2023-01-23
35 分钟The phrase “comparison is the thief of joy” might be the kind of cliche that makes you roll your eyes – and yet, it’s an idea that is, scientifically, pretty accurate. In today’s episode, psychologist Laurie Santos – a Yale professor and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast – discusses some of the surprising evidence behind what does and doesn’t make us humans happy. Laurie also shares strategies on how to improve our well-being, discusses the irony behind “self-care”, and explains why happiness is often a journey not just within, but beyond, ourselves. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts
Ted audio collective.
You'Re listening to how to be a better human.
I am your host, Chris Duffy.
Here's a strange thing that I have noticed about my own brain.
Often the times that I feel the happiest are where I have a lot of irons in the fire.
There's all these possibilities, and there's this sense that exciting things might happen.
But the thing that's weird is that I often feel happier in that moment where the irons are in the fire than when they actually come out and become a real thing.
Right?
Like, even if I have accomplished something that feels really big and special, like we finished recording a season of this show, or I did a big live show, and it went well.
I crash so hard that night or the next day, as soon as I've done the thing that I thought that I really wanted to do, it's like I have a happiness hangover.
I'm confused, to be honest, about why it is that accomplishing the things that I thought I wanted to accomplish often dont make me feel very happy at all.
In my experience, happiness is kind of a slippery fish.
When I try my hardest to grab ahold of happiness, it just flops out of my fingers and slides away.
But when I ignore the fish and I focus on other things, sometimes out of the corner of my eye, I see that, hey, that happiness fish is swimming right around next to me all over again.
Our guest today is Lori Santos.
Lori started the Happiness Lab podcast to help people understand how science could help them lead more satisfying lives.
And I promise you, I swear, Lori is going to use zero fish based metaphors to do that.
Lori's podcast grew out of her work teaching at Yale, where she started a course called psychology and the good life.
It's also known as the Happiness course.
Since then, Lori has taken the happiness course online at Coursera, where thousands of people enrolled in the program.