up close and personal, which is pretty profound. I feel like we hear a lot about these college snowflakes and all these terms, but right now, nationally, more than 40 percent of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Right now, nationally, more than 50 percent of college students say that they're very lonely. Right now, nationally, more than 65 percent of college students say they're overwhelmingly anxious. Right now, nationally, more than one in 10 college students has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. These are scary national statistics, and this was what I was seeing in my little local community, so many students who are struggling. As a kind of benevolent aunt kind of faculty figure in this college, I really wanted to do something to help them, and also had the sense that as psychologists, we're really missing out. The field of positive psychology has all these hacks for mindsets you can change, behaviors you can engage in to feel better. I feel like we weren't doing such a hot job of sharing those strategies with people, so I said, I know what I'll do. I'll develop a whole new class where I teach Yale students all these strategies that the field knows. I'll call the class something cool, I'll call it Psychology and the Good Life, so students will notice it, it'll pop out of the course catalog. But really, that was where it started. I was like, let me get the students in my college some strategies that they can use to feel better, practical tips they could put into effect. I didn't really expect the class to go so viral on campus. We had over 1,000 students take it the first time I offered it. What I didn't expect beyond that was that so many people outside of Yale would hear about the class. I think talking about me being in your living room, I didn't expect so many people to take on the class and so on. But I think it just came at a time when so many of us are feeling stressed out and anxious and we're not enough and that we're putting all this work in and we're doing something wrong. I think when you realize that the science has tips you can use to feel better, that can be really exciting. It can give you some agency.

Speaker 1:
[11:02] Laurie, were you measuring or have you measured the metrics of people who've taken the class before and after having received that guidance and those tips?

Speaker 3:
[11:14] Yeah, we didn't in the live version of the Yale class, mostly because we did not expect 1,000. We thought 30 kids were going to take the class. When 1,000 showed up, we were white knuckling all kinds of logistical issues. But subsequently-

Speaker 2:
[11:25] You mean you didn't get your survey organized?

Speaker 3:
[11:27] Yeah, we didn't get IRB approval and whatever. But we were able to get our act together for the online version of the class. The class is now available online on coursera.org and YouTube for anyone to take it. And there we're able to give people a pre and post survey and to compare how people do on that pre and post survey with how they do on a different online Yale class just to enter a site class. We have this kind of control class. And what we're finding is that students, when they take the class, go up about a point on a 10-point happiness scale. So kind of just like Dan Harris, who was on my podcast, we're finding that people go up about 10% when they start putting these things into effect in their daily life. And I think that that effect size is important. I think sometimes when people hear these tips, you think, I'm going to go from zero to 100, and that's not what happens. But if you're a six out of 10 on a happiness scale, you might go up to a seven. Or if you're a four out of 10, you might go up to a five. And that difference matters, and it feels really meaningful, like in the trenches in your real life.

Speaker 2:
[12:25] I mean, that's cute.

Speaker 1:
[12:26] It's hard to know over time also, as one practices those skills on an ongoing basis, whether there's not ongoing improvement. Because when you just pick up, like I just learned how to play canasta, I suck at canasta. I mean, I'm much better than I was before I learned, but like in a year or two after my friends have kicked my butt, you know, playing on Sundays, I might really go up. So I would be curious to like sort of track people over time and see how much improvement there is.

Speaker 2:
[12:59] When you're in the right age range for canasta, Vanessa, you'll be really good.

Speaker 1:
[13:07] I was 40 when I was 14, so I'm 80 now that I'm almost 50. So I guess that begs the question, Laurie, when we think about human emotion, and it's an interesting where does emotion and happiness, is happiness just a part of emotion, one emotion or is it sort of a meta emotion? So we can dive into that. But when we think about emotions, how much can we control and dictate our emotions? And then what's unique about young people, tweens and teens who have hormones looping in their bodies and brains, who really don't have control over their body chemistry. What can we expect over how much say we have in how we feel?

