Dr. Laurie Santos is a Yale psychology professor and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast. Her Yale course “Psychology and the Good Life” became the most popular class in the university’s history, enrolling nearly one out of four undergraduate students. Santos visited Lakeside on October 15 as the Bernie Noe Endowed Lecture speaker, bringing her science-backed insights on happiness to a campus known for high achievers.
Teens today are facing what many call a mental health crisis. A 2023 survey by the Health Resources and Services Administration found that about 1 in 5 teens have a diagnosed mental or behavioral health condition, up 35% from 2016. What has happened to Gen Z? It’s a question Dr. Santos has explored in depth, from her Yale classroom to conversations with leaders like former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. As Santos put it, society may have “created a culture where young people prioritize good grades, social media likes, and constant hustling over the important wellbeing pillars of sleep, friendships, and free time.”
Lakeside, renowned for its challenging curriculum and equally driven student body, is no stranger to this experience. A previous Tatler article by Dash B. ’21 even notes that “if there’s one word to describe the experience of being a Lakeside student, it’s stress.” A study by NYU on academically rigorous high schools, like Lakeside, warned that students can burn out before they even reach college, resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms and “emotional exhaustion” from chronic stress.
Into this environment comes Dr. Santos, whose expertise is directly relevant to the question on everyone’s minds: Are the kids alright, and if not, how can we help them? In advance of her talk, Tatler spoke with Dr. Santos about the science of happiness and the well-being of Generation Z and Generation Alpha. Below is a selection of Tatler’s questions for Dr. Laurie Santos, covering her groundbreaking work and advice she has for young people at Lakeside and beyond.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Matthew K. ’28 (MK): For those who might know you only from a headline or podcast, how do you describe what you do and your research?
Dr. Laurie Santos (LS): I’m a psychologist. I’ve been studying psychology for a very long time. Makes me feel very old. For the start of my career, I was interested in animal cognition. So I’ve studied what animals know about the world and what makes humans psychologically different [from them]. That was what I did for a very long time, until I took on this new role at Yale, where I became what’s called the head of college: a faculty member who lives on campus with students, who sees them really closely. And I was seeing the college student mental health crisis — feeling depressed, stressed out and anxious, and that was really frustrating, because I realized my field of psychology wasn’t helping.
We have all these strategies that we can use to feel better, but we weren’t giving students access to those things in our psychology classes. And so I decided to teach this new class on all the strategies you can use to feel less stress, flourish more, and so on. We called it “Psychology and the Good Life.” And I thought it would just be a new psych[ology] class on campus, and what I didn’t realize what would happen is that it became Yale’s most popular class ever. One in four Yale students took the class the first time we taught it, and that really just taught me how much people are craving these strategies that they can use to feel better. So I retrained in the science of happiness, and now I spend most of my time not just doing research on the topic, but publicly communicating it, both at schools like here at Lakeside, companies , [and] through my podcast. I just really think that if more people knew what science showed we could do to feel better, people would be putting that into effect in their own lives and feeling better.
Emma S. ’28 (ES): How did you react when you found out that so many people signed up for your class, and what did this tell you about how people want to feel and improve their lives?
LS: Well, I was humbled, right? It was really incredible. In some ways I was shocked, but in some ways I wasn’t. I just have the sense that what enrollment showed was that students are going with their needs. I think young people don’t like this culture of feeling overwhelmed and anxious and just “on” all the time. And I think when you offer people solutions, especially evidence based solutions, not platitudes, not a bunch of stupid TikTok videos […] people are like, “Yes, I’m in. I want to learn more.” So I think it really taught me that people don’t like this culture. People want agency over what they can do to make it better.
ES: Just a quick follow-up question, how would you define happiness? I know it’s a really broad term, and it can mean so many different things for so many different people.
LS: So, social scientists use a very specific definition of happiness: they think about being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is the answer to this question. Being happy in your life is really about your ratio of positive to negative emotions, right? You want to feel like your life is going well, so you want lots of joy, laughter, and contentment and maybe less anxiety, sadness, and anger. That’s kind of being happy in your life. But being happy with your life is your answer to the question all things considered, how satisfied am I with my life, how you think your life is going. So psychologists tend to think of the kind of affective part of happiness, which is like the emotion part of happiness, and cognitive part of happiness, which is how you think things are going. Best-case scenario is you boost both of those at once. That’s what the strategies I’m teaching are all about. It’s like how you can just feel good and experience lots more positive emotions, and also how you can find a sense of purpose and really feel satisfied with how things are going.
