How to Lead a Happier Life with Dr. Laurie Santos
The One You Feed
Eric Zimmer
4.6 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2022
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. She is the host of the podcast The Happiness Lab and 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. Dr. Santos has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, and more. She has won numerous awards both for her science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association.
In this episode, Eric and Dr. Laurie Santos discuss the psychology of happiness and strategies on how to lead a happier life.
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Dr. Laurie Santos and I Discuss How to Lead a Happier Life and …
- Her podcast, The Happiness Lab
- The research she does with dogs
- How animals are excellent guides on how to be present
- The power of doing little things and doing them often
- Focusing on the small things can help keep our “stories” accurate and positive
- Gratitude and delight practices are useful strategies to create happiness
- The impact of sound and learning to notice pleasant sounds
- Shifting our attitude of how we spend our time (get to rather than have to)
- Understanding the scientific benefits can provide motivation to change behavior
- Self compassion helps to find the happy medium of being too harsh or easy on yourself
- Getting curious about our resistance to creating good habits
- How noticing and meditating on the rewards of a positive behavior hacks the brain systems
- Knowing that behavior change is easier when our environment supports the behavior
- Loneliness and how our intuitions are often wrong when trying to overcome it
Dr. Laurie Santos Links
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr, Laurie Santos, check out these other episodes:
Ruth Whippman on The Complexities of Happiness
Jonathan Rauch on The Happiness Curve
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's stuff our societies have been saying, our cultures have been saying, our |
| 0:03.0 | grandmothers have been saying, for hundreds, if not thousands of years. |
| 0:07.1 | But somehow in the modern world we've got away from actually practicing these things. |
| 0:19.1 | Welcome to the One You Feed. |
| 0:20.9 | Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes |
| 0:25.6 | like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. |
| 0:31.0 | And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. |
| 0:35.2 | We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy or fear. |
| 0:40.0 | We see what we don't have instead of what we do. |
| 0:42.8 | We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. |
| 0:46.3 | But it's not just about thinking, our actions matter. |
| 0:49.8 | It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. |
| 0:54.6 | This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, |
| 0:59.0 | how they feed their good wolf. |
| 1:15.0 | Hey, I'm Joel Stein. |
| 1:16.6 | I want you to close your eyes and imagine a pocket watch. |
| 1:20.2 | It's moving from side to side. |
| 1:22.8 | You're getting very sleepy. |
| 1:26.1 | Great. |
| 1:27.1 | Now that I've hypnotized you against your will, you're going to start liking long-form journalism. |
| 1:30.5 | Like so much. |
| 1:32.5 | You're going to listen to a podcast where the host interviews a writer about their long-form |
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