Speaker 3:
[13:55] Yeah, this is a spot where I think the ancients were really onto something. You know, the ancient Buddhists really thought carefully about how much you could control your emotions. And the Buddha had this famous parable where he talked about it, where the parable is, Buddha is talking to one of his followers and he says, hey, follower, if you're walking down the street and you get hit by an arrow, you know, is that bad? Does that not feel great? And the follower says, yeah, it sucks to get hit by an arrow. He says, okay, imagine you're walking down the street and you get hit by two arrows. Is that worse? And the follower says like, oh yeah, you know, two arrows, much worse than one. And so here's where the emotion analogy comes in. The Buddha says, you know, the first arrow is what happens naturally. That's, you know, a situation comes up, you immediately get pissed off or a situation comes up, you immediately feel sad. That's the first arrow. But the second arrow is our reaction to it. It's what we do to that initial feeling of an emotion. And the Buddha points out that the second arrow is on us. We shoot that arrow ourselves, right? You know, so you get an email from a colleague that kind of annoys you. That moment of annoyance, it's hard to control. You couldn't control the email, but you can control whether you slam your laptop down, go into the other room and get snippy with your husband, and yell at your kids for not emptying the dishwasher. Those next steps are your own. And so I think what insight that gives us psychologically is the idea that we might not be able to control the first emotion. And especially if you're a teenager, if you got hormones flying around, I think those first emotions feel incredibly salient. But we can learn to take the next step in a healthier way. We can learn to regulate our emotions. We can learn to label those emotions. There's lots of work on the process of what's called affect labeling. I think a huge strategy for teenagers to learn like, oh, I'm feeling pissed off right now. I'm feeling really anxious right now. I'm experiencing anxiety in my body. Just those kinds of techniques can be a way to not control the first arrow because we're never going to control that, probably. I mean, we will get some good neurofeedback techniques and we'll work on it. But right now, we don't have those tools. But we all have the tools to control the second arrow with the caveat that it's super hard and we need lots of practice.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
[18:21] We're obviously going to be twinning. Refresh your spring wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com/awkward for free shipping and 365-day returns now available in Canada too. Go to quince.com/awkward for free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com/awkward. What about the relative immaturity of some parts of the brain compared to other parts of the brain? This listening audience knows all about the limbic system being myelinated well before the prefrontal cortex. I'm wondering how that sort of second arrow effect works in a brain that does respond so much more to things that feel good, to risk reward, to motivation, to all those limbic system inputs.

Speaker 3:
[19:16] Yeah. A lot of the second arrow is probably your frontal cortex jumping in to do something harder. But not all of it. We even young people can use techniques where they use their sensory systems to soothe themselves. You're having a really upsetting day, you're feeling sad, you can put on some pump up music. Twelve-year-old can do that, a 15-year-old. Well before, the frontal lobe still myelinated. The simple practice of affect labeling. We've been working on studies and collaboration with some entertainment groups to teach these strategies to toddlers to get better at labeling their emotions. Even that, there's studies showing that that's allowing you to have a little bit of break with what your limbic system is doing. So it is definitely true that it's already hard to engage your second-era system when you're an adult with a fully myelinated frontal lobe and so on. That's right. It's definitely going to be harder for kids, but there's still techniques we can use to do that. And I think a big way that we can help the young people in our lives do that better as an adult is to practice it ourselves, right? Is to show that we're regulating our own emotions in real time.

Speaker 1:
[20:25] Laurie, to ask the flip side, I guess, of the question, do young people have a chance to be happier than people older and younger than they are? Because the research tells us they feel things more strongly than people older or younger. So is there a chance for sort of those peaks that we were discussing earlier?

Speaker 3:
[20:46] Yeah. I mean, I think that's definitely true, right? Young people have way more high arousal emotions. And I think there's lots of evidence if you look at life history data on happiness that young people, at least historically, have been a lot happier. There is, unfortunately, I say unfortunately for me in my midlife, this sort of so-called U-shaped function of happiness, where early in life, you tend to be pretty happy, happiness is really high. And then like a U, you kind of go down, down, down over time. I think the nadir is 48.6, between 48 and 49.

Speaker 1:
[21:16] Perfect.

Speaker 3:
[21:17] So I've just passed this, you know, I'm going back up.

Speaker 1:
[21:19] I'm 49.6.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] There's a benefit to me being the oldest one on this podcast.

Speaker 1:
[21:25] Laurie and I are sitting at the bottom of the U together. Nice to see you there, Laurie. I'm so happy to have the company.

Speaker 3:
[21:33] But good news is as we get older, that's something we can all look forward to, right? Is that we kind of go back up over time, too.

Speaker 1:
[21:39] Yes. You talked about historically young people have been happier. But we talked earlier about what you were noticing on your campus and what all the research and data is telling us about the state of teen mental health. What do you see as the drivers to young people's unhappiness or lack of wellness in their mental health?

