Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist at Yale, teaches the most popular course in the university’s three-hundred-year history, Psychology and the Good Life. One of her central messages—in the class, and on the podcast it inspired—is that, when it comes to happiness, we have some agency. “The data bears out that there’s a lot we can do to change our behaviors and thought patterns in order to feel a little bit happier,” she said. Santos recently joined us to talk about some of her favorite books that offer useful tools to boost our positive emotions. Her comments have been edited and condensed.
Stumbling on Happiness
by Dan Gilbert
Gilbert researches the ways in which we’re bad at predicting what’ll make us happy, and what might hurt us. Prospection is an amazing power that humans have, but it’s kind of in beta version. One of our systematic errors is that we constantly overestimate the effects—magnitude and duration—that our circumstances will have on us. It’s what Gilbert refers to as impact bias. Take a breakup, for example: you often think it’ll be the end of the world, but it doesn’t affect you as much as you anticipate.
This is tied to another big insight from the book: we have what Gilbert calls a psychological immune system. There are mechanisms in place that make us feel better when we’re faced with a pathogen, like rejection and disappointment. Understanding our impact bias won’t make it go away, but it can still be helpful—say, by giving you the confidence to take more risks.
The Power of Fun
by Catherine Price
How many of us feel as if we’re languishing, just doing the same old, same old? And, even when we finally have some leisure time, we don’t do things that are actually fun. We might do something easy, like scroll through TikTok, but that often leaves us feeling gross. Price advocates for fun, which she specifically defines as having three features: connection, flow, and playfulness.
If you think about the times in your life when you’ve had the most fun, you’re probably with somebody, because fun is social. It’s also important to be present. If you’re having fun, you’re usually not feeling compelled to pick up your phone. Finally, fun has to be inherently rewarding—you’re not doing it for your résumé. Price makes a really nice case that engaging in fun makes us happier, healthier, and less stressed.
The Book of Delights
by Ross Gay
Gay, a poet, made the decision that he was going to write an essay every day for a year about something that delighted him. His delights range from the eighties band DeBarge to the purple flowers that bloom in spring. Some of his delights exist in part because of structures of racism and inequality, like the nods that Black people share with one another in spaces where they are the only people of color. That we are able to find joy in such places is a beautiful sentiment. Gay wouldn’t have needed to write a book of hassles because research shows that our natural inclination is toward negativity. He had to train his brain to notice good little things over time, and, in doing so, he demonstrated that it’s possible to refocus your attention.
The Stoic Challenge
by William B. Irvine
The Stoics often get a bad rap. A common misconception is that they didn’t experience many emotions, but they were actually big fans of emotions, specifically positive ones. Their basic principle was that there are two kinds of things in life: what you can control, and what you can’t. What you can control is how you react to circumstances outside of your control.
Irvine suggests approaching life like a game, as if the bad stuff that happens to you are actually challenges designed by the “Stoic gods.” Doing so requires you to engage in habits that protect you. One example is negative visualization, which entails imagining all the terrible things that could happen to you in order to contextualize whatever it is you’re going through. This can help you react to obstacles with humor and resilience.
Four Thousand Weeks
by Oliver Burkeman
We’re constantly trying to set our future selves up to be the ones that rest, but it’s a delusion to think that we’ll ever get everything off of our plates. Burkeman is all about radical acceptance: we’re never going to have enough time, because we’re mortal. There’s a lot of good psychological evidence on the power of mortality salience. Thinking about death allows you to savor what matters. This framing gets rid of emotions like guilt; if it’s impossible to do it all, you don’t have to feel guilty when you say no or fall short. You’re just honoring your human limitations.
He also does a lovely job talking about the history of time and how we measure productivity. Just the idea of saving time, referring to it as something we can move around, is a crazy notion. That’s just not how time works. When you embrace the limits of time, you’ll be better off.