MK: In both your college and teen courses, you mention common misconceptions about what makes us happy, including things like top grades, admissions, and social media. What are the most common misconceptions, both in teenagers and college students, that you see us holding about happiness and success?
LS: For young people thinking about the future, I think a big one is material possession and success. It’s true, there is a relationship between money and happiness, but it only really applies at the lower ends of income. Once you get enough money to put food on the table and to keep a roof over your head, more money is probably not going to matter [as much]. Same with material possession and success. I think a big one for students your age is grades. There is a significant correlation between high school grades and happiness, but it’s a negative one. What does that mean? That means as your grades go up, your happiness goes down, which is not the direction you want to go.
I think people think that you have to have perfect high school grades to get into a perfect college, which allows you to get a job that pays you lots of money. In reality, the correlations [between education and future success] are way smaller than you’d think. One study I like to think about finds that your college GPA and starting salary are correlated at about 0.1, which is a really tiny correlation, but that’s just your first year salary. If you look at five years out, there’s basically no correlation at all. We get in our heads that this stuff matters, and I think for students at Lakeside, it does matter for getting to college, [which is] your next step, but really that pattern won’t predict all the other stuff you care about down the line, in the long term. And I think that’s really not what you hear on the ground, especially at schools like Lakeside.
ES: What do you think is keeping kids our age from being happy?
LS: Yeah, I wish there was one thing. There’s lots of different factors. I think a big one is our relationship with technology. You have a device in your pockets that’s like telling you anxiety-provoking information all the time which is stealing your attention from the social connections that you have in your life. We are only beginning to understand how bad that stuff is for our psychology, and how especially bad it is to get as you’re younger. So I think that’s one factor.
I think that there’s also a real push, especially in some communities, for young people to become pre-professional, very worried about their future really early on, right? And that means that you’re not doing things for the intrinsic reward of doing things, you’re doing things for the extrinsic reward of “I need to get that on my resume, so I can put it on my college application.” All this stuff is what you’re thinking about your future. And not only is that not good for your current rewards and your present happiness, but it’s also, as we’ve just talked about, maybe wrong, like you’re thinking that these things are going to matter a lot when they don’t really matter.I think there’s lots of different factors, from busyness to cultural changes and overall work for students.
One that I’ll talk about at assembly is this concept called time affluence, which is feeling wealthy and time and I think that this is something that young people today just don’t have, especially relative to young people before, right in the 80s, when I was growing up, it was like, you just there was no extracurricular, there’s no play in the yard, and that was all you did, because you all are, like barely sleeping, because you have so much homework and have to get to school for wpractice, all these things and so lots of factors at once. But I think they’re all factors that we can think about, whether or not we really want them as part of our society. It’s really so negatively affecting people’s mental health.
ES: Adding on to the social media piece, I know you say a lot that it’s the physical connections that you have in person that are so much more fruitful than the ones you have online. Can you share more about that?
LS: Social connection is one of the biggest predictors of happiness. If you had to focus on one thing to improve your happiness, making sure you feel connected with other people is a huge one. But what the studies show is that it has to at least be what researchers call “in real time” social connections. Doing a real in real life is you and I didn’t realize social connection, but in real time also works, you know. So if your parents are out of town, you call them and you talk on the phone,hat’s sort of in real time. Or, if you go on a Zoom call with somebody, Facebook Live or something, it’s not perfect, but it’s mostly in real time. What’s not in real time is like, you text your friend, like, boop, text me back, or like, scroll through Instagram, you know, feed and see or see, see what people are posting on Snapchat or something like that. Like those just don’t work in the same way and so. And the problem is that a lot of those not in real time, social things are often an opportunity cost of talking to people in real life. You know, how often are you. Sitting around with friends and they’re looking at Tiktok videos or staring at their phone and not talking to each other in real life.
MK: Looping back to hustle culture, I think that today, like, do you think that society is creating a hustle culture for like, teens to, like, really overachieve and like, as you said, like, worry over worry about, like, their pre-professional life, yeah. And if so. Like, how do you like, what pillars of our happiness? Like, do those effect? Like, do they affect your sleep health? Like, how does that? How’s that really better?