Speaker 2:
[22:04] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[22:05] I gave that caveat about the U-shaped curve. Historically, our young people right now are showing the lowest happiness that we've seen since we've been testing. That's really scary for folks who study life history because we don't know what's going to happen. One possibility is the entire U is flattened. Young people are unhappier today and they'll go down a little bit to where you and I are in midlife. But another possibility life history wise is that now the curve just goes down even lower. The U is the same shape, but the lowest point of their happiness is going to get worse, which is really scary. We're seeing young people being unhappier than they ever were. In terms of the drivers, it would be so nice if there was one driver. If it was just like Instagram, we'd be like, get rid of Instagram, and then they'd be fine and everything would go back to normal and whatever. Probably, there's not one driver. I think there's lots, but technology is a big one. Folks like Jonathan Haidt have really pushed this view, and I think there's some controversy over some of the data he talks about, and I think there's a real there there, right? What are young people's technology is preventing them from getting in real life social connection. One of the most important factors when it comes to happiness, it's preventing them from sleeping. We know just reducing your sleep even by an hour or two a night for young people can really introduce some of these mental health issues that we're talking about. And I think it's really devastating young people's attention. Being present, just sort of noticing what's around you being mindful is a strong predictor of happiness. And when your phone is pinging in your pocket, if you can't notice what's going on, that's just necessarily going to make you feel worse. So I think technology is a big driver of this stuff. I think cultural changes that are causing our young people to be pre-professional much earlier than they've ever been pre-professional is a big one, right? Worries about academic success, worries about getting into college, the kinds of things that elite schools like mine are sort of stressing parents out with. I think those are really causing students to not pay attention to their own internal rewards, causing these extrinsic rewards to really steal joy. So I think those cultural changes are a big one too.

Speaker 2:
[24:09] And what about the role of parents buying into a lot of this and stressing themselves out and their kids out? I mean, there's, you know, this achievement perfection culture is very stifling. There's a lot of data about that. And, you know, it feels like we are not doing right by the parents and trusted adults out there, if we don't point out some of the things that they can look in the mirror, see, reflect on and change.

Speaker 3:
[24:38] Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, one of the biggest predictors of childhood and teen anxiety is a parent's anxiety level, you know, and I see this in the students I work with at Yale, you know, have a student who's incredibly anxious, having panic attacks and so on. And then eventually I'll meet a parent and just be like, oh, I see where this, you know, the parents are so stressed out about what classes they're going to take at their grades and oh my gosh. And so I think as a parent recognizing that your skills in emotion regulation, right, your ability to kind of be a little self compassionate, give yourself grace, check your perfectionism. Those are the kinds of things that are going to A, teach your kid the right behaviors, but B, honestly, just help them with emotional contagion. You know, one of the quickest ways that we transmit emotions is just like the way we transmit a virus, right? We kind of catch it. And I often worry that our kids are catching our parental emotions, especially when we try to suppress them and pretend they're not there. And so I think parents should remember they can work on themselves and get the benefit of feeling better themselves, but also helping their kids too.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] Totally. I mean, I want to, I want to highlight that little phrase, especially when parents try to suppress them and pretend they're not there because, you know, many of us, I will own up to, I thought I was this great actress when my kids were younger. I thought I was, you know, sort of playing the role of a super mellow mom. But inside, I was very anxious and nervous about all the things, right? I mean, I was, it was everything from, you know, all the things crossing the street is scary and, you know, when they're little and, you know, where are they going to land in life is scary as they get bigger. I'd love to talk about how you educate people. Let's start with the parent group, but then we're going to work our way down because you've started broadening your course selection for younger audiences, which is super interesting. How do you educate parents and trusted adults to actually let go of some of that?

