YouSaid · the spoken record

Laurie Santos

lines on the record: 117
first: 2022-06-14
most recent: 2022-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Since teaching this class, my well being has gone up in a small but significant way, probably about a single point on like a 10-point happiness scale. But that's a lot. I'd much rather be an eight than a seven. And when times are tough, I'd much rather be a six than a five, you know, and that's kind of the power of these approaches. They're not going to turn everything, you know, sunny and roses and unicorns all the time, but they'll give you that competitive edge when things are feeling pretty tricky. And so I don't know if I have a specific one, but in just so many different ways these techniques have saved me. And I watch myself forcibly put them into effect even when I don't feel like it because I know the science and I know like, you know, I want my students to see that I'm doing the right thing too.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And so, what seeing these stresses and this stuff through my students' eyes taught me is like, oh man, like I have to start doing this stuff. I have to be a better example for them. And in so many domains, like, you know, in part because I'm a human, in part because I think my instincts are worse even than the average humans. Like, I don't have any of the intuitions to do this stuff. Like, you know, I'm having a bad day. Like every molecule in my body is screaming like, don't talk to anyone, plop and watch Netflix. Definitely don't, you know, do a hard yoga class. And I know that's just wrong. And I'm like, brain, shut up. And so, you know, for me, having these techniques at the ready are really, really powerful and honestly, I think, have, you know, were so essential in getting me through the pandemic in One Piece. You know, I'm nerd, so I take a lot of these self-report surveys over time. And I found that, you know, on average,”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, and it hurt me because I'm like, oh, I don't want them to do that. But it also struck a chord because I was doing that stuff too. If they asked me how my week was going, I'd be like, oh my God, if I could just get through the trips and get to Friday. It's easier to see another.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, honestly, so many tiny little ones, it's like hard to pick a single one. I mean, you know, if I'm being honest, you know, when I became a head of college and took on this new role, you know, and saw the kind of mental health stuff that my students were going through, you know, part of it was really extreme mental health cases, but part of it was like the little stuff. I'd run into students, you know, in the courtyard and be like, how's it going? It's like, oh, if I could just get through midterms and get to Friday, you know, it's, I was watching them kind of just like fast forward their life, you know, just like out of stress in these little things and not being present and not noticing stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exercise, and let's not even get into sleep, right? Which is, you know, another one of the first things to go is like, oh, I'll sleep less. But then that winds up having these cascading effects on our mental health during the day, but even things like our concentration, our ability, the ease with which we're present and so on. And so if you're really trying to prioritize your happiness, you also kind of have to prioritize taking care of your body, particularly exercise and sleep for improving your mental health.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That morning elliptical, you know, there's evidence regulating like a half hour of cardio exercise a day is like significantly reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Like we forget how powerful it is.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You covered a lot of stuff. I think the one last thing I'd add is just the importance of remembering that your brain and your happiness are like tied to your body. I think we think there were these like minds that are floating off in nowhere and we forget that if that mind is attached to a body that's not getting me sleep, that's not moving, that's like constantly like, you know, flaring up its fight or flight system, like we forget that those kinds of things matter a lot. And so one of the things I try to emphasize with my students is like these basic healthy habits. And it's funny as we get busier, as we get more frantic, as we're feeling more depressed, you can watch these things fall by the wayside, you know. Like when I'm having a particularly frantic week where I'm feeling really time famished, often my instinct of the first thing that should go should be my morning elliptical. It's like, I can steal that hour back, but like.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, plus all these other forces telling you what you should be spending your money on, which isn't time. It's like a new gadget or another material possession and so on.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it's the thing that makes us happy, it's really hard to back off. And she argues as your income goes up, it can get harder to back off because it's like almost a status symbol because you're making more money. So I think that used to be true. Like the leisure classes used to, I think like, you know, if you look at the leisure classes in like the 1920s, I'm thinking like, you know, old, you know, Carrie Grant, you know, movies like Philadelphia story, like, you know, the privilege classes enjoying their privileges and one privilege was time. But even though privileged people could be investing in time more, they don't always, but there's a flip side to this, which is that the privileged classes could do this, but they're not. Ashley talks a lot about the fact that a lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily a not having money hit. It's a not having time hit. So she argues that time famine comes with, you know, being low income.