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The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

The Hidden Beliefs That Shape Your Happiness with Shawn Achor

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 14.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Our beliefs shape more than we realize. They influence what we notice, how we respond to setbacks, how connected we feel to others, and whether we take action to improve our lives. 

As part of our series on how to spring clean your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie sits down with happiness expert Shawn Achor, author of The Power of Beliefs, to explore how our beliefs about time, work, relationships, and self-worth shape happiness, success, and long-term wellbeing.

And if some of your beliefs are holding you back, Shawn shares practical ways to start shifting them. Plus, we learn one delightful fact about fireflies.

Experts Mentioned:

  • Shawn Achor, positive psychology researcher and author 
  • Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire
  • Henry Beecher, anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School who pioneered research on the placebo effect 

Resources Mentioned:

Related Episodes:

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Pushkin.

0:10.8

Welcome back to our series on how to spring clean our well-being.

0:16.3

So far, we've explored the happiness benefits of things like releasing grudges,

0:20.6

redesigning our spaces,

0:22.0

and rethinking how our screens affect our physical health. But this episode of the

0:26.4

Happiness Lab is about spring cleaning the beliefs that lie underneath all that. So if I ask

0:31.5

people about beliefs, what do you believe? They'll start with a political belief and then a

0:35.9

religious belief. This is author and happiness expert, Sean Aker. They'll immediately go to one of those two things. But actually, we have beliefs about everything. We have beliefs about who drives a cyber truck. Are they a liberal or conservative? We have beliefs about how tall I should be or whether or not it's good to be a stay-at-home parent. We have undercurrents

0:54.2

of belief that shape everything. It's true that this idea of beliefs feels almost too broad to tackle.

1:00.2

You can believe in things like free will or Santa Claus, or karma or meritocracy. The list goes on

1:06.4

and on, from the political to the personal, to the abstract and existential. So I asked Sean, what is a belief really?

1:14.8

For me, beliefs is simply the lens through which you view the world that change the way you act

1:19.9

within it. So our beliefs shape how I get a C in biology or how I have a new baby. Those beliefs

1:27.0

help us to facilitate not only what's coming in,

1:30.8

but then they change what comes back out to and then they predict what happens next.

1:35.8

In his new book, The Power of Beliefs, Sean focuses on a set of core beliefs that he argues

1:41.2

can be predictive of positive life outcomes, things like success and long-term happiness.

1:46.8

And that feels especially important right now, given how many people are struggling.

1:51.5

Those beliefs are things like, I don't matter, or I'm alone, or this work isn't meaningful,

1:56.6

or I'm missing out, or there's nothing greater than me.

2:00.7

And on the opposite side is, of course, I'm not alone, or there's nothing greater than me. And on the opposite side is,

2:02.2

of course, I'm not alone, or this work is meaningful, or I matter, right? Or my behavior matters.

...

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