Speaker 3:
[26:34] Yeah. I mean, first, I think we just need to acknowledge that it's hard, right? Like all of these things are hard and parents are going through a tough time themselves in terms of the achievement culture and perfectionism and meritocracy and all these things, right? So I think take a deep breath, give yourself some grace. Yes, this is hard. But I think the first thing we need to know data-wise is that it really matters. Like it matters a lot for our kids' emotional state, but it also matters a lot for their performance. My colleague Julia Leonard here at Yale is really interested in this question of what causes kids to persist, what causes them to push through when things are tough, when they don't immediately get through a problem set or figure out some sort of tough task. What she finds is a big one is their own beliefs about their ability to succeed. The quickest way to reduce those is to have a parent acting very anxious about what a kid is doing. She does these tasks with little toddlers where she has kids doing a puzzle box and just films parents that are around. What she finds is that the more anxious the parents are acting, the more the parents can't help but intervene because they really want to help the kid. Not only does that affect the kid's performance on that particular task, Julia finds that it affects kid's performance in future tasks. It's as though kids watching their parents be so anxious watching their parents take over start to think, well, I must not be able to do this. I think of this not just with little toddlers, but with my Yale students who have their parents who still act as their alarm clocks because parents are worried they won't get up for their midterms, checking in about whether they can do their laundry. This isn't just affecting kid's performance, it's affecting kid's own ability to recognize what they're capable of, which is really dangerous. I think if only because you care about your kid's performance and their learning, you need to shift that around. A strategy I like to talk about is switching towards parenting to learn. Your goal is to teach your kids things, not just that they perform well. When you parent to learn, you got to let them mess up. You got to let them go through their punches. Of course, that is hard. It is worth saying for parents, that sucks and it's really difficult. But, ultimately, on the other side of it, you get a competent, resilient, persistent kid.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] Right, I mean, there's this weird, delicate balance that on the one hand, you want to help your kid build resilience. On the other hand, you're aiming for, quote unquote, happiness. And this is where the happiness education comes in, right? Because so much of happiness is not being classically happy, but is actually feeling accomplished and feeling all the things. And that comes through all sorts of different pathways, including as the kid in the equation, being allowed some independence, being allowed to make mistakes, being allowed to stand on your own two feet and then get something right and then feel accomplished.

Speaker 3:
[29:23] Exactly. And you mentioned standing on your own two feet. I think we forget the positive emotions that come from agency, and how quickly our agency can get taken away. I love this work of David Yadin, who's a motivational psychologist who studies kids. And he talks about this idea of collaborative troubleshooting, which is whenever your kid comes into trouble, don't try to solve things for them. Try to help them be agentive in solving it themselves. You can ask questions to try to figure out, okay, what have you tried already? Like, I know you're smart at this, and I know you've probably tried some things. What have you done so far? You treat them almost like a real collaborator and try to figure things out rather than taking over. And all of his work finds that this is a much and much more effective strategy, if what your goal is, is to get your kids to learn and be resilient.

Speaker 1:
[30:10] And people might be listening, and I've had this experience. Like, you can say all of that, and you can still get the sort of most magnificent eye roll ever. And maybe they'll engage that time, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll stomp off. But as I learned over decades of parenting, my kids now mimic back to me my version of that, which is like, well, okay, you didn't do as well on the test as you wanted. What are the strategies you'd use next time? Which they mimic back to me in a voice that they think sounds like me. I don't think actually sounds like me.

Speaker 3:
[30:49] But are you secretly so proud where you're like, yes, they got in there?

Speaker 1:
[30:53] Totally, because I'm like, you can mock me all you want, kiddo, but by mocking me, it means that what I said got into your brain, and you have somehow absorbed it, which I have occasionally said to them, and then they just kind of smirk. But I think it's the tying the shoes, right? Like when kids are little, and you're teaching them to tie your shoes, there's literally nothing in my book besides teeth brushing before bed. There was nothing more annoying than teaching kids to tie their shoes because it was like endless. Like you had to leave an extra half an hour before preschool. And the easiest thing to do would have been to tie their shoes.

Speaker 3:
[31:32] Because you're really good at shoe tying. You're very good at algebra homework. You're very good at writing college essays.

Speaker 1:
[31:38] Apparently, I'm not that good at algebra because every time the like three times I was allowed to help my kids with math, they were like, that's not how we do it. And I'm like, okay, I don't know about the Singapore math. Like I'm going to watch TV. But the tying the shoes like if, and the temptation was to tie them and to tie them. And finally, I realized to your point about the osmosis of a parent's energy, I was like, oh, I suck at this. Like I am clearly so frustrated and so impatient that I outsourced the shoe tying lessons to my husband because he didn't care. He was like happy to sit there doing 20 years for like 45 minutes. Meanwhile, I was like, we gotta get out of here. And so I think owning your own stuff around this and recognizing what elevates you if you have a co-parent training off and delegating whoever is less elevated by some of this stuff because yes, it's osmosis. We also, they're like, what is genetic play in this? What do circumstances, like what are the roles of these other forces, Laurie, in this quest for happiness?