LS: I think all of the above. You know for sure, hustle culture is affecting your sleep. I actually think we could solve most of the young people’s mental health crisis. We could just get you all to sleep, make it so that you do that, that would be really great. But I think your sleep, I think it makes people very anxious. You’re constantly worried about what’s happening in the future, and if you’re doing enough, I think it causes a lot of really negative self talk, something that we’ll talk about in assembly, right? You’re criticizing yourself. I’m not good enough. I didn’t do enough. It’s like just this constant voice in your head telling you you need to do more and more and more. And I think it really pulls you away from the things that you intrinsically enjoy, right? It sets you up to focus totally on extrinsic rewards. And we’ve known, literally since studies in 1970s that if you even if there’s something you really enjoy, but you slap a kind of external Award, a grade or, like, some performance metric, on it, it just makes you feel kind of like worse about it. There’s a very famous study actually done at Yale in the 1970s where they had kids solving like little anagrams, like the kind of like New York Times, and they either just let them do it for fun, or they slapped their brain on it. And what they found was that students, of course, enjoyed it less when there was a grade. They actually performed worse when there was a grade and they took on, like, easier anagrams to solve. It’s like, when you’re just doing it for fun, you want to do like, the hardest level of the puzzle because challenge, but if you’re doing it for grade, you’re like, oh my gosh, let me just pick things, like, I don’t like, I just need to get the grade. It’s like, all those things are exactly what we don’t want for learning, but we’ve created, like, whole structures, where, where. That’s how we think about things. And I think despite these challenges, like, our generation seems to be one of the most, if not the most open, and like self advocacy and things like that. And like, for example, at Lakeside, like we organized like a coping skills project to support and we also learned a lot about mental health and our human development program. I from your experience. Like, what positives do you see in Gen Z in their approach to mental health? And like, what are today’s young people more willing to seek mental health? And if so, yeah, does that happen?
MK: Despite these challenges, our generation seems to be one of the most, if not the most open, to talking about these challenges and self advocacy. For example, at Lakeside, we organized a coping skills project to support [something], and we also learn a lot about mental health and our human development program. From your experience, what positives do you see in Gen Z in their approach to mental health? Are today’s young people more willing to seek mental health? And if so, how does that happen?
LS: For sure. I think reducing the stigma of talking about these things is huge. And I think that your generation has done a really great job using these tools available to you to talk about this stuff and to share strategies, so I think that’s really huge. It’s awesome that places like Lakeside promote that. I think the tension, though, is that sometimes those things are promoted at the expense of fixing the bigger problems. You can add in lots of mental health support and counseling and skill building, this kind of stuff. But if we don’t address the fact that you have so much homework that you can’t sleep, this is not working. So, I sometimes worry that those things can be in place when you’re not solving the real strategy, right? It’s like taking some sort of high blood pressure medication where you’re just eating a little bit healthier. I challenge schools often to think about the main causes of the mental health crisis that we see, and can we give students those mental health services which are so essential, but at the same time, as we have harder questions about the culture and what we want to do differently, I’d like to see in terms of like individual changes, you, yourself, or you, Emma, are going to optimize your happiness and figure out how to meditate and get more sleep. But we also might want to think about the structural changes that we should promote at Lakeside and society broadly that would make it easier for you to do those things, and the best-case scenario is that we’re promoting the individual changes at the same time as we’re focused on changing the structures as well.
ES: What do you think those structural changes could be? I know it’s kind of hard, because in the world we live in now, everything’s based on that hustle culture. And, especially at a school like Lakeside where we have a focus on academic rigor, how do you think those structural changes could be made?
LS: I think one is to look hard at what really constitutes academic rigor, like what gets you to learn best. And I think there’s a point where you could ask, is that much homework actually helping you learn best? If it’s affecting your sleep, if it’s affecting your social connection, if it’s causing levels of depression that make you miss school, you might have pushed it too fast. Even in other domains where people value extremely amazing performance, people allow for rest. If you talk to the best athletes in the world, they’ll have days where they engage in active rest, right? They train at 80%, not 120%. We need to ask ourselves the question of is the way we’re thinking about academic rigor the best way to achieve it? And my guess is, in some contexts, that might not be true. We might want to add in a little less work, a little more rest, a little more time to sleep.
