The Science of Happiness and Finding Joy with Laurie Santos

So what are the very human cognitive traps that make us unhappy? You mentioned that as a cognitive scientist and knowing that we tend to be not the best predictors of what's going to make us happy.

And we spend a lot of energy in places that don't make us happy.

And don't go to the places that actually wouldn't require a lot of energy, but would make us very happy.

Yes, yes, yes.

So I think a big one is one that we were just talking about, right? We just run our monkey minds, right? Which, to be fair, is just a natural thing to do.

We're constantly thinking about the future and what we had for lunch and all these things.

We're just running our brain on autopilot.

We just let our thoughts go and go and go.

And so many studies show that if we're just a little bit more mindful, if we can savor, if we can be in the present moment, we'd be happier.

In some ways, this very special thing that humans uniquely do, the fact that we can get out of the here and now to think about the future or the past or some counterfactual, we use that tendency to make ourselves miserable a lot of the time.

So that's kind of a big one.

Another one is that we tend to get used to stuff over time.

Another, you know, great feature of the mind when it comes to perception or just like, you know, if you're smelling someone's strong perfume on the train, eventually you'll get used to that and it won't bother you as much.

But it's pretty bad when it comes to the stuff that makes us happy.

You know, like, you know, the cute dimple that my husband has should make me as happy the first time I saw it when we first met as it does, you know, many, many years later.

But then you just kind of stop noticing it over time.

The beautiful stuff in life just becomes less noticeable.

And that means it impacts our happiness less.

So that's a big, you know, bias that we have that really messes us up.

Another one is our tendency for social comparison, right? We don't evaluate what we have objectively just in terms of how good it is.

It's all relative to something else.

That could be relative to how things were before in the past, right? Could be relative to what someone else has.

Oftentimes we're comparing against what other people have, which make us, even if we're doing pretty well ourselves, feel terrible, right? But it means that we're constantly not thinking about what we have, but what other people have or what we could have had or some counterfactual version of us.

And that means that even good things wind up making us not necessarily feel so good.

And so those are just some of the biases I think about a lot that like these natural tendencies of how our mind works, but there are tendencies that when it comes to our own well-being wind up leading us astray.