Speaker 3:
[32:48] Yeah, well, they play a role, but they play less of a big role than we often think, right? You know, let's take genetics. There's some evidence that happiness is heritable, meaning that some of the variation we see in the population might be due to genetics as opposed to, you know, kind of just like what you're doing. But the heritability factor is like kind of moderate, right? It's about as heritable, for example, as religious beliefs, right? Yes, you know, you might have the same religious beliefs as your parents, but we also know that religious beliefs change around a lot, right? They're not kind of destiny. And I think happiness works the same way, right? There definitely is some aspects of our well-being, especially things like depression and anxiety that are heritable, but it's not destiny. You can move these things around. Circumstances too, right? If you're in incredibly dire circumstances, you know, if you're listening to this right now and you can't put food on the table or a roof over your head, yes, you know, changing your circumstances, getting more money, getting more resources, that will make you happier. But for most of the people listening, circumstances isn't the best path forward. It's really much more about changing your behaviors and your mindsets to feel a little bit better.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
[35:29] As a pediatrician, I've seen kids come, literally they come out of the womb. They are who they are. Their temperament is stamped into their being. You can't explain it. You're in the delivery room, you can't explain it. I've watched these kids grow up and I think that's what people call the genetic component, that temperamental part. I see it, but the family, there's one family I think about so much in my practice where they're the most joyful, most optimistic people ever. I mean, every encounter with them is like rainbows and sunshine. But as I got to know them over time, I don't think they were any happier or less happy than anyone. That was just the way they went through life, but they processed emotions in the same way. They had the same highs and lows as everyone else. They just projected out to the rest of the world something that was read as happy. And they made it easier for other people to be around them. They made it easier for people to ask them what was going on, which is a very interesting quality about people who project happiness or who project sort of that. Maybe it's more charisma than anything else, but it's just, it's interesting. I think that as you talk about genetics, it's probably, does that sound like a fair description that it's more the temperament filter than anything else?

Speaker 3:
[36:58] Yeah, I think so, but another thing we're seeing is that even the things that we thought were basic personality differences, new work is starting to show that we might be able to move those around too. There's some lovely work by Sonia Lubomirski looking at introversion and extroversion. I mean, this was part of the big five, like the super built in. But she's finding, for example, that if you take introverts and say, hey, just try to be a little bit more open to people this week, try a little bit more talkative, a little bit more energetic, what you find is that people can do that. You don't switch your personality and go from zero and extroversion to 100, but you can switch around ever so slightly just a little bit. These were the kinds of temperamental features that we thought were really built in. So I think we need to stop underestimating our ability to change. Again, not zero to 100, but five percent, 10 percent here and those changes make a difference.

Speaker 1:
[37:50] Well, it's so funny that you bring that up because I was literally going to say, I was just writing about Susan Cain's book, Quiet, because it was transformative for me. I was reading it for work because I had very introverted girls that I was coaching in sports. But as I was reading it, I realized it was literally describing one of my children who I could not understand. She cites the study from Harvard, the longitudinal study about highly reactive infants and how they could predict decades into the future that these highly reactive infants would become introverted people. I started tracking my own kid. He was probably about seven or eight at the time, and maybe a little older, and I read the description to him. This is a kid where it took us two years to teach him how to look someone in the eye and shake their hand and say, hello. Here's what's interesting about him, is that in puberty, so he shifted, highly reactive infant, very reactive toddler, then became more introverted, more introverted with all the shifting that you were talking about, Laurie. Then in puberty, he became much more extroverted. In this with testosterone, which the research tells us causes kids to be more sensitive to social reaction, more seeking of social approval, all of those things. I was literally just writing about this thinking, okay, what is changeable? Some people always say, I want my kid to be introverted. I don't have a problem with it. Her book is really all about, well, extroverts aren't so great anyways. Why are we all so obsessed with extroverts, which I take exception to as an extrovert. But I'm really interested in, okay, so then what does that research mean, that temperament is shiftable? Should that be a goal? Are we just molding children some ideal image or is there value to some of those shifts?

Speaker 3:
[39:54] Yeah. I think it depends on the situation and what your goals are. For example, there's lots of work showing that extroverts, in part because they more easily get social connection, are often a little bit happier than introverts. But introverts, if they make some effort to chat with a friend on the phone, get the chill not going to the huge party social connection, they can wind up feeling better too. And so I think the nice thing about recognizing that you can change is that if it's a goal of yours, you might be able to take baby steps to move things around.

