How To Be Happier This Year

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Hey, it's Maya. Like many of us entering the new year, one of my goals is to be a happier, more peaceful person in twenty twenty-six. That's why I recently revisited a conversation I had with my friend and former undergrad advisor, Laurie Santos. Laurie is a psychology professor at Yale and a leading expert on happiness. She shares a bunch of science-backed strategies that we can implement right away to make us meaningfully happier in our everyday lives. Our conversation ranged from ideas like the arrival fallacy, the false sense that reaching one big milestone will finally be the thing that makes us happy, to whether thinking about our own happiness too much can actually backfire. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed hosting it. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Laurie. Hi, Laurie.

Hello, Maya. [laughing]

[laughing] Thank you for joining me on A Slight Change of Plans in honor of World Happiness Day.

Love it. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

So I alluded to this, but it's worth sharing with folks that I've actually known you since I was seventeen years old. [chuckles] Um, I was a, a student of yours. I was-

A whole eight years now. [laughing]

[laughing] I know! It feels like it's been so much longer. Um, I was a freshman in your monkey lab class, and you ended up being my academic advisor for all four years. And at the time, your research lab was focused on cognition, right? Differences between monkeys and humans, and I would never have known at the time that at some point you would pivot and start focusing on happiness research. So can you share what led to that shift?

Yeah, it was just as much of a surprise for me, too, [chuckles] interestingly. But yeah, no, so I, I mean, I was doing all this work on kind of comparative cognition and studying monkeys, you know, happily doing that work, and then I took on a new role at Yale. I became what's called the Head of College. And so, uh, Maya, I know you know this, but for your listeners, Yale's one of these weird schools like Hogwarts in Harry Potter, where there's, like, colleges within a college. There's, like, Gryffindor and Slytherin kind of thing. Yale has these, too. I was head of what's called Silliman College, and that meant that I, as a faculty member, lived on campus with students. So I hung out with them in the dining hall, and I just, you know, saw them in the coffee shop. I was, like, really much closer to student life than I was even, you know, running my lab, where I got to know students really well. And honestly, I just didn't like what I was seeing. I was seeing the college