Happiness in the Age of AI feat. Dr Laurie Santos

Laurie Santos (0:00)

Researchers in this space of positive psychology often talk about what's known as the arrival fallacy, this idea that I'll be happy when, I'll be happy when I get the new house, I'll be happy when I get that promotion, I'll be happy when I get the new relationship. And the sad thing is that we're usually not as happy as we think based on those accomplishments. And even when we get the accomplishments, we're not usually as happy for as long as we assume. And then that raises a question of like, okay, well, then what does move the needle?

SPEAKER_2 (0:28)

Hey, can I talk to you about something?

Sreela Roy-Greene (0:32)

I wish you knew how lonely menopause felt.

SPEAKER_2 (0:38)

I wish you knew why it's so hard for men to share their feelings.

Laurie Santos (0:48)

I wish you knew what it's like to be me.

Sreela Roy-Greene (0:53)

Welcome back to Mind If We Talk, where you get to be a fly on the wall for many therapy sessions and learn some mental health tips in the process. I'm your host, Sreela Roy-Greene, a licensed mental health counselor with over 19 years of experience. Today's episode is about finding the right tools to feel better in your everyday life. And boy, do I have a great guest for you. I'm talking with the one and only Dr. Laurie Santos, a rock star cognitive scientist and professor. Beyond her work teaching and researching at Yale, Dr. Santos hosts a massively popular podcast, The Happiness Lab, and was voted one of Popular Science Magazine's brilliant 10 young minds. She has reached over four and a half million people through her free online course on the science of well-being.

Together, Dr. Santos and I discuss why success doesn't always equal happiness, how to balance happiness and mental health, especially in the age of AI and much, much more. Let's get into it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Santos. On this episode of Mind If We Talk as we wrap up this season.

And I think this is just one of those topics that is so important right now, especially in the climate that we're in with the increased use and awareness of AI and mental health and how we need to use it, what makes sense in terms of like being responsible, and having somebody like you here as an expert, I think is so valuable to us and our time, and for especially our listeners who are tuning in, because I think that this is really on everyone's mind right now.

Laurie Santos (2:28)

I'm excited to chat more. This is, I mean, so many of my students are thinking about these things, you know, on the daily, right? So I get why this is so important. I'm just so happy that we're having conversations.

Sreela Roy-Greene (2:37)

Absolutely. In all seriousness, you know, we're in a very incredible time in, I think, human history, where there's these advancements and we're going in this amazing direction. But with that said, you know, we at BetterHelp, we believe in responsible AI. You know, my big concern as a practitioner now with 20 years as a therapist under my belt is, you know, maintaining a degree of human connection and responsibly using AI. And what does that, if you will, marriage look like? And how do we proceed?

Laurie Santos (3:09)

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things to consider. One of the things I think a lot about, especially when people are asking AI for help and for kind of advice and through therapeutic benefits and so on, is just like whether or not the AI is delivering in the same way that a human therapist might, right?

And one of the things I think we haven't talked a lot about is just the idea that so many of the LLMs that are out there right now, many of the AI tools that folks tend to be using to ask for advice, they tend to be a little sycophantic, right? We noticed this in the work context, right? Where it's like, oh my gosh, what a great question. Like, what a wonderful idea you have for your e-mail, you know, whatever. But we forget that that can be potentially problematic in the advice domain or in the therapy domain. And there was a really interesting science paper that just came out looking at this, which asked this question, what happens when AI is, you know, you're bringing AI a problem, maybe even an ethical problem or something that is a dilemma that you're facing. And it just says, oh my gosh, you did exactly the right thing.