Speaker 1:
[40:24] And for kids, it's not their volition, right? Like if we have kids living under our roofs, and this gets back to the parental influence, it's like, well, do we get to decide what could make our kid happier, or do we allow them to just evolve? And I guess the root of that question is based in the comment you just made, which is the role of social connection and happiness. Can you speak to the importance of social connection and how that might help inform parents about what's worth sort of like, I don't want to say pushing on, but prioritizing versus other things that we might assume would make them happier, which might not?

Speaker 3:
[41:03] Yeah, yeah. Well, social connection is a big one. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social and a very famous study of so-called very happy people. So these are the people that are in the top 10 percent of the happiness survey distribution. They often report that they spend more time with people and they prioritize time with their friends and family members. So social connection is pretty much essential if you want to achieve high happiness. That doesn't necessarily mean joining an improv group or being the life of the party. That means in the local one-on-one connection, you feel a sense of mattering, you feel a sense of belonging, you feel connected with other people. Honestly, you feel loved, you love others, and you feel loved yourself is one way to frame it. So I think if you have a kid that struggles with social connection, you might want to think about whether there are strategies you can use to help them a little bit. I think this is especially important right now because we've created lots of structures that make this tricky. So many of our kids are still coming out of COVID. Many of them, no matter what their age, this like developmental period where they just like didn't get to interact with that many humans, right? And I think technology makes this harder, right? Technology is frictionless to get some sort of thing that feels like social interaction. So when you have to talk to a real person, a teacher, someone at the grocery store, or another parent, that can just feel a little scary. So I think nudging our students to get a little social connection is helpful. But I think we need to nudge in the right way. And again, this is where we get back to David Yeager's lovely work on collaborative troubleshooting, right? Start by assuming your kids are the wisest individuals on the planet and that they're doing something for a reason, right? I noticed that you had a hard time talking to your coach. I'm sure you've thought through whether you want to do that or not. So I'm just curious, how do you think about making that decision? What are the pros and cons of some of that? Have you ever thought about that it might be fun? Is this something you think about? And genuinely listen to their answer. And you might hear that they're like, oh, the coach is a weirdo, but I talked to my friends. Or you might hear, no, I want to do it, but I'm scared. OK, let's think about what strategies have you tried already. You're not giving the answer. You're not forcing them. You're trying to understand what they know about the situation, what they've tried, the wisdom that they've already brought to the problem. And so I think it does make sense to kind of nudge toward social connection. But it's a nudge. It's not a shove. It's not a force you. It's not a let me grab your hand and drag you over and force you to do it. It's really kind of using their wisdom for them.

Speaker 2:
[43:33] And it's not your social connection. I mean, I think that's the enmeshment issue is real here because there's this problem that parents and trusted adults face, which is if they see that kids need social connection, sometimes they try to mediate that social connection.

Speaker 3:
[43:50] Do do it.

Speaker 2:
[43:51] Yes. And it's like a playdate when they're five is one thing. But as they get older, this is another one that we cannot do for them. We'll say those small PSA that when my kids come home each year for their Thanksgiving break from college, they are heading into finals when they go back. And my two kids are very different in this way, but one of them likes to just lock in and get a bunch of work done, and would be very happy shutting a bedroom door and being in there 24 hours a day because it feels like there is happiness to be attained out the other side when I'm done with all this. And I have found that the only strategy that works is to say you have to find a way to get out of your room and connect with people and then come back and tell me how that felt. And if I've got that wrong, great. And every time it's like, oh yeah, I had forgotten that that's another path to happiness. Yeah, I want to pivot down to middle schoolers and high schoolers because you are now teaching them. It lands much better when it comes from someone who's not their parent, as we all know. So we welcome you into this fold to give kids a solid foundation in terms of what happiness is and how to aim for it. How does your teaching differ for younger kids? And sort of what's your through line there? Like how do you approach a middle schooler? How do you approach a high schooler versus a college age kid?

