Hi, I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning.

I'll be guest hosting Radio Headspace this week and I'm so happy to be here. If you

don't know, I'm a psychology professor at Yale and head of Ciliman College. I also

host the Happiness Lab, a podcast all about the science of happiness. Over the years, I

learned that the pursuit of happiness is not as straightforward as we'd like to believe.

Many of the things we think will make us feel fulfilled or content actually do just

the opposite. So this week, we're going to talk about how to find happiness and in the

process debunk some of the most commonly held beliefs that lead us off the path. On

that note, today I'll explore how our minds can lie to us about what will make us feel

good and what truly makes us happy. I think happiness is really difficult to achieve,

not because we're not putting work in. It's because we are putting work in, but we're

doing it the wrong way. I think a lot of us are faced with this idea of hustle culture,

right? That if we push ourselves at work and earn more money and get more accolades

that we'll feel happier, but there's so much evidence that that's just simply not

going to work. Happiness is really not about what we achieve, but the evidence suggests

that it's in the journey, right? It's in the path that we're taking to get somewhere.

One of my favorite kinds of stories when it comes to the misconceptions we have about

happiness are cases of people who had something that they would have assumed would have been

terrible happen in their lives, but ultimately they got some happiness from it. One of my

favorite examples of this is the former military man, JR Martinez. He thought that the thing

that would make him most happy would be to serve his country and to become an army

brat for life. And what happened was when he was on his first tour of duty, his Humvee

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