I think a different question, though, is one about whether or not we kind of have it wrong in terms of what we want to do for academic rigor. A lot of it is about grades, a lot of it is about test scores. We could ask the question of should we allow for more play? Should we allow for more flexibility? So, I think at a place that really values academic rigor, they could say, ‘Yeah, academic rigor all the way, but are we getting it right?’ It is often elite colleges that are setting things up badly for students, where it appears that if you could get 10 more AP classes, or 30 more extracurriculars, then, then you could kind of win this war of getting in. And what universities will say, kind of quietly, is, like, you know, that stuff doesn’t really help, you know, like, really, it’s just kind of a lottery. There are a lot of students who could succeed at a place like Yale. But imagine that they were honest about that. Imagine universities said, and not just Yale, but imagine they kind of colluded, almost like nuclear disarmament, where all the colleges had to get together and say, ‘look, you can pick the specifics, but you need two APs and you need two extracurriculars, and like, above that, you know, great, but like, it’s not then you qualify to get in and you just go into order, and you might get any money, nothing’s going to make a break it, right? And so I think the problem is, because there’s this, like, arms race. Students never High School. Students never feel like they’re enough. You always feel like there could be more, and that makes you do too much. You know, past the point of academic rigor being healthy or effective, right? And it also causes you to just feel awful, right, which we also know is bad for academic performance. So, so I think a structural change that I would push on university side is to let’s all de escalate, like we want to make sure you have enough rigor to get in. But beyond that, like, don’t kill yourself. Learn strategies for effectively understanding what helps you learn versus what’s too much. Prioritize mental health. These are things universities could change in their admissions criteria, because if all of a sudden you had an essay about [needing] to rest and it wasn’t a fakeable thing, all of a sudden, high school students would prioritize it. So, I think there can be changes that happen at a place like Lakeside, but I think there’s broader changes in the kind of academic training ecosystem that we need to see as well.
ES: As we’re kind of wrapping up on time a little bit, what’s some advice for students like us and also the people surrounding us who want to become happier?
LS: yeah, well, I think one piece of advice is that you have a lot of agency over it, right? I think both as individuals and in terms of the structures, right, what will change the structures of Emma work at Lakeside, if you all and your parents advocated for less homework and less stuff, and then you can push for it, right? But I also think that there’s a lot you can do yourself right. What we know about happiness is really about optimizing specific things, certain behaviors, like social connection and rest, certain kinds of mindsets, like not criticizing yourself, finding ways to be a little bit more present and optimizing certain kinds of emotions. We haven’t talked as much about that, but I think we, we sometimes, while the younger generation, I think, is great at decreasing the stigma about negative emotions, I think sometimes you can get very worried about having them, like if you’re feeling anxious or you’re feeling overwhelmed, that like something’s wrong, like good vibes only, like, if someone’s bad, like no, no, right? And I think what, what the studies show, is like, no, those negative emotions are important. You need to figure out ways to regulate them and deal with them, but you don’t want to suppress them and pretend that they’re not there. And so really, happiness is about doing those things. So I guess the main message is like, if you’re not feeling good, you actually have some agency. You have a lot of agency over what you can do yourself in terms of your behaviors and your mindsets and your emotions. But you also have probably more agency than you think about changing the structures. And this is something I think young people forget, right? Another thing I think that’s amazing about your generation is you harness the technologies that we have for communicating to do great things. Look at after a terrible event, like Parkland shooting or something happens right where it’s like people get together and make hashtags to change things. And I think you all are great at harnessing these technologies. But what would it look like to harness, you know, if every student at Lakeside was like, I’m only taking two APS or whatever, just pick us like everybody agreed, and you shun the people that didn’t agree. You like, you know, like, like, really? And it wasn’t just at Lakeside, imagining that every school like Lakeside in the country, right? What would a college like Yale do? Like, if every private school in the country the kids were like, No, when we take it to a piece, then, like, that would be the best, you know. So, yeah. So I think that harnessing the technologies you have for communicating, setting standards. I think whenever we’ve had massive cultural change, it’s always been driven by young people, and so you really have some agency to change hustle culture around, but you need to believe it’s not good. You need to believe that there’s a better way towards academic rigor that’s more effective, and that’s where I think the science comes in.