Speaker 3:
[45:23] Yeah, well, a couple of things there. I mean, one is that I find that because I teach college kids, the high school kids and to a certain extent, the middle kids are sort of curious, right? I mean, we remember this. When you're in middle school, you're like, what are high school kids doing? When you're high school, like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen when I'm in college, right? And so already, you know, I think I've piqued their curiosity that they get to learn from a class. That's the same thing that these Yale kids get. And honestly, if you think about the strategies I share with them, they're not that much different, right? The kinds of behavior changes and mindset changes that matter for happiness, they're going to work if you're 55, if you're 15. It's really just about changing some of the examples that we use. And so we frame the same kinds of strategies, like as we do for the college students, for middle schoolers, for high schoolers. We sort of change what the example is because, you know, the example for college students looks a little different than an example for a 13-year-old. But by and large, what we're finding is that the strategies are very similar. And we learned something really interesting when we teach happiness to these younger ages. I think it's really exciting for them to realize that they have some control over this. To realize, like, you can change your behaviors and your mindsets to feel better about this. I think a lot of them feel like they're kind of just trapped, you know? But when they realize that they can make changes to do better, that's very exciting. I think the other thing they really like hearing is that this stuff matters. You know, we walk through the work showing that your happiness matters for your grades. You perform better when you're doing better, right? You're a better friend when you're feeling happier. You do nicer things. If you want to solve the problems of the world, help the planet, you'll be more likely to do that if you're in a positive mood. And so I think them realizing that it's not just about them, that it really matters for a lot of the things that they're hearing are the bottom line. That can really give them not the agency to make changes, but really the permission, right? That they really do need to focus on this stuff too.

Speaker 1:
[47:13] Laurie, kids that age often ask us about helping their friends. They're worried about their friends, they're concerned about something going on with their friends, and they're always trying to navigate how to help a friend when they also worry about being disloyal, betraying them to an adult, things like that. And it sort of comes down to there's helping, and then there's, can we make someone else happy, or can we contribute to someone else's happiness? Can you speak to what role young people can play in each other's lives around those issues?

Speaker 3:
[47:53] Yeah, well, one of the biggest ways to feel a little happier is to be around other happy people, right? There's tons of studies showing these network effects about happiness. If you're really close to another person who's happy, that's gonna boost your own happiness up. This is because of this process of emotional contagion. This is one of the things I find, especially the younger learners resonate with a lot because they realize, okay, I can't force my friend to be happier. But just by being a little optimistic myself, just by engaging in a little joy, a little adventure, a little humor, a little optimism, a little hope, like I'm gonna transmit a tiny bit of that to the people around me. That gives you, again, some permission. It almost makes it like that you're supposed to do this, right? That's your mechanism of changing things. And so I find that that's really powerful. Honestly, what we hear from the middle schoolers and high schoolers is also that they want to do that, not just for their friends, but for their parents. They care a lot about their parents feeling anxious, feeling depressed, feeling pessimistic. And so they're like, well, I'm gonna focus on my own optimism, hope, happiness, humor, whatever, because it's gonna help my parents win.

Speaker 1:
[48:57] There's a study out of Michigan about young people's concerns about their parents' unhappiness and wellbeing. So to your earlier point, if you imagine your kid is not noticing your state of being and your unhappiness and your struggles, and you think you're hiding it well, as Cara said about her Oscar-winning performance, they pick up on everything. They see everything, and not only that, they worry about you. Even if they seem like the most selfish people on the planet, they are not. They are worried about you.

Speaker 3:
[49:31] And it's affecting them, right? It's affecting even really young kids. My colleague, Wendy Bendis, here at Yale, has done these lovely studies on emotional contagion with parents. She brings parents in and gives them a hard problem. You do one of these so-called stress tests where you have to give a scary speech or you have to do something, you're feeling bad about your performance. And then she tells participants, don't show that, really try to suppress it. And all they do is they go in with, these are younger-age kids, kind of toddler-age kids, and they do a little Lego building task. And then what the researchers do is they just, not knowing what condition the parents are in, they measure how the kids perform on this task. And they find that the kids are showing more negative emotion, they're performing worse on the task, right? You're transmitting this stuff even and perhaps, especially when you're trying not to, when you're forcing it down, right? It's transmitting and it's going through. And that's the youngest kids who can't articulate this. Your middle schooler knows when you're stressed at work. They know when they're frustrated with their partner. They know when you're feeling worried about the state of the world. You cannot hide this from them. So I think working on your own happiness as a parent is one of the best things you can do. And that's one of the reasons we've developed a version of this class not just for middle schoolers and high school students. We've also most recently put out the science of well-being for parents. Because one of the things we found was that about half of the folks who were watching our science of well-being for teenagers were parents. So we said, well, maybe we should get them their own class that they can use themselves.

Speaker 2:
[50:55] And I think this begs the question and it feels like my place to land is, can we really make someone else happy?

