A simple exercise from Yale’s Happiness Lab will help you make decisions that lead to long-term happiness

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A simple exercise from Yale’s Happiness Lab will help you make decisions that lead to long-term happiness

By Jenna Abdou

Close your eyes and imagine you’re sitting across from yourself in 20 years. How might that change the decisions you make today? Yale professor Laurie Santos, PhD experimented to find her answer. Inspired by UCLA professor Hal Hershfield’s research, Santos generated images of herself in her sixties and seventies and talked to her future self. 

“We’re navigating what our future self might want in the present moment, but we often perspective-take on our future self quite poorly,” Santos shares. “Hal’s research has found that just seeing a picture of your future self can bring [the idea] more into view. It helps with that process of trying to figure out what [the future you] would really want.

“It’s profound,” she adds. “I really recommend people try it out. You see an image of yourself as much older and it’s like: I don’t want her to be unhealthy or have diabetes. I don’t want her knees to be screwed up. It really did change the amount that I worked out and how I was eating. It made it easier to make choices that would help my future self, rather than screw her over.”   

After creating the most popular course in Yale University’s history, Psychology and the Good Life, Santos has become the go-to happiness expert. This experiment reflects a central question her work explores: How do we make decisions that lead to long-term happiness? Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and more than 4.5 million people have taken her free Coursera course, The Science of Well-Being.

Here, we discuss how to transform your self-talk, redefine success, and create space for serendipity. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You shared in your conversation with your friend, Yale professor Tamar Gendler, that perfectionism causes you to have “an internal drill sergeant” who constantly yells at you. What has been most valuable in taming that voice and evolving your self-talk?

It’s really reduced my procrastination, because where does procrastination come from? Say I’m trying to write a podcast script. Usually procrastination comes when I’m worried it’s not going to go well or I’m having a tough time with it. If my inner drill sergeant is screaming at me—You suck. You should be able to do this. Why haven’t you done it yet?—that doesn’t make me want to sit down, open my Microsoft Word file, and work on it. It makes me avoid it. Whereas if I can talk to myself with some kindness and say—Hey, this is hard right now. All writers go through this moment where it’s tough sometimes. You should be nice to yourself.—that internal voice is much more likely to get me back on task and to try things out. 

There’s lovely work by [University of Texas at Austin professor] Kristin Neff and her colleagues showing how much a self-compassionate voice can prevent procrastination in students and people on the job. That’s been a big one for me. But overall, it’s a better way to relate to myself. It sucks when the enemy you have is inside your head. You want the inside of your head to be an ally that’s helping you out. 

It’s also important to remember that self-compassion is not self-indulgence. People assume that if you’re being nice to yourself, you’re letting yourself off the hook. But the analogy I often use with my students is to think about self-compassion as how you would talk to a good friend. If you had a really good friend who was totally screwing up, you wouldn’t allow them to be self-indulgent. You’d call them on it, but you wouldn’t do it in a mean way or a drill instructor way. You’d get curious: “What is going on? How can we fix this?” That’s the kind of self-talk mode that helps us when we ourselves are facing problems.  

It was illuminating to learn that our perception of stress not only changes our experience of it and our performance but also how it affects us afterward. Still, it’s one task to craft this reframe, and another to embody it. What mindset and behavior changes help us achieve the latter? 

A big one that I learned [relates to] how we talk to ourselves about stress. This is another domain where our inner voice can be a friend or an enemy. If I know something stressful is coming and I’m like, “This week, I have so many meetings. It’s going to be terrible,” that voice is affecting not just how I think about what’s coming up, but it’s also affecting physiologically what’s happening to me. I’m spiking my own stress hormones and the events haven’t even happened yet. Whereas if you talk to yourself and say, “This is great. I’ve got a whole day of meetings. It’s going to be a lot, but cortisol is going to kick in. It’s going to bring glucose to my bloodstream and I’ve got this.” There are times when we greet stressful moments with excitement. 

So, it’s remembering that we have a choice of how we frame those things—and recognizing that the way we frame them is having these longer-lasting effects about whether we’re turning on our fight-or-flight system and launching a whole hormonal cascade of stress hormones. The way we talk to ourselves matters a lot for what happens to our physiology.  