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although what Ashley finds is that you'd think that was true, but in practice what she finds is that the rich are often not as much investing in time as you expect, in part because there's this idea that like time is money. Like you'd think when you'd get to a certain wealth level, you'd be like, all right, I can shut off and stop earning this income. You know, like, you know, I'll take more vacation time and so on. But what she finds is like now time is really money, right? You know, so you know, if you're earning, if you're earning minimum wage, your time to, you know, like if I don't go to work for an hour, you know, I don't get my, you know, I do ideally 20 bucks, but, you know, in some places, 15 bucks, whatever, you know, if you're earning what Elon Musk does and you don't go to work for an hour, you know, when you think about that, like, oh my God, I just lost, I mean, I don't know how much urines per hour, but like it's probably a lot more than minimum wage. And that can be really hard, right? Now that trade-off, because we prioritize money so much and assume.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got two and a half hours out of that pad tie order. What did I do with that two and a half hours? Act of saying that for me feels like, oh, like, oh gosh, I saved all that time. What did I do with it?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We all have, you know, any of us that have a little bit of discretionary income can choose how to spend it, but one way we can spend it is on time-saving purchases. You know, you buy the cut up veggies at the grocery store to cook or you get curbside pickup or takeout. You hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn. Things that you're doing to get back a little bit more free time. If you make those purchases, you're happier, but if you reframe the purchases you're already making as time saving, it can make you happier. Probably many of the people listening to this at some point have ordered like takeout. But did you when you order the takeout calculate how much time you saved? You know, I went to the Thai place and I got pad time like, dude, if I try to make chicken pad thai, that would take, you know, like my kitchen would be a wreck. I'd have to clean it. I'd have to look it up, you know.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's the irony is that we'd all be a lot happier. We gave ourselves some free time. It was a real irony for my college students who have a bazillion extracurriculars and they're always feeling FOMO that they're not even doing enough despite having such a filled plate. It's the irony that we all experience. One of the, you know, Ashley Willens has done some really lovely work on time affluence broadly. She has this great book called Time Smart that talks a lot about this. And she argues in her work that one way that you can spend your money to feel happier is to use your money to buy back time.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or flight. And it's awful for your well-being. In fact, some work by Ashley Willens shows that if you self-report being time famish, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. You know, we know unemployment is awful for your happiness, just feeling like you don't have any time is bad too. And I think one of the reasons it's bad is when we feel more time famished, it's harder for us to connect, right? I mean, we're just like rushing, you know, you're rushing, you don't have time to connect, but you just kind of have this triaging sense. You don't have time for social connection. I don't have time for that like quick conversation with my husband. It's just like, you know, boom, boom, boom. And so giving yourself the subjective sense that you have a little bit more free time can open up windows for social connection, including the kind of social connection that you get with your partner and your relationship.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some ways, that those are the biggest gifts. And I think if you start solving those, you go a long way to the other stuff that comes with it. When you're being more present, you can be more grateful. When you're being more present, you can find more time for fun and play. But the attention and the presence kind of comes first. And that relates to another big thing we know is so important for happiness, which is having a little bit of free time. Why don't we attend to our spouses? You know, it's partly the technology, but it's partly because we're busy and we just don't have time. Lots of evidence that one of the key ingredients for happiness that we often forget is what's known as time affluence. This just subjective sense that we have some free time. Time affluence is the opposite of what's often called time famine where you have this subjective sense that you're starving for time. And we know psychologically that time famine feels a lot like real famine. It has the same physiological effects where you're triaging stuff. It doesn't feel good. It activates your fight.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“War, you know, my spouse doesn't have like an entire team of Google engineers making his bids for my attention more interesting, but Instagram does. And so, yeah, and so I think we need to kind of pay attention to how we're attending to our spouse.