Your Brain Is Lying to You About Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos

**Laurie Santos** (0:00)
One of the reasons we're not as happy as we could be is that we're doing it wrong. On my podcast, I often talk about this idea that our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. We go for stuff thinking it's gonna work, and then we wind up not being as happy as we could be. And I'm sure you see this on the show all the time, right? We work longer, we go for more money, we go for some big accolade at work, while we're not investing in a deeper sense of purpose or connection or these kinds of things, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:41)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis. This is Chip Conley, and our guest today is sort of famous. Dr. Laurie Santos is maybe the most famous happiness professor in the world. About a decade ago, she created a Psychology in the Good Life course at Yale that sold out, and then became an online course.
She has a really well regarded podcast called The Happiness Lab. I wanted to have her on the show here, partly because I wanted to explore the topic of happiness in midlife, but also I wanted to explore a few other topics that we get into.
I think you're going to enjoy this. It's a slightly shorter episode, and I think you're going to find it to be a nice little dollop, almost like a little afternoon dark chocolate, piece of dark chocolate that will just give you a little bit of a jolt of joy. So be with you at the end with the three key lessons that I got from this episode. Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis.

**Laurie Santos** (1:41)
Thanks so much for having me on the show.

**Chip Conley** (1:43)
So your history is really interesting.
First of all, for those who don't know, you're maybe the world's most famous happiness professor and focusing on the good life. But if you go back to your working class roots in New Bedford, a working class community that was, if I'm not mistaken, got strong Cape Verdean heritage there, as well as Portuguese folks. First of all, congratulations to your amazing football soccer team.

**Laurie Santos** (2:11)
Yes, finally getting the recognition we deserve, I think, in this particular World Cup.

**Chip Conley** (2:17)
What was it in your childhood or in growing up there that actually gave you a hint that someday you'd have three degrees from Harvard and be teaching at Yale? I mean, it seems improbable, but I'd love to understand more about the young Laurie.

**Laurie Santos** (2:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think a couple things there. One is I grew up with parents, especially a mom, who really cared about education. I think there was just this idea that education was the path to doing really interesting things, and it was always just like a value that we had, both kind of doing well in school, but also just kind of being curious about stuff. I think also growing up, you know...

**Chip Conley** (2:55)
She was a guidance counselor as well. She's correct.

**Laurie Santos** (2:57)
Wow, you do your research, man. Like family.

**Chip Conley** (3:00)
We do, we do. I'm trying, you know, for those who don't know, Laurie's got one of the most popular podcasts out there, and I'm just trying to keep up with you, girl.

**Laurie Santos** (3:09)
No, but yeah, yes. So she was a guidance counselor. She was involved in education and just got us thinking early on that this was, you know, the kind of thing that we should be doing. I think my mom was also careful to think about what that would feel like as we went off in education. You know, she was fond of telling me and my brothers that we were like the kids from the land of the misfit toys. This is taking me back a little bit, but if you remember those Christmas specials, like with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, there was like, you know, Rudolph ended up at the land of the misfit toys because he had his weird red nose and there was like the doll who wanted to like, you know, be a dentist and things like that.
And her idea was like, you're often going to be in places where you just don't fit in, right? If you're going to be the kind of person who's going to go off and go to Harvard from a place like New Bedford and so on, like you're often going to be, I mean, she didn't use the word kind of code switching and figuring things out, but like your superpower is that you're going to have lots of affiliations and lots of identities and be able to get around along with lots of people. And I think her hearing that early on as a kid really prepped me for so many of the opportunities I face where, you know, occasionally I'll be in some situation where I'm like, who are these other people? And like, I really don't fit in here. But it's been awesome to kind of recognize that that's not a limitation, that that can be really a superpower. And I think that that has helped some of the transitions that I bet we'll talk about, right? Because if you think, you know, I don't necessarily fit in, but I can just sort of switch and I can try something new, then it makes trying new things all the easier.