Laurie Santos || The Science of Happiness

Right now, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function; over 60% say they're overwhelmingly anxious; more than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last 12 months.

Our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. There's so many ways that we get happiness wrong, and I think one of them is just that—that we think we should be happy all the time, that it's normative to be happy all the time.

I think of being happy in your life as having a decent ratio of positive to negative emotions. It's not no negative emotions; it's not positive emotion, you know, happiness emoji all the time. But it's, like, generally having a decent ratio of things like laughter and joy to things like sadness, anger, and so on. That's happy in your life.

People who tend, naturally, to have a higher subjective well-being—they just tend, naturally, to do the behaviors that wind up improving your happiness.

Our sense of having free time really matters for our well-being. Much more so than our wealth affluence, our time affluence matters a lot.

We don't think about happiness the right way. We have these cognitive biases when it comes to happiness and achieving happiness ... One of the big ones is that we don't realize our minds get used to stuff.