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, how did your day go or something? We're doing an ask of someone two ways our partners can react. They can kind of attend to that bid and, you know, show you attention and respond back. Or they could kind of like ignore it or blow it off or, you know, they're not even paying attention because they're looking at their phone. And there's some evidence that you can make predictions about how a relationship is going is going based on just the number of those so-called bids that a partner responds to positively. Like when you're asked for attention, you kind of attend back. And these have been talked about in the domains of relationship science, about couples and blah, blah, blah. But I think it's functionally about attention. Like, you know, when you're kind of reaching out for the attention of your spouse, do you kind of give it back? And I think this is one of the challenges, you know, in the ways we were talking about is like there's competing things for our attention and there are companies that are making millions and millions of dollars winning that.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, a happy relationships are relationships are happiest when you're in a relationship with other happy people. And so I think one thing to make sure is that you're helping your partner achieve some of this stuff that we're talking about too. And again, I think the number one question idea is how do I make my kids happier? But I think the second question I get, you know, is like, how do I make my spouse happier or my partner happier? And so I think finding ways to engage in these sorts of things can be really powerful. I think we forget the power of attention to make our relationships better. If you look to some of the work on relationships and what kinds of factors can signal that your relationship is not going well, some work suggesting that it has to do a little bit with attention. Often in relationships we make these kinds of bids. I show my like, oh, honey, like, look at this stupid thing on the internet. Or, oh, I, you know.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around other people. You don't have the energy to engage in flow. And I think because of this personal ineffectiveness, you're kind of so constantly beating yourself up that, you know, it's hard, it's hard to kind of give yourself the benefit of the doubt and like, you know, I'm not going to be judgy about this. I'm not going to be trying to be perfect about this. I'm just going to be like letting myself, you know, do it for enjoyment sake and, you know, all those things become harder, which compounds a problem.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But she argues that fun kind of adds a little bit more to flow where it also has an element of being really social. So it's hard to have like true, like if you think of the times in your head simulate a time that you think of as like most fun, like that thing I was doing, that was the most fun ever usually it's social. Sometimes social like a dog or like whatever, but it's usually social. It also has a certain kind of attitude and it's like an attitude of play. Like you're not doing a side hustle. You're not doing something to make money or to perform in a specific way. You're just kind of messing around with a sort of childlike attitude, a sort of playful attitude. And so she'd argue that if you really want to prioritize the best leisure possible, you want the flow, the active engaged, but you'd also want to add elements of being social and you'd also want to add elements of like playfulness. And I think, again, a lot of these get harder during burnout. You're cynical. I don't want to be.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think when we think about what we really want out of our leisure, I think it's flow-inducing activities, and it might also be activities that you want to call fun And there's actually not that much empirical work on fun, but Catherine Price, who I mentioned before, who does this work on technology and phones, also has a new book called The Power of Fun great book, if you kind of want, you know, like if you're struggling with your leisure and you want some good ideas. But she argues the first ingredient of fun is that, is flow, it is engagement. You can't have fun if you're just kind of plopped around.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you ask people, hey, you're at work, would you rather be at work or would you rather be at leisure? People are like, oh, definitely would rather be at leisure. You ask people at leisure, like, would you rather be at leisure like you are right now? Would you rather be at work? People are like, oh, I'd rather be at leisure. So it's like, we don't want to be at work, but we forget in some ways the good things that work does for our psychology, which is it sometimes kind of puts us in challenge mode, puts us into flow. And I think the answer is that we kind of all need leisure that's a little bit more challenging, that's a little bit more flow inducing. We kind of pick incorrectly when we're sort of picking these things. And that leads us to not get the benefits out of leisure that we could get. And I think this gets exacerbated in burnout because of the emotional exhaustion issue. You're like, yeah, I don't want to learn a new language or, you know, figure out some new thing. I just want to plop because the only energy I think I have is to plop. But by staying in that local minimum, you're sort of missing out on opportunities for the kind of engagement that could possibly.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The couch, you know, like scrolling through what shows you're not even watching a show, you're scrolling through now shows you could watch. People say they feel kind of apathetic, like they're not really that challenged. They're not in flow.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Burnout is just kind of this sort of deep feeling of like meh or blah, right? You know, if you hit like full depression, you know, this depression can feel like an intense sadness feeling, but languishing is kind of like neither here nor there, you got nothing. And, you know, the science shows that the way out of languishing is to get into flow at this active state where you feel engaged and energized and challenged. And it can be hard to go for flow when you're feeling emotionally exhausted. This is one interesting thing I teach my students about is we're really bad when it comes to picking leisure that will feel good. There are these cute studies where you ping people at different times of the day and you ping people when they're at work and you ask, how are you feeling? And not for every job, but for a lot of jobs, people feel in flow and a little bit challenged. It's hard, but you're working and you feel engaged and you feel active and things. When you ping people when they're at their leisure, because often we pick leisure that's like plopped up.