The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using
Thu, 12 Dec 2024
In this episode, you will learn how to live a more meaningful and happy life with zero weird tricks. Today, world renowned professor Dr. Laurie Santos is here to give you a crash course on living a happier, more fulfilling life. Dr. Santos is the professor behind Yale’s most popular course of all time, which she then taught as an online course called The Science of Well-Being.5 million students have taken her semester-long course, but you don’t need to.Why? Because today on the podcast, she is distilling and summarizing the key takeaways from her world-famous 26 lectures into one hour for you. She will share the surprising truths about what truly makes you happy and 5 science-backed ways to rewire your mind for more joy and meaning. And even if happiness feels out of reach, this episode will change your perspective and equip you with practical tools to experience more of it, starting today. For more resources, including links to the studies mentioned in the episode, click here for the podcast episode page.If you liked this episode, you’ll love hearing from Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar – the most popular professor in Harvard’s history – share about the science of creating a better life. Listen to this one next: How to Build the Life You Want: Timeless Wisdom for More Happiness & PurposeConnect with Mel: Get Mel’s new book, The Let Them TheoryWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Sign up for Mel’s personal letter Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes Disclaimer
Chapter 1: What is the ultimate crash course in happiness?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Oh boy, you ready? You better believe you are because today you are getting the ultimate crash course in happiness from the professor who created the single most popular course taught in college in over 300 years at Yale. It's called The Psychology of a Good Life.
Chapter 2: What are the surprising truths about happiness?
It's 26 lectures long and it's all about what truly makes you happy. Well, today on the Mel Robbins podcast, class is in session and Professor Lori Santos is here to distill her 26 lessons on the surprising science of happiness into an hour that is packed with so many tools that you can start using today to be happier. But I'm going to warn you, Professor Santos begins class with a bombshell.
You've got happiness wrong. Everyone does. And today, you're going to learn the surprising science of happiness and how to be happier in five steps. No gimmicks, zero weird tricks, and you need this now more than ever. In a world where so many of you and the people that you love are feeling disconnected, lonely, and really overwhelmed, this conversation is essential.
Chapter 3: How can you control your happiness?
And Dr. Santos is here in our Boston studios to prove to you that you have more control over your happiness than you realize. And by the time we're done talking today, you'll not only know how to feel happier, you'll know exactly what to do to be happier every single day. Hey, it's your friend Mel. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you're here.
I'm so happy you hit play on the conversation today. First of all, it's always such an honor to be able to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're brand new, I want to welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. And you have picked one amazing episode to hit play on. And it tells me something about you.
It tells you that you're the type of person who not only values your time, but you're also interested in learning about ways that you can be happier. And I am really fired up for today's episode because I've brought in the best of the best. Someone who's going to guide you toward a happier life using the exact steps and research that will boost your happiness day to day.
Dr. Lori Santos is in our Boston studios. She is a cognitive scientist and professor at Yale who teaches the single most popular course that has been taught at Yale in 300 years. It's a course she created called The Psychology of a Good Life. It's so popular that 1200 students signed up within three days of it being announced.
Now, Dr. Santos has spent her entire career researching what truly makes you happy. And she has one of the most popular podcasts on the topic. It's called The Happiness Lab. And I personally, I love her research. I have used it. I've cited it. I've written about it. I've even taught it in online courses that I teach and in the work that I do with some of the world's leading global brands.
That's how powerful her work is. And you're going to feel that power today. And that's why you can hear your friend Mel just bubbling over. That's why I can't wait for you and for the people that you love and for me to learn absolutely everything that she has to share with us today. So please help me welcome Dr. Lori Santos to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Professor Santos, I am so fired up that you're here. I can't wait to jump in. And I want to just say one thing. We're here in our Boston studios, and I don't know if they've changed the flight pass for Logan Airport, but there are airplanes outside. There's construction down the street.
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Chapter 4: What is the Psychology of a Good Life course?
So if you are hanging with me and Dr. Santos today and you hear a little beeping or you hear a plane, just know we're all on this walk together. So with that, Dr. Lori Santos, Welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Oh, I'm thrilled that we've got you here in our studios.
And I'm like just looking around the studio being like, this is Mel's studio, so cool. And you're in it. I'm in it right now. Well, you're so busy, so thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And we're going to cover a lot.
And I just want to tell you, as you're listening and you've invited Dr. Santos and I in the car with you or on your walk with you, that there is so much that she's going to unpack for you about happiness, from the things that we get wrong about it to the ways our brains are working against us, to most importantly...