What do you do when you’re trying to reframe something but it feels like you’re faking it till you make it? For example, I’m telling myself I’m excited, but really I’m anxious.

The beauty is that the “fake it till you make it” works in some ways. Your brain can’t help hearing those statements, especially if you state them out loud. In some ways, our minds are kind of stupid. If they hear “Hey, this is going to be okay,” they can’t help but process it, at least a little bit. 

One of the techniques that I talk about in the podcast and teach my students for self-compassion is to give yourself a self-compassionate touch: Grab your shoulder, give it a little stroke, and say: “Hey, this is going to be okay.” It seems so cheesy, but again, your mind is stupid. It doesn’t know that it’s not a caring friend or your mom coming to give you a hug. You can fake a lot of stuff with your brain, but physiologically, it follows. 

You’ve explained that suppressing our emotions decreases our performance and physical health, adding that “if you ignore the gaslight, you will run out of gas.” Still, we often suppress our emotions to avoid pain. What alternatives promote our well-being and the health of our relationships? 

We assume that suppressing our emotions avoids pain. It might avoid pain in the moment. When the gas light comes on, it’s like I’m on this trip. I’ve got to pull over and get gas. So there’s momentary pain that happens when dealing with it. But the long-term pain is going to be worse if I run out of gas on the highway. 

It’s important to recognize that our emotions work like that. It’s one thing to notice, I’m feeling a little bit anxious right now, let me sit with that versus ignoring that, taking it to work, and saying something mean to somebody. Then, there’s that consequence. We don’t realize that there’s a longer-term consequence to not allowing our emotions and sitting with them, at least in the short term. 

There’s evidence that this is particularly hard for parents. There are lovely studies by [Yale psychology professor] Wendy Mendes showing that as a parent, if you’re stressed out at work, a lot of that stress or frustration is going to come out at your kids later on. She did this study where she put parents in a stressful situation (like giving a speech). Then she has this parent, who’s just been stressed out, do a Lego-building task with their kids. She looks at how much the kids enjoy the Lego task and how they do it. What you find is that if the parent is stressed out, particularly if the parent is stressed out and trying to suppress that stress, it bleeds through, maybe even more because you’re trying to suppress it. 

In your episode with [relationship experts] Drs. Julie and John Gottman, Julie emphasized that people can’t be there for you when they don’t know your needs, sharing that “it’s incredibly important to realize that interdependency is what creates strength in a relationship, and interdependency is created by saying what you need in a positive way.” How can we practice this relational skill? 

One good way to practice it is to try it out in baby steps: Ask for something small that you need and watch their reaction, whether that’s with your partner or a team member. We get a lot of purpose and value out of doing nice things for other people. So when we say “If you did this, it would help me”—not “You have to do this,” but rather “I need this. Here’s a thing that you could do that would be helpful,” you give people the opportunity to [help and] they usually enjoy it. It can create this positive feedback loop where you’re getting the thing that you need, not by forcing somebody to do it for you. But when they do it out of the goodness of their heart, they get a happiness boost, too, for having done something nice for somebody else. It winds up being a win-win.

In that same episode, the Gottmans shared that “the goal of conflict is mutual understanding” and that “the masters of relationships always dug deep when there was a significant issue at stake.” From your conversations and learning, what approaches help us achieve that goal? 

When we are experiencing conflict, we tend to think of the solution as what’s called the zero-sum game: One of us is going to win and one of us is going to lose. But oftentimes you can actually increase the pie if you find moments where you can compromise or negotiate. Any good business school will teach you about negotiations where the goal isn’t necessarily to get your way, but for everybody to get part of their way. So, the overall reward that we’re getting winds up being even bigger. In relationships and interpersonal interactions, we can start to reframe things that way and recognize that the pool can be bigger than we expect, especially if we know what everybody needs. Sometimes, we’re fighting over things and assuming our partner cares about one thing, but in fact it’s not what we expect. 

It’s an interesting point because we often argue or experience stressful internal dialogue because we think we know someone’s perspective and we don’t. How can we avoid doing that? 