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean solitude, I think when you're experiencing the depersonalization, which is like rich cynicism, you know, I get it. It's like, I don't want to deal with people anymore. But ultimately, that's allowing us, that's forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism for kind of filling up our happiness tanks, as it were, because other people really do make us feel better. And I think this is the problem when we're in the fix of something like burnout, we often go towards the wrong stuff, right? Like we're often not like, let me pick up an engaging hobby that will build my identity, but it's kind of hard. Like you're emotionally exhausted. You're like, I'm not doing hard. I'm doing like plop on the couch and watch Netflix. But actually, kind of what you need is hard. What you need is to engage in a little bit of flow. The psychologist Adam Grant had a very viral article in the New York Times during COVID on the phenomena of languishing, which isn't so much.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you don't act on them, you're going to really run out of fuel or like a catastrophic problem. And you got to kind of take action on an action, you know, looks different. Sometimes it's real rest, like real rest, like taking some real time off. Sometimes it's renegotiating your own identity and relationship with your job. You know, often, you know, in a tricky way, it's like structural changes, like maybe we need to rethink how we're thinking about work more broadly as a society. But it's important. And I think these are powerful signals that we need to listen to a lot more.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feeling a little bit more personally ineffective due to COVID. I think a lot of that was COVID, but a lot of that was like, you know, I'm like throwing my, you know, I'm trying to do all these cool events for students. We can't do anything because they can't be in person or we can't throw these kinds of things. I was like feeling that more and more. But definitely feeling the kind of depersonalization. And that's the one I was most worried about. You know, a student would ask me like a reason, you know, can I see my grade on the midterm and see how I did? I'd be like, oh, you want to schedule a meeting with me? Like, do you know how packed my calendar is? You know, and I was like, wait a minute, it's completely reasonable for a student to want to meet with me, you know? And so it's like, it's those things that are kind of creeping in where you're kind of like just annoyed with people and you've got this short fuse. And it's like, it doesn't feel good, but again, it's like if you think of emotions as these regulatory signals, they're these like beak, you know, there's the alert systems like on your car where you're like gas gauge goes on, like these symptoms are your emotional gas gauge for burnout.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, inventory, a burnout scale, one of these self report scales you can take. I encourage people to Google it and grab a free copy and take one of these things. You can find it on the internet. But you can get a sense of how high you are on some of these things. And when that number starts creeping up, this is yet another one of these cases where emotions are really good signals for us. They're telling us some important information. If you're experiencing those symptoms, it means you have to make some changes. And oftentimes it's not because your work you didn't care about your work or your work is boring or it sucked. Oftentimes it's because you got so involved in your work. Your work is really your identity right now. And it means that you got to kind of make some big changes. Recently I announced that I'm taking a year off from my role at Yale as a head of college and taking a year off from Yale. And it was in part because I was noticing the seeds of some of these things, right?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jobs are structured to kind of feel like that. The late journalist David Graeber talked about this idea of bullshit jobs where it's like, you know, like if your job went away, it wouldn't really affect the fate of the world in any rich way. It doesn't matter, right? So this is this idea of personal ineffectiveness. You just feel like what you're doing doesn't have meaning. But the third part of burnout is an interpersonal kind of burnout. It's what Maslack and others call depersonalization. It's functionally just like a terrible cynicism and lack of compassion, right? You're just getting a little bit of a short fuse with the people around you. Like someone asks you a completely reasonable thing for your job description and you're like, you know what, screw you. Like, screw you for asking for me. Like, you know, how dare you? Your intentions are bad. And so these are the features of burnout. There's lovely. Maslack has a kind of patented burnout.