I don't know how you're going to do this, woman, but you're going to condense the most popular course literally ever taught on happiness into this conversation with key takeaways. And I understand you also have homework for us. Yeah, sorry.
You can't invite the professor on the show and not have your listeners get homework. Sorry, listeners. I didn't mean it. That's okay.
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Chapter 5: How does money influence happiness?
I would love for you to speak directly to the person that is with us right now and listening and share with them what they might experience that could be different about their life if they take everything that you're about to share to heart and they apply it.
Well, this is something we've seen in our students, which is that if you listen to what I'm about to say, if you follow the homework, you can actually become happier somewhere between five to 15% happier, five to 15% more positive emotions, five to 15% more satisfied with your life. It's actually what the science tells you.
And in our short, short, short, short version of the course today, that's what you're going to get. Wow. What does five to 15% feel like? Well, I think it feels like, you know, if you were like six out of 10 on positive emotion, you know, if I said all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10. You go up to like almost seven out of 10.
And that matters wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, how much joy, how much laughter you have. You can kind of pop up a little bit. You're not going to go from zero to 100, but these are lasting effects where you really go up a small but significant amount in terms of how you feel.
Can I share something? Please. So when you said five to 15%, my brain was like, well, that's not enough. And I think that's probably relevant to our conversation about happiness. I mean, does that surprise you that I was like 5%?
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Chapter 6: What is the importance of time affluence for happiness?
Not at all. I mean, I think when we talk about these strategies, especially to my very type A Yale students, right? Everyone wants to go from zero to a hundred, right? Everyone wants to do the extreme thing. And I think one of the lessons we get from the happiness research is that like, this works better in baby steps.
And it's not the kind of thing that you're just going to do one thing and happiness lasts forever. I think one of the disappointing things about happiness is that it takes constant work, like all good things in life, right? If you want to learn to play the violin, if I want to learn French, you know, if I want to get really good at Guitar Hero, which is the last thing I've invested myself in.
Really? I'm just trying to move from medium to hard on Guitar Hero. I know it's a little 2005, but that's what I do. But like, you can't just practice once and then that's it. Like you got to kind of keep up with it. And one of the lessons that we get from the science about happiness is that happiness works the same way. It's kind of like a leaky tire.
You do these different behaviors, you change your mindset, it fills things up for a little bit, but then you kind of got to do it again and again. It sort of takes constant work, but the good news is that you can change things around a lot.
So if you feel like your life is a leaky tire right now.
Yes, and I think probably listeners out there, my guess is a lot of you are feeling that way.
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Chapter 7: How can you use time confetti to improve well-being?
Yeah, I think so. I would love to have you share a little bit about this course that you teach at Yale University. It is the single most popular course taught in over 300 years. It's called The Psychology of a Good Life. Can you tell us a little bit about this course, why you created it, and why the heck is it so popular?
Yeah. So so the course kind of started when I took on a new role on Yale's campus. I've been teaching there for over two decades. But in just the last couple of years, I took on a role of what's called the head of college on campus. And so Yale's one of these weird schools like like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like Gryffindor, Slytherin.
There's like these like weird colleges within a college. They're basically like dorm communities. And so I became a head of college of one of these, which meant as a faculty member, I was living on campus with students.
Really? And you're married.
So are you there with your spouse? Eating in the dining hall, hanging out in the coffee shop. It's kind of fun. I became this like benevolent aunt to like 500 19-year-olds, right? And I thought this was going to be fun, right? I thought college life right now was going to look like what college life looked like back when I went there in the 90s. And it just didn't.
I mean, I was really looking at this college student mental health crisis up close and personal. And this is true at Yale, but it's just true nationally. So right now, nationally, more than 40% of college students report being too depressed to function. Right now, nationally, more than 60% of college students report feeling very lonely and overwhelmingly anxious.
More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And this was what I was seeing in my community, where there were just students who were really struggling. And I just kind of went through this crisis of confidence.
As a professor, I'm like, we're not teaching them computer science and Shakespeare and all this stuff if 60% of students are experiencing overwhelming anxiety most days. And I was like, we got to do something about this. And being a psychologist, I mean, I'm a trained psychologist. I said, well, my field has strategies, right?
Like we know simple kinds of ways that you can change your behaviors and your mindset that again, don't take you from zero to a hundred, but work pretty well, right? Can make you kind of patch up that leaky happiness tire and feel a little bit better. And so I said, well, why don't I make a class? I'll just make a whole new class and I'll kind of teach students all these strategies.
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