Happiness Tips By A Yale Professor INSPIRATIONAL SPEECH

So when we think of college life, we often think of images that look like this. We think of a generally happy time, but sadly, as a head of college on Yale's campus, that's not always what I see. What I see firsthand is the growing college mental health crisis that we see on our college campuses today. Thankfully for Yale, it's not just Yale. Sadly, this is something that we see across the nation. Here are the national statistics that we see. According to a National College Health Survey, over 40 percent of our college students report regularly being too depressed to function. Over 60 percent say they're overwhelmingly anxious, and another 60 percent report feeling very lonely most of the time. So I see these statistics as a professor and a head of college, and I think these are really awful. But they also beg a really important question, and that question is, what is going on? Why are our young people so unhappy? There's lots of things going on, but today I want to suggest a slightly surprising answer that comes from the science of psychology. And that answer is that there might be a problem with our minds. It might be that our minds are actually lying to us about the kinds of things that make us happy. Simply put, we're seeking out the wrong kinds of stuff. Here's one wrong thing that some of us are seeking out. In case of money, we're at the World Economic Forum, so a lot of us think that if we just got more of this stuff, we'd be happy. But is that really true? That's what researchers Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton tried to look at. They collected a whole set of measures about people's happiness and well-being, and tried to see if those measures were correlated with people's annual salary, at least in the US. Here's what they found, plotted logarithmically. They find that happiness does go up as salary goes up, but that going up stops off at a point. And that point is around 75K. What does that mean? That means if you are in 75K, if I double or even triple your salary, it's not going to have any impact on your well-being. It's not what we forecast, but it's what the data suggests. This is just one of a number of cases where it seems like our minds are lying to us. Our minds are causing us to seek out stuff we think is going to make us happy, but it's not going to work. I think this is part of the crisis that we see in our young people, and just in everybody today. We're seeking out all kinds of things that we expect to give us this boost in well-being, but it's not working. And we might be seeking those things out at the expense of the things that really do matter. But then that raises the question, what matters? Like, what aren't we doing that we should be doing? And here's where there's lots of good news. The good news is that we don't have to listen to our lying minds because we have science, the power of everything we love. We have two decades of work that tells us some counterintuitive things we really should be paying attention to to improve our well-being. One of those counterintuitive things is the fact that we should be seeking out more social connection. What's the thing that separates very happy people from not so happy people? The amount of time that they spend with people they care about. But it's not just people you care about. It turns out that very short interactions with a stranger can improve our mood more than we expect. Here's one lovely study that looked at this. This is by Nick Epley and his colleagues. He goes up to folks that are commuting on the train, on the L train in Chicago, and he says you're going to be in one of two different study conditions. Either you're going to be in the solitude condition, which means you're going to ride this train and just enjoy your solitude, or you're going to be in the social condition. You have to ride this train and for the whole train ride you have to talk to somebody and make a connection. So you're laughing, you're predicting what most subjects predict. Like, that is going to be weird, right? And that's when he asks subjects what subjects predict. They predict the solitude condition is going to feel good, social condition feels bad. But what really happens when you run this study is exactly the opposite. In fact, it's the solitude condition that sucks. The social condition feels really good. We mistakenly seek solitude when being social would make us happier. But that's not the only domain where we mess up. A second domain where we mess up is we mistakenly don't take opportunities to do nice things for others. Another thing that separates very happy people, they give more to charity at every income level and they volunteer, spend time helping others. But we know this not just from demographics, we also know this from the empirical data. Here's another study by social psychologist Liz Dunn. She tries to get people to do nice things for others. She walks up to people on the street, hands them $20 and says, by the end of the day you have to spend this. You either have to spend it on yourself, you treat yourself to something nice, or you should spend it on somebody else. The question is, if you were in this study, what would make you happier? If you were like most subjects, you might think that treating yourself feels good. After all, you're going to get something out of this, right? And that's what Liz Dunn finds. When she actually surveys how people predict they're going to feel, people predict that spending the money on yourself is going to feel better. But what really happens is just the opposite. Both when I survey you at the end of the day, and even at the end of the week, you feel better if you spend that money on somebody else. We mistakenly try to treat ourselves, spend our money on ourselves, when helping others would feel better. One of the reasons that money doesn't make us as happy as we think. All this goes to say that there are a bunch of ways that our minds are lying to us. They cause us to go after this stuff that we think is going to work, but it doesn't work. And we do that at the expense of behaviors that really would improve our well-being if we did them. What does this mean? It means that I think we could solve our college mental health crisis if students were taught to go after some of the right kinds of stuff. But it's not just for our college students. All of us can improve our happiness if we did it the right way. And that's the good news. The science of psychology suggests ways that each one of you in this room could improve your well-being. You just have to take a little bit more of a scientific approach.