Happiness Expert Dr Laurie Santos Shares the Little Things That Brighten Her Day

Dr Laurie Santos’s “happiness class” is the most popular in Yale University’s 321 years – and more than 4 million people have downloaded its online version. For her own happiness, the psychology professor and podcaster relies not on instincts but science.

06:00 The moment the alarm goes off, I crack open my phone and do a sleepy scroll through Google News.

07:15 In some meta-analyses, a half-hour of cardio exercise can be as good for reducing symptoms of depression as taking an antidepressant. But I’m not the kind of person who’s naturally motivated to exercise. So I treat myself to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer during 45 minutes on the elliptical machine. If there’s time for yoga, I use [online platform] glo.com. Many things that I know bring happiness are hard to create time for. It’s why I exercise early – you need to fit these things in first.

08:30 I add protein powder to a chocolate blueberry banana spinach smoothie and head upstairs to my office. If you do the same things every morning you end up doing the good habits more naturally. I try to eat without engaging with media but don’t always succeed.

09:00 Being addicted to email is something I’m working on to improve my wellbeing. In truth, on the elliptical, when Buffy gets a little boring, I pull out my phone. On Twitter I follow Jay Van Bavel, a professor at NYU who studies political polarisation, and Jennifer Richeson, my Yale colleague who studies how people experience racial diversity. News can be anxiety-provoking so I don’t have news notifications. Embarrassingly, I get a lot of my news from Twitter.

09:55 Frantically print notes. Run downstairs to my podcast closet.

10:00 I’m now in this slightly creepy closet with my recording equipment and a bunch of mattresses and cushions behind the green screen. I interview Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki for my podcast, The Happiness Lab. His advice is spot on. The way to make sure our teams are as happy as they can be is to engage with empathy – for other people and also for ourselves. Sometimes we can’t fix other people’s problems. That resonated with me.

11:15 Switch gears to my work as head of college. I live on the campus, in a mansion in the middle of a quad, and I sprint across it to check in with my administrative assistant and operations manager. It’s the first time we’ve run graduation since COVID began so we’re out of practice. Did we get the frames for the student prizes? Are we all set for where the microphone’s going?

12:00 I eat lunch of leftover black beans and tortilla and avocado alone at a 12-person dining table under a chandelier with crystal spirals. Then I walk up Hillhouse Avenue, which Mark Twain called the most beautiful street in America – it’s filled with old elm trees and university buildings – to teach my happiness class.

13:00 One of the themes of my class, Psychology and the Good Life, is that many of our intuitions about happiness are wrong. We think it’s about money, achievement and accolades – my type-A Ivy League students especially think this – but the evidence suggests it’s really about simple behaviours: doing kind things for others, having a mindset of gratitude. Advice that I give my students but sometimes struggle with myself is the importance of social connection – talking to strangers on the street, trying to connect with people. Doing podcast interviews has made me better at that.

14:30 I’m just tired. The college students don’t realise how exhausting teaching can be. Resting for me is checking email in my office. So far I’ve been sprinting from meeting to meeting, not being as present as I could be. The class is a good reminder to get back to basics in my daily life, too. There’s an idea that we want to push ourselves hard but evidence suggests we should be more self-compassionate.

18:00 Dinner with a candidate for a job. It’s fun because my faculty colleagues are also my close friends and it’s on the patio of one of our favourite New Haven restaurants, Harvest, where we get this delicious truffle Brussels sprout salad. It’s probably terrifying for the candidates but they’ve done their interviews and this is a moment where, at least in theory, they can relax a little. We chat about science and nerd out about ideas.

20:00 One of my faculty colleagues, Arielle Baskin-Sommers, lives in New York so she often stays over. We usually grab a drink, maybe do yoga. Tonight, we go back to the mansion, put on our beat-up, cosy pyjamas and sit in the huge foyer on the oriental rug to have some rosé and gossip.

21:30 I’m taking those pyjamas upstairs to my bedroom. That’s a sacred time, to reconnect with my husband [Yale philosophy lecturer Mark Maxwell]. Even though he goes to bed later, we chat about our day and read. I’m reading Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet, which is about how we don’t like emotions like grief and melancholy but they do have positive aspects. She starts with an account of a concert cellist who, in the midst of the civil war in Sarajevo, put on his shirt and tails, brought a chair outside and started playing a sad, sad song that reverberated through the streets. It’s so powerful to think that in all this awfulness, we can do things that have a moment of meaning. Isn’t that such a wonderful expression of the human condition?

22:00 By 10pm, I’ve fallen asleep and my husband has taken the book out of my hand, shut off the light and that’s it.

Life lessons

Before studying the science of happiness, Dr Laurie Santos researched animal cognition; in 2016, she travelled to Victoria to test how dingoes think. But when she started living with students as head of Silliman College at Yale, she was struck by the high levels of mental health dysfunction on campus. “I was seeing depression, anxiety, suicidality. This is an international problem among college students.” So in 2018 she began teaching her Psychology and the Good Life class, which offers datadriven solutions to improving happiness, and more than 1000 students signed up. Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has been downloaded more than 70 million times.

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