Yale's Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students

[brooklynite]

New York Times

Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these young high-achievers looking for something they’ve lost, or never found. Either way, the desire to lead a more fulfilled life is hardly limited to young Ivy Leaguers, and Santos turned her course into a popular podcast series “The Happiness Lab,” which quickly rose above the crowded happiness-advice field. (It has been downloaded more than 64 million times.) “Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy?” asks Santos, who is 46. “Because it takes work! Because it’s hard!”

I was just Googling you to find out some minor fact, and I saw a story in the Yale student paper that said you’re taking a leave of absence for burnout. So, first, I’m sorry that things were feeling difficult. And second, if the happiness professor is feeling burned out, what hope is there for the rest of us? Back up, back up. I took a leave of absence because I’m trying not to burn out. I know the signs of burnout. It’s not like one morning you wake up, and you’re burnt. You’re noticing more emotional exhaustion. You’re noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone’s intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t noticing those things in myself. I can’t be telling my students, “Oh, take time off if you’re overwhelmed” if I’m ignoring those signals. You can’t just power through and wish things weren’t happening. From learning about the science of happiness, I treat it like any other health issue: If my blood pressure was soaring — you need to take action. So it’s not a story of Even the happiness professor isn’t happy. This is a story of, I’m making these changes now so I don’t get to that point of being burned out. I see it as a positive.

Even aside from an expert like yourself, we all have more resources about how to be happy than any humans ever, and yet so many of us still find it so hard to figure out how to be happier. Why is that? This is the way I frame a lot of the talk about happiness on the podcast: Our minds lie to us. We have strong intuitions about the things that will make us happy, and we use those intuitions to go after that stuff, whether it’s more money or changing circumstances or buying the new iPhone. But a lot of those intuitions, the science shows are not exactly right — or are deeply misguided. That’s why we get it wrong. I know this stuff, but my instincts are totally wrong. After a busy day, I want to sit and watch crappy Netflix TV shows, even though I know the data suggests that if I worked out or called a friend I’d be happier. But to do that I have to fight my intuition. We need help with that, and you don’t get it naturally, especially in the modern day. There’s an enormous culture around us of capitalism that’s telling us to buy things and a hustle-achievement culture that destroys my students in terms of anxiety. We’re also fighting cultural forces that are telling us, “You’re not happy enough; happiness could just be around the corner.” Part of it’s all the information out there about happiness, which can be hard to sift through, but a lot of it is a deeper thing in our culture that seems to be leading us astray.

A lot of stuff that we know can have a positive effect on happiness — developing a sense of meaning, connection with other people, meditation and reflection — are commonplace religious practices. How helpful are they outside religion? There’s evidence that cultural structures, religious structures, even smaller groups like your CrossFit team can cause true behavior change. The question is what’s driving that? Take the religious case. You could mean two things by saying you need a cultural apparatus around the behavior change: One is you need a rich sense of beliefs; you need to buy into theological principles to get the benefits. Another is that it’s your commitment to these groups that does it, and it doesn’t have to come with a set of spiritual beliefs. There’s a lot of evidence that religious people, for example, are happier in a sense of life satisfaction and positive emotion in the moment. But is it the Christian who really believes in Jesus and reads the Bible? Or is it the Christian who goes to church, goes to the spaghetti suppers, donates to charity, participates in the volunteer stuff? Turns out, to the extent that you can disentangle those two, it seems to not be our beliefs but our actions that are driving the fact that religious people are happier. That’s critical because what it tells us is, if you can get yourself to do it — to meditate, to volunteer, to engage with social connection — you will be happier. It’s just much easier if you have a cultural apparatus around you.

[delisen]

1. Ignorance can breed happiness. Knowledge can breed unhappiness.

The tale of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a tale of the emotional price of knowledge.

I am not familiar with this professor’s work and I will check it out.

However there is some dissonance for me in this excerpt. I think the professor may not be qualified yet to teach others about happiness and Yale may not be the venue.