It’s about asking people. We often try to participate in perspective-taking. If I’m having a conflict with somebody at work, we talk about taking that person’s perspective. But research from folks like [University of Chicago behavioral science professor] Nick Epley and others has shown that what’s far more valuable is to engage in perspective-getting, which means that you ask people their perspective. You ask about their stories and values and really listen when they give you that answer back.

By doing that, we can often get around these misperceptions we have, because when we try to take someone’s perspective, we’re totally biased by our own perspective. Whereas the act of perspective-getting does two things: One is you really get a more accurate sense of what people want. But we give people a little bit more agency, because now they’ve already started to feel heard, which makes people even more willing to compromise than they were before. 

In your conversation with [actor-comedian] Tony Hale, you discussed how the arrival fallacy causes us to think that we don’t have enough or haven’t achieved enough, which impedes our well-being. What is “enough” for you and how has that changed your relationship to success?  

Studying the science of happiness and the things that really make us happy changed how I think about some of that stuff. Part of it is recognizing that happiness comes from other people’s happiness. When it’s less about you, it’s less about your own personal accolades and more about how things are affecting other people. The typical metrics of a podcast’s success are download numbers or how much ad revenue it has. That genuinely never feels as important as an email from someone saying, “This really changed my life.” So, trying to find metrics about how what I’m doing is affecting other people has been really helpful. 

Also, realizing that sometimes enough is about the ability to be present—to have the space to engage in serendipity and connect with the people I care about. I’ve been saying no to a lot more cool opportunities. But I realized that if I pack my schedule, then I’m going to have less opportunity for the stuff that really matters and that I really value. That’s been hard. It takes a lot of work to say no to things that I think are going to be cool because having more time off or more space for the projects I’ve already committed to is going to be more important. 

What is the value of spontaneity and serendipity? Why should we create more space for them?  

There’s great research on the importance of what’s called time affluence, which is the subjective sense that you have some free time in your life. It turns out that the opposite of that, time famine, winds up being a terrible thing for our well-being. In fact, there’s some work by Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans suggesting that if you self-report being time famished, that’s as much of a hit on your overall well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. Losing your job tomorrow would make you feel bad, but having no spaciousness in your schedule feels just as bad. 

Serendipity is important even for the events that we engage in. The events that often feel fun or adventurous are sometimes ones that we haven’t scheduled in advance. They’re ones for which we have no set expectations. So engaging in serendipity winds up being a great way to engage in happiness. But you have to have enough openness, both in your schedule and your attitude toward what you’re doing, to embrace that. 

What can help us have no expectations?  

Unfortunately, expectations are the way the mind works. Serendipity is nice because I walk down the street, run into a friend, and she’s like, “Let’s go for a glass of rosé.” I wasn’t predicting any of that, so I didn’t have time to set up expectations. But whenever we have expectations about things, they tend to affect how we view stuff. We naturally set these reference points that can mess us up. The key is to work hard to find new reference points.

There was a famous study on Olympians—their overall happiness on the medal stand. One of the striking things you find is that the silver medalists, who are in second place, aren’t as happy as the bronze medalists, who are in third place. The reason is that the silver medalists’ reference point (their comparison point) is the gold medal. They didn’t get it and they feel bummed. Whereas the bronze medalists’ reference point isn’t so much the gold medal, because they were multiple strokes or minutes away from that. Their reference point is Oh my gosh if I was just a little bit slower, I wouldn’t be on the stand at all. Everybody talks about finding the silver lining, but I always joke that you have to find the bronze lining. The bronze lining is a little bit better. 

You highlighted earlier that we are best served when we motivate ourselves through self-compassion. I’d love to close on the impact of this and a practice you recommend trying. 

It’s important to recognize that self-compassion has a few parts. This is work by Kristen Neff, where she talks about self-compassion as being partly about mindfulness. So, first, recognize what emotions you’re dealing with, like, “I’m having a tough time right now.” You react to that negative emotion by saying, “But everybody faces this. I’m human. I’m going to go through this stuff.” Then, finally, you react with self-kindness. You say, “What can I take off my plate? How can I take care of myself?” Those three steps can be a powerful way to update your self-talk so that it’s kinder to yourself. 

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