Small Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie Santos | From The One You Feed

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Dr. Laurie Santos joins Eric Zimmer to discuss how small, consistent actions can significantly impact long-term happiness and mental well-be

Key takeaways

• Dr. Laurie Santos highlights that 'little and often' habits are more effective than attempting massive, overwhelming life changes.
• The practice of 'noticing delights' serves as an easier entry point for mindfulness than formal gratitude when experiencing low moods.

Main topics

• Mindfulness and the Two Wolves parable
• Canine cognition and presence

Notable quotes

Happiness is not a function of big changes, but of small, consistent actions.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that well-being is a manageable practice achi

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Pushkin. Speaker 3 (0:15) Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Dr. Laurie Santos here with a little something extra for you this week. On Monday's episode, I spoke with podcaster and author Eric Zimmer about his new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot, and how, in spite of our instincts, it's often better for our long-term health and happiness to set smaller goals rather than big ones. But Eric and I actually go back a little further than that episode. A while back, I joined him on his podcast, The One You Feed. We covered some of the same themes we explored in Monday's show. But in that conversation, we went even further. Plus, he was interviewing me. I wanted to share that discussion with you today. I hope you enjoy it. And we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the show. Speaker 2 (1:04) Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Speaker 2 (2:00) Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. She's also the host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Her course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students what the science of psychology says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that's happier and more fulfilling. And that class is Yale's most popular course in over 300 years. She's been featured in numerous news outlets, including New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and many, many more, and is also a winner of numerous awards for both science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association. Laurie has been featured as one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten Young Minds and was named Time's Leading Campus Speaker 1 (2:54) Celebrity. Hi, Laurie. Welcome to the show. Speaker 3 (2:57) Thanks so much for having me on. Speaker 1 (2:58) I'm so excited to have you on. You are the creator of a really great podcast called The Happiness Lab, as well as work you do on happiness at Yale and all sorts of things. And we'll get into all that in a minute. But let's start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Speaker 3 (3:42) Yeah. I mean, I've heard the parable before, that one you feed. You know, for me, it really shows that happiness and focusing on our mental health takes work and it takes choices, right? And it reminds us not just that happiness takes work, but that there's these interesting opportunity costs, right? That if you're putting your time and your energy, especially your emotional energy into certain kinds of things, you could be doing that at an opportunity cost of the kinds of processes you want to win out, right? And so the wolf metaphor has always been really powerful to me. It's not enough that you focus on the things that matter, you also have to make sure that you're not also focusing on the things that don't matter. Speaker 1 (4:18) Yeah, and there's a lot in your work that I think we'll get to as we go through that really hits on that parable. So much of your work, I think, orients around an idea of what we think will make us happy is actually not usually the things that will make us happy. If we think something is going to make us happy, that's where we're going to direct all our energy. And to your point, if all your energy is going there, you don't have enough left to put over on the things that do create happiness. If we had infinite energy, this wouldn't be a problem. right? But it is. And so, yeah, that opportunity cost is really important. I want to start by going a slightly different direction because I did not know this about you until I started doing deeper research, but you are the director of the Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, which that is so cool. That is so cool. I'm a huge dog lover. Speaker 3 (5:10) Yeah, the work is relevant in a couple different ways to feeding wolves. Speaker 1 (5:13) We Speaker 3 (5:14) haven't worked with wolves directly, but we have worked with Australian dingoes. This was my kind of, you know, day job before I got interested in the science of happiness. I was really interested in this question of what makes humans unique, what makes humans special. And studying canids is really an important way to answer that question, in part because dogs and domesticated dogs in particular grew up alongside humans, right? You know, so this path from becoming a wolf to becoming... a canid that could be around people as one that really shaped these animals to pay attention to us in a particular way and maybe even shape their cognitive abilities. So canids are a really fantastic comparison point for all the... cool and interesting things that humans do if you're interested in questions of uniqueness. But I sadly don't get to spend as much of my time doing the canine work these days. No, Speaker 1 (5:57) it's just as I was looking at some of your publications after like the second one that had dogs or, you know, canines in the title, I was like, there's something I'm not understanding about her work here. And so then as I dug a little deeper, I was like, okay. So to that end, you know, if we wanted to translate that work into the happiness work. Is there anything about the work that you do or about dog cognition or animal cognition that would point us in the direction of happiness or any lessons we can sort of, even if we're sort of stretching the analogy a