Speaker 3:
[51:03] Yeah. I think we can make ourselves happy. And I think we can create the right structural conditions for them to thrive. But I think we need to let other people do it themselves. And I think this is such an important parenting thing for all of us, not just for our kids, for our spouses, for our aging parents. I think we want to control how they feel, what they do and so on. And almost always the best way to do that is to treat them like a full collaborator, is to ask what they want. How are they trying to figure it out? What can I do to support you? But you tell me what you need. So it's always such a better way to go about it.

Speaker 2:
[51:37] And it can be hard when the kid is young enough that they don't know what they need, or when they lack the vocabulary to describe what they need. And that feels like a really important building block to focus on, that instead of focusing on how to make them happy, focus on how they can label their feelings so that they can tell you what's going on inside, focus on authentic experiences where they can identify, yes, this is great, or no, I'm not into this. That feels sort of foundational, and then the rest gets built on top.

Speaker 3:
[52:13] And again, I think what we forget is that the way you help your kids build that, especially if they're young, is to do it yourself. It's not to like strong arm them and give them books on it. It's when they hear you say, mommy's had a tough day at work, and I'm feeling really frustrated, and so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take five minutes and just go into the kitchen and be myself. Or like mommy was being really mean to herself earlier, and I need to take a break, right? They hear you giving yourself self-compassion, you labeling those emotions, and they pick them up, right? That's, and it's great because it gives you permission to do that good work for yourself.

Speaker 1:
[52:49] So I want to give you one exercise to close. I keep thinking about the scene in Sixteen Candles where they go to the dance, and they're the parents who are trying to push that kid into the dance. If you could rewrite that scene, right? If that's us trying to get our kids to be happier, or to build the skills to be happier, if you could rewrite that scene, I mean, first of all, John Hughes would obviously ruin the rest of the entire movie because there's so much to rewrite. What would it look like? What would the behavior between the parents and that kid, they're trying to shove through the double doors? What would that look like, Laurie?

Speaker 3:
[53:25] Yeah. I think it would start by listening. It would start by saying, hey, I know there's a dance tonight. I'm sure you've thought about whether or not you want to go. I just want to hear your logic of how you've decided this. I'm sure you've really thought through it and you've really good reasons. Tell me. I think what you'll hear might be some interesting things. There's bullies, there's hazing, you might hear something that you didn't expect to hear. You might not just hear, I don't want, I'm scared. Then I think, reflect that back. Are those values you care about? I'm hearing that you don't want to go because you're focused on your math homework and I get it. That's actually a really good thing to be focused on, but X, Y, and Z. That feels so different than shoving them in. Then ask, let's see, you get to the point where you might want to go to the dance. What strategies have you tried already? What have you, and again, you might hear something that you could support with that you might not have expected. That the reason they don't want to go to the dance is, I don't know, they don't have cool enough pants. You're like, all right, we're going to go to the department store and get some cool pants. They might give you a reason that you didn't realize. I think this is the problem when we're trying to solve our problems for our kids, is if we haven't asked them what the real problem is, we might be solving the wrong way. I think we need a little bit of humility to recognize that maybe we don't have all the answers. Maybe they've actually tried stuff and they might know something. I think what it would really hopefully look like is a parent listening, trying to collaborate on problem solving with their kid, and maybe coming up with the right solution so the kid will want to walk in there on his own.

Speaker 2:
[54:59] Laurie, we're coming to Yale. We're like planting ourselves in your classroom.

Speaker 3:
[55:05] That's lovely.

Speaker 2:
[55:05] Thank you for coming.

Speaker 3:
[55:06] Well, the door is wide open if you want to show up for a class. Of course, they're all available online, so you could watch them that way too.

Speaker 2:
[55:12] Thank you for downloading your brain, your research. It's such, having taken your course, I can say it's really eye-opening to rethink all of the biases that we bring into this and also just to give ourselves the freedom to rewrite our own narratives a little bit. A lot of this is, it's not about one more thing. It's actually about unloading and learning how to do that. So we are so grateful to have you and your wisdom on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for coming.

Speaker 3:
[55:47] Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Speaker 1:
[55:49] Thank you so much for listening. You can email us with questions, feedback, or episode requests at podcast at lessawkward.com.

Speaker 2:
[55:59] If you want to learn more about what we do to make this whole stage of life less awkward for everyone involved, our parent membership, our school health ed curriculum, our keynote talks, and more are all at lessawkward.com.

Speaker 1:
[56:16] And if you want products that make puberty so much more comfortable, visit myumla.com.

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