It’s not suraward to anyone that the pandemic has had a major impact on our mental health. The virus caused loneliness, depression, and anxiety to run wild around the world. So this week, we sat down with The Happiness Lab The host and professor of psychology at Yale University, Dr. Laurie Santos, to learn some of the science-based strategies we can use to help us cope and even find some happiness. Listen to Dr. Santos discuss how techniques such as reframing and mindfulness can help us to be more resilient in the face of tragedy and how we can improve in accurately assessing the things that bring us joy.
Dr. Santos is professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. She is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive prejudices that hinder better choices, and her course, “Psychology and the Good Life” recently became Yale’s most popular course in more than 300 years.
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This week’s episode highlights
From the interview with Dr. Laurie Santos:
On how to determine which types of online social interactions are most beneficial to your mental health:
So one way to think about it is, how can we get any closer to what we were created to do naturally? But another way is to think carefully about what is good. I think this is what we all need to do more and more. It’s like right after having a certain interaction, how did it feel to scroll through the Instagram feed for an hour? How do you feel after that? If you’re like me, it can be like, “I feel kind of disgusting, a little listless” How did you feel after that happy hour at Zoom? Well, you know, some days I get enriched and feeling good … If it was like an hour that I was at a Zoom happy hour after millions of hours for work Zoom meetings, like, I feel kind of unpleasant. I needed to get up and move. So the answer to what seems to be the best one will change. And that’s fine too. I think the key is to pay attention to how it is, because the things that we anticipate will feel good, not [always] necessarily feel good.
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On the strategy of emotional resilience inspired by the stoic Greek philosophers:
Epictetus started his book with the idea that there are two things in the world: there are things that you can control and others that you cannot control. You know, the fact that vaccines are not being released as fast as I want, the fact that my students are not sure they can stay on campus this semester, the fact that I cannot see my friends, all those I cannot control. But here are the things I can control: my reaction to those things, you know, whether I call a friend or not, if I pull out my yoga mat and do a good workout, because it will make me feel good. Those are the things I can control. And what the Stoics say is that if you focus on the things you can control, no one will be able to force you into a negative emotion.
About how we seek happiness the wrong way:
[T]This is the problem with the idea of pursuing happiness: it is not that we should not pursue happiness. It turns out that when we try to chase him, we get it wrong … if we really want to focus on what really makes us happy, it’s usually much simpler than we think. These are things like taking the time to be there. [T]looking for time for a social connection, moving your body, getting enough sleep … When you go after these things, it doesn’t look like you’re chasing happiness, you’re just doing the things you normally should be doing as a human. But it turns out that this can result in a lot of well-being in the end.
To learn more about the science of happiness, we recommend listening to the full episode.
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Episode transcript