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so burnout, it's worth, I mean, there's so many kind of lay notions of burnout. I think it's important to just start with how scientists really think about burnout. And so when you look at how scientists like Maslack and others have thought about burnout, they usually think of it as having these three parts. And so part number one of burnout, which is kind of what we commonly think is this idea of emotional exhaustion, right? You're just dead, right? You know, like you have a good night's sleep and two hours into your workday, you're done, right? Like you just, you know, that's emotional exhaustion. But there are other parts of burnout too. And so another one is this idea of personal ineffectiveness. You just feel like ultimately the things you're doing have no meaning, right? And I think, you know, that I think is coming up more and more in the present day, maybe more and more with COVID. But like, you know, even if you're doing your job perfectly, it doesn't matter. It's not helping people. It's not kind of doing the right thing. I think there's just a problem where a lot of”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that. You know, you're really kind of mindfully paying attention to things and making decisions about your well-being based on whether this is a good situation to go into or not. And, you know, sometimes that can involve hard decisions. I mean, it's very similar to the phone. Ultimately, you know, the thing we were talking about with technology and kind of regulating its effects on us is setting some boundaries with how you use your phone. Maybe you don't use it in bed because it's going to affect your sleep. Or maybe, you know, you commit to like having it notify you and you have this moment of like, oh, is that for a good thing or something? Like you're functionally setting boundaries with how you use that. I think we need to do that with so many of the things that affect our well-being in life, whether that's other people, certain situations, ways that we spend our time. I think we need to intentionally and mindfully notice what it's really doing for us and then make some informed decisions about whether we want to keep experiencing that.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think boundaries are really important. They are, in some ways, you could think of them based on the kinds of things we've talked about before as kind of control mechanisms that we use to deal with our attention, right? Like if you know it's going to be a situation that causes you to feel anxious or pissy if you deal with this early colleague, then you can limit the amount you deal with the surly colleague, right? Emotion regulation and finding ways to control your emotions are sometimes about you experience that emotion. You've got to control it and regulate it in the moment, but you can also be smart enough about like trying not to get yourself into that situation in the first place, which is often researchers call these things complicate things, but it's like situation selection. Like don't select situations that are going to put you in this horrible emotional place. Like kind of give yourself, you know, a little gift so that your hot self is not kind of put in these awful situations in the first place. And ultimately, I think boundary setting is a lot.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, it's okay to be pissed, but then now I have strategies to kind of deal with that. You know, another is to kind of watch your reactions and the kind of timing of things. You know, this is where I often catch it where it's like, you know, I'll have some interaction with a co-worker or I'm really annoyed. But then like three hours later, I'm talking to my podcast producer and texting about like, can you believe she? And he actually is, you know, we know the second arrow stuff, so he'll text me back to arrow emojis. And I know I'm like, you know, it's four hours later. She has nothing to do with this, right? This is me, you know, keeping this going. And so a little bit of mindfulness can really go a long way here of like once, because once you have this moment of noticing, you realize like, I don't have to be my thoughts. I don't have to be my emotions, right? I can kind of hit pause and I can react to this differently.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, one is finding ways to be more present and allowing yourself to notice what those emotions are, right? Like when you're in that meeting with a surly colleague, if you can develop these practices in mindfulness, you can be like, I'm watching my blood pressure rise like that thing with my jaws happening. Like this is a signal that I'm feeling pissed.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I don't sleep, and then I am short with my husband, and then it's like boom, boom, boom. So we need to realize that those second arrows are on us, but also that we have strategies we can use to control those secondary emotions that come from it. There really is things we can do to kind of control the things that we come up.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People say, yeah, it sucks even more to get shot with a second arrow. So Buddha goes on to explain that we don't often get to control the first arrow. That's the situation. You walk in and it's the surly coworker or you get some bad health news or just something bad. Like the world throws this at us, right? That's the first arrow. But he says the second arrow is our reaction to those situations. And that's under our control, right? You know, that's if you like, you have this early coworker and you don't take time to do a couple breaths and then you take that home to your kids or, you know, you react to the health news by like, you know, freaking out and making bad decisions. And what Buddha points out is like, we're responsible for the second arrow. And sometimes we really make it worse. And, you know, Buddha doesn't say this, but I'd say like, you know, sometimes not just one second arrow. It's like an entire quiver of arrows that I'm like, you know, I had a bad day at work. And then I, you know, like I'll, you know, have an extra too much glasses of wine.