by Vickie Austin
Dr. Laurie Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University and the host of The Happiness Lab podcast. She teaches the Science of Happiness, the most popular class in the history of Yale, and a class that’s now available to all via drlauriesantos.com/science-well-being.
Her research and that of her colleagues provides a clear pathway to satisfaction and well-being.
An attitude of gratitude
While it may sound corny, gratitude is a gateway to being happy and staying happy.
In an interview on Life Kit on National Public Radio, Santos shared the results of research done by Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at University of California Davis. In a study, Emmons gave one set of folks a couple of weeks to write down what they were grateful for, then had another group write down what he called burdens, things that annoy us. Those with the gratitude list demonstrated significant improvements in well-being over just a few weeks. The folks who “griped” didn’t change.
On Santos’ podcast The Happiness Lab, Emmons says, “We know from studies that gratitude helps us recover from loss and trauma. It helps us deal with the slow drip of everyday stress. … Gratitude is absolutely essential. It’s part of our psychological immune system.”
The experts agree
In Psychology Today, the experts agree. A 2023 review of the literature by Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia found after analyzing 48 papers encompassing 65 individual studies that the data “provide(s) strong evidence for the immediate benefits of expressing gratitude in American samples.”
Their work also revealed that being more social is important to happiness. They posit that it’s difficult to be happy if you are disliked and lonely. Three preregistered experiments provided compelling support for the idea that “behaving in a more sociable manner may boost positive feelings.”
Fake it ‘til you make it
Actions of happiness such as smiling can elicit feelings of happiness. There’s some controversy to this theory, but Folk and Dunn reported two sets of large, cross-cultural studies that provided evidence that “exhibiting a natural smile reliably induces immediate mood benefits.”
Injecting novelty into one’s life is another way to boost happiness. Four studies reviewed by Folk and Dunn found that taking a novel approach to familiar experiences can increase happiness. We tend to become inured to things that once brought us pleasure, something called “hedonic adaptation,” so mixing it up with something new jolts us back into happiness mode.
Happiness also can come from subtracting elements of life that strain or bother us. Stopping behaviors like yearning for future technologies can enhance our satisfaction and allow us to focus on the present, according to three studies and two by the authors.
