There’s been a lot of hype around Dr. Laurie Santos’s class at Yale about happiness, and if it’s anything like her podcast, then the hype is well-deserved. The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos is a thoughtful, approachable, research-steeped investigation into what makes us happy and how to make our own happiness in the “labs” of our lives. Stockpiling insights from the latest scientific studies on happiness as well as inspiring stories from guests, Dr. Santos will help you unlock the gates to happiness, one episode at a time.
Who’s Your Host?
Dr. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at Yale University who has studied human cognition, cognitive biases, and happiness for almost 20 years. Her class, “Psychology and the Good Life,” was already the most popular class in Yale University’s 300+ year history when she began offering it for free online. In 2020, a staggering 3.4 million people enrolled in the course. Dr. Santos has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, and The New Yorker, and has been a guest on The Today Show, NPR’s Life Kit, and many more.
What’s It All About?
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos offers fascinating perspectives from psychological studies that shift the way we think about happiness and our role in creating it. Covering topics like connection, rejection, and habit formation, Dr. Santos teaches us how to make choices that allow happiness to flow into our lives, and how to avoid longing or grasping for ideals that don’t exist.
Why We Love It
Dr. Santos explains the phenomena of happiness that don’t make perfect sense, like why sometimes happiness eludes us even when we get everything we want. She helps us see through and circumvent the tricks our minds play on us, and she offers practical tools for changing the way we think in order to change how we feel. She backs it all up with the latest research, interwoven amidst real-world stories.
Where to Start
Some common misconceptions about happiness: you simply have it or you don’t, it lasts forever once it’s achieved, it’s purely a product of circumstance. In the first episode of the show, Dr. Santos busts happiness myths with guest scientists, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, and Dr. Bob Waldinger from Harvard Medical School. The research findings they share may inspire you to confront your own limiting beliefs about happiness.
Best for: Forming Healthy Habits
Diving deep into the neuroscience of reward systems, routines, and something called “chunking,” Dr. Santos illustrates how we form habits. She is joined by Dr. Richard Ratner, a psychiatrist who helped soldiers in the Vietnam War to kick heroin habits, and psychologist Wendy Wood, Ph.D., a psychology and business professor at the University of Southern California, to expose a widespread misunderstanding about willpower and share what science proves are the most successful tricks for creating and breaking habits.
Best for: Facing Rejection
Learn the connection between the pain of a broken heart and the pain of physical injury in Laurie’s discussions with several leading experts on the science of rejection. You’ll hear an extreme story of rejection and humiliation from actor Tim Colceri, plus plenty of practical wisdom to help you handle that kicked-in-the-gut feeling of being turned down.