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there is this idea that between feeling the emotion and acting on it, there's a whole host of strategies we can use to regulate those emotions, notice them, but not act on them. And I think this is important because when we look at the misery that's caused by our negative emotions, it's not often the situation that caused it. It's like the extra bad steps that came with how we reacted to those emotions that my favorite kind of way of thinking about this comes from a story from the ancient Buddhist tradition that's known as the second arrow. And so the stories that Buddha is talking to his followers and he's telling his followers this parable and he says, hey, if you're walking down the street and you get someone shoots you with an arrow, does that feel bad? And people are like, oh, yeah, that's terrible to get shot with an arrow. And Buddha says, okay, well, imagine you're walking down the street and you get shot with not just one arrow, but two arrows. Is that second arrow worse?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And your own emotions is a way to do that. I think another strategy is making sure you notice what's happened in those interactions so that the emotions you caught don't automatically wind up affecting your behavior. This is another kind of misconception. I think we have. I think we have this misconceived notion of how emotions work. I think we think like there's a situation, it triggers emotions, and now we have those emotions and we will act on them. Like our coworker made us angry. So now we will inevitably slam the dishwasher around or doing things and like be a little short with our kids. It's just like we have to.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think one thing is to recognize explicitly that they are having that effect. I think we all know that implicitly when you interact with the one co-worker who's like that surly person, you leave that like, oh, you know, and then you take the surliness out with you, you know. It's worth remembering, though, that emotional contagion is a two-way street, that we have power to. You know, just as that surly person is affecting us, if we walk into that meeting expressing optimism, feeling good and so on, they're going to catch that too. And I think we forget that we can seed the kinds of emotions that we want to see. That's true in our interpersonal interactions. It's also true in our social media feeds. Sometimes I feel like you hop on Instagram or Twitter and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news. People complaining, people complaining. And then you kind of catch that. But it's worth remembering you can see the opposite, right? Like you can post something different. And so taking control over yourself.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What can I do to make my child feel happier? And I'm like, well, have you focused on your own happiness? Like, how are you doing? It's like, well, no, no, no. I want to focus on them. And it's like, you know, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, right? Not just because they're paying attention to the strategies you're using, they're paying attention to your priorities. Those are implicitly getting transmitted. But literally your own emotions are getting transmitted. And so I often say that if you're really worried about your kids' happiness, like do some work to focus on your own because if you're feeling less anxious, if you're feeling in a better zone, if you're expressing gratitude, all these things are going to naturally come to your kids more easily too.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think another one is I think a lot of parents are worried about their kids' well-being. And I think that that's good. Obviously, we want parents to care about how their kids are doing. But it tends to be, you know, in my experience, very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids. When I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids' grades, I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are anxious about grades because you're embodying all of these kind of anxieties. And so I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of emotional contagion, that like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions. If you're embodying calm and this is going to be fine and everything's okay, then kids are going to follow that. If you're embodying anxiety and like, oh my gosh, this is so important. Like kids are naturally going to catch that too. And I think that that's tricky to remember. You know, I often get parents saying, oh,”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right? Is that they've never had a chance to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own. And so when they finally have to do it, it seems really scary. And they really have these beliefs that they're not capable. The author and former Stanford dean, Julia Lithott Hames, has whole books about helicopter parenting, and she talks a lot about how today's teens are failure deprived. Like they haven't had a chance to fail, and this has these consequences, not just that, like when they finally do fail, it's like really terrifying, but even to try something where they might fail feels, you know, way scarier than it would have if they'd had tinier failings along the way.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grade. And again, I think it's well intentioned. The goal is to help, but ultimately it's not achieving the goal that parents.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do that stuff. And it makes sense if a kid's like, well, my mom's taking over for me, this must be really hard. This must be really scary, right? You know, when my mom's getting anxious about my grades, that must mean that the grades matter really a lot, right? And so I think what parents don't realize is that quick solution of like, oh, I'm just going to take care of it either out of their own anxiety or out of a real idea that this is helping, it winds up ironically doing just the opposite. It winds up kind of making kids feel like they themselves are less efficient and less capable than they could be. And it winds up contributing to a lot of anxiety. And in my experience as a college professor, I see this more and more among parents, more and more parents checking in, you know, my roommates having a rooming conflict. And I'm like, well, why are you talking to me? Why aren't they, you know, you can give them some advice about how to handle it, but it's their rooming conflict or parents calling professors about a student getting a bad.