little bit, anything from there that you find interesting? Speaker 3 (6:30) Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of things. One is Animals are incredibly good at prioritizing some of the stuff that makes them happy, right? I mean, to take, you know, for example, presence, right? You know, mindfulness, just being in the present moment. You know, I think dogs are a wonderful example of this. I mean, I think one of the benefits we get from hanging out with dogs, and in fact, there's scientific work to suggest this, is that you become more mindful when you're around your dog. If you're taking your dog for a walk and he's, you know, sniffing the ground and looking at the flowers and paying attention to the sounds, it sort of causes you to do the same thing. It gets you back. into your normal sensory experience. And so I think animals can be a great guide for helping us do that. I also think that dogs are a really wonderful way to get social connection, especially if you're having a hard time getting some social connection with humans, you can form that meaningful bond with an animal in a way that gives us so many of the exact same psychological benefits. So the work I was doing with dogs wasn't necessarily on happiness, but they've definitely given me a glimmer into some strategies that work. Speaker 1 (7:31) Yeah. I mean, dogs are one of, my great sources of happiness in life for sure. It's funny anytime if you were to look at my camera roll or you were to look at my gratitude lists, they're always, you know, they're near the very, very top. All right. So let's talk a little bit about an idea that you use a lot, which I think is really important. And we talk about it on this program. We talk about it in the spiritual habits program. You say a good rule of thumb for all this stuff is little and often. Speaker 3 (8:00) And I think what I mean by that is, you know, we can really find ways to protect our mental health and boost our well-being through the little things that we do if we kind of keep up the habit of doing them often. You know, so I think when we think about the things that are really bringing us down, it's not usually the one-off thing that we happen to do with our time. It's the things that we're doing persistently over and over again that, again, can kind of create this opportunity cost on our happiness. put in positive habits, even if they're tiny, even if they're baby steps, and you can get yourself to do them more and more, those are the things that are really going to impact your well-being. Oftentimes more than you expect. You think, oh, it's this little thing, you know, do a five-minute meditation, you know, or it's this tiny thing to like make sure I'm, you know, texting a friend and checking in. You know, these things matter more than we think. Speaker 1 (8:49) Yeah, there's a Tanzanian proverb that I use in the Spiritual Habits course, which is little by little, a little becomes a lot. And I just love that idea. And I love how you just pointed to this works for both the good and the bad, right? You know, if social media doesn't make you feel good, I'm not castigating it across the board, but if you're one of those people in which social media turns into a comparison exercise and leaves you feeling bad about yourself. you know, little by little, that becomes a lot versus just like you're saying, text to friends, little by little, you're nurturing and growing connection. And so I just think that's such an important idea. And we tend to discount it Speaker 3 (9:26) because Speaker 1 (9:27) we think we have to make really big changes. And sometimes a big change can be great and can be helpful and depending on what it is. But for most of us, it's the little changes, you know, how do we work? a little more of this into our day. And Speaker 3 (9:41) I think, you know, focusing on the little can allow us to do something that also can improve our well-being, right? Which is to make sure we're harnessing self-compassion. You know, I think sometimes we want to make this huge change, like, you know, I'm going to be perfectly happy and I'm never going to mess up again. We're often trying to make that big change with a certain sort of attitude, and it's an attitude of perfectionism. Like, if I screw up, you know, the world is over. And so I think focusing on the little changes means you're giving yourself something you can bite off, something that's actually doable. You're not setting yourself up for failure. You're kind of doing it in a compassionate way. And so I think that's another way that focusing on the little can help us. We're doing it with this mindset of compassion and doability as opposed to, I must be this perfect robot that gets everything right the first time. Speaker 1 (10:24) Absolutely. And I think there's so much to be said for positive momentum, right? So when we start doing little things and we're successful, we feel better about ourselves. We feel more confident. We feel like we have more self-efficacy versus when we try and do big things and we fail. You know, you do that long enough that eats away at your sense of. your ability to change. You know, I did a lot of behavior coaching for a while, and that was such a big thing was people would say, I'm the kind of person who doesn't finish things. And I'd say, well, you haven't finished things in the past, but I don't know that that's a personality trait, right? But we've got to adjust the way we go after these things. Speaker 3 (11:03) That's exactly right. And I think we forget that the stories we tell ourselves matter a lot, right? You know, I'm a person who doesn't finish things. You know, that's a story that you can update, right? That's a story that has some content that may or may not be true that you could change. challenge, you know, riddled with these cognitive fallacies. And so I think focusing on the small can also help us make sure that those stories are accurate, right? We're not trying to come up with a magnum opus story that's going to make sense of everything we've done. We're just talking about, you know, did I get up and like do my five minute gratitude meditation this morning, right? You know, these tiny things allow us to achieve it, but they allow us to come up with better stories that we can tell ourselves that are stories that are. positive ones about growth and so on. Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:44) Dr. Rick Hansen said something once. He said, our stories about ourselves are at least six months out of date. And I think actually that number is way underestimated. I think our stories about ourselves can be years out of date, you know? And so I like that idea of just adjusting a little bit. You mentioned gratitude there. And I thought maybe we could turn towards gratitude for a second, because it's one of the skills that you talk about in your happiness course as being a real really helpful happiness tool. There's lots of studies about how good gratitude is for us in so many different ways. You know, it's pro-social. It tends to make us often be able to regulate ourselves better, sometimes get more done. I mean, there's a ton of reasons why gratitude is so valuable. So my question to you would be twofold. The first would be, what do you think are some of the most useful strategies for making gratitude part of our life? And then the second question is a little bit more complex, but you talk about hedonic adaptation, which is we get used to things, right? You know, I get a new car and then I get used to having the car. It's no longer special anymore. Well, I'm curious whether we can have hedonic adaptation in our gratitude work, because this is what I feel like happens to me as I do it. And it's really valuable until I've done it for a while. And now I'm back to the same sort of things. And now all of a sudden it's kind of used to the gratitude work. So question one would be, what are some practices you like? And then question two, what would be some ways of keeping it fresh? Speaker 3 (13:15) Yeah. Well, in terms of practices that I think work, I mean, part of it is, you know, you got to find what works for you, right? Speaker 2 (13:21) There Speaker 3 (13:22) are practices that might be fantastic for me that you might find cheesy or you might find onerous. You know, as someone who's an expert on behavior change, as you know, the practices that's going to work is the one that we can get ourselves to do, right? Speaker 1 (13:33) Right. Some Speaker 3 (13:34) that I really like are just the simple act of writing down a few things that you're grateful for. You know, I have a little app that I use to do this. I don't think you need an app. It can, if you're a pen and paper person, use pen and paper, but just commit to, you know, three to five things you're grateful for every day. And the key, which maybe is going to get to your hedonic adaptation question a little bit, is that ideally those should be different. You know, it doesn't really work if every day you're like. Dog, spouse, coffee, dog, spouse, coffee, dog, spouse, coffee. Like you got to first have to mix it up a bit. Speaker 1 (14:04) Yeah. Speaker 3 (14:04) And you second have to make sure you're feeling it. It can't be rote. I mean, the whole point of gratitude is that it's an emotion and you have to kind of turn it on. But another practice I really love, which for me felt a little bit easier because it meant I was noticing things I was grateful for throughout the day, was a practice that I learned from the author Ross Gay, who has this book called The Book of Delights. And his practice is just he tries to notice things that he finds delightful out there in a world. So it's not like, you know, capital G gratitude of this. blessing that came to your life. It's just like you notice fun things out there. Like, you know, this morning as I was walking to get coffee, there was a guy who was like parking near me and he was like. blasting old school, like Ozzy Osbourne out the window of his car. And he had this big dog that was hanging out. And so I looked over and for a second, I thought the dog was like jamming along to Ozzy Osbourne. Speaker 2 (14:55) Right. Speaker 3 (14:55) And that was like delight. You know, Ross Gay would put his finger in there and just said, that is a delight. Right. And the reason I like the delight practice is first, it's easier than gratitude. Right. You don't have to kind of remember this list and write it down. Speaker 2 (15:07) But Speaker 3 (15:08) the second is that it's doing what you want to be doing in the gratitude practice, which is sort of training your attention. the blessings, to the things that are good in life. You're fighting this bias that we know is one that is built in, which is a negativity bias. Our brains are set to notice the big tigers out there in the world, the anxiety-provoking, scary, sad things. It takes some work to train our brains to shift focus and notice the delightful things. So if a gratitude practice seems onerous or like it's going to be too work, commit to noticing the delights. And I like finding a delight buddy where you can like text the buddy, like saw a dog hanging out, car playing. Ozzy Osbourne. Delight, you know, all caps. That's a great Speaker 1 (15:45) idea. To Speaker 3 (15:46) get to your hedonic adaptation question, you know, I think this is a tough one because there are studies that suggest that we don't hedonically adapt to certain kinds of emotions as easily. And gratitude is one of these that if you're focused on the right stuff, you can continue that feeling long after you expect. You don't see the same hedonic adaptation curve for gratitude. But you have to keep feeling it to get there. And I think the problem with a lot of gratitude practices is we turn them into something that we do rote. It's like brushing our teeth again. It's like spouse, dog, coffee, like every single day, right? And you just stop feeling it. And so one way to do that is you make a rule with yourself that it has to be something new. It can be my spouse's feet or his smile or my dog's tail or my dog, the way she drinks the water. You have to commit to it. finding something novel every single time. And that means you're still in the noticing, right? You're still like allowing the gratitude to do what it needs to do, which is like you got to. feel it. You got to think like, that is amazing that this universe of all the people this dog could be with, of all the dogs I could have, I have this dog. You have to take