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About their own competence, and she does this in like really little kids. Like, so think toddlers. And her task works something like this. So she brings a toddler in, she gives them a tough puzzle to figure out. And she either has parents, you know, try to help by, you know, doing, like giving some sort of strategies of like, hey, what color is this? Like a kind of teaching thing where you're not solving it for them, but and you're not giving like, hey, I'm going to give you a hint. You're just like, hey, you know, let me adjust and let you pay attention to the right stuff. Versus the thing that parents tend to do, which is here's how you do it. I'm just going to give you the solution or even worse, you know, and I get it like, you know, as a person who's like dealt frustrated with the kids before is like, let me just do that for you. Like, you don't know how to do it. It's really hard. Like, let me just do it. What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition where the parents give the answer give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, they believe like they probably don't have the ability.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the SAT because that's going to like really matter for whether they get into college. But I think more and more everything feels like the SAT. There's no point where it kind of is okay for them to like screw up and learn. And that's really problematic because we know a couple of things about how kids learn. One is that like you got to fail to learn. And in addition, you got to fail to develop anxiety that you can do. You got to fail in order not to develop this sort of anxiety that whatever task you're doing is going to be impossible for you. And what I worry about a lot is that parents who kind of in this very well-intentioned way try to solve problems for kids take away the opportunity that kids get from solving those problems themselves. And that might not seem bad, except that that there's lots of evidence that that contributes to kids' beliefs about whether they can solve those problems themselves. My colleague here at Yale Julia Leonard studies the way that kids develop belief”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I see lots of parenting habits, and I wish I could switch around in part because I see the effects that they have once students are at college. I think we've seen, especially just over the last 10 years, a lot of changes in how much parents intervene and help their kids. You know, there's been a lot of talk of obviously like helicopter parenting and so on. Now it's often said that we're in the domain of what's called lawnmower parents or steamroller parents. It's not like you're swooping in to help your kid, which is the helicopter model. It's like you're mowing the lawn or flattening the path completely. So there's like no bumps or little things for kids to navigate doing that preemptively. And I think it's incredibly well-intentioned, right? Like no one wants your kids to go through anything hard. I think there's a real sense that the stakes are high. Like, you know, you want your kid to like learn, but there's also like performance and you want them, you know, you want your kids to learn and to take their bumps, but you don't want them to do that.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About happiness in genetics, and I think you know, as a parent, as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on. You know, I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and learned about these evidence-based approaches much earlier. And so we, you know, with my team here at Yale, we're sort of trying to think about ways that we can get these strategies out to younger and younger kids. But I think there are lots of ways that parents can promote this stuff. I think parents do a great job of worrying about whether kids are getting good grades and, you know, being academically successful. I think we really need to think about conveying some of these skills for boosting happiness over time too.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Sue, when you look at happiness in genetics, you kind of get two kinds of messages. One is that there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. So some of the variants we see in the population about happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right? However, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny. Even the heritability of happiness is lower than you might expect. Estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around 40%, 30%. It's not that all the variants in the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not the case. And that means that there's a lot of room for the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold. And usually when I mean environment, I mean, like, you in your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness. And so that's a.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the last time you're ever going to talk to them. Like, we don't have to figure out what terrible things are going to happen, but they're gone. It's done, right? Instantly you get this sense of like the next time you see your kid, you're going to hug them a little bit closer, right? And all it took was like a two second negative visualization about what if they weren't here, right? You know, we have the capacity to really appreciate this stuff, but we need to bring our attention to what matters and why these things are great in our lives. And that takes a little bit of work, but it's really possible. We can have a richer life and savor things a lot more by changing our reference points.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT