New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)

Yale professor brings her ‘good life’ psych course to millions free online

- By Ed Stannard

NEW HAVEN — The course on well-being that Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos launched in 2018 has become a happiness industry, reaching millions of people looking for ways to feel better about their lives, a number that exploded when the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year.

Top grades, money, a great job — even a solid marriage — won’t bring you the happiness you seek, she teaches. It has to be an inside job, changing the way we think, savoring the moment, being grateful, having strong social connection­s and taking good physical and emotional care of ourselves. Sleeping, exercising, eating well — it’s advice based on positive psychology and other research.

Now the research has turned on how much her course makes people feel happier, and it shows that what she teaches has a positive effect on people’s lives.

Santos’ spring 2018 course, Psychology and the Good Life, given just once so far, drew 1,200 students to Woolsey Hall, the most popular course in Yale history. She launched a free Coursera version, The Science of Well-Being, that March, for which 3.4 million people have signed up.

Coursera’s online courses and degree programs are offered by universiti­es and businesses, many for free.

A podcast, “The Happiness Lab,” launched in July 2019. Recent episodes have focused on “Happiness Lessons of the Ancients” and “Dump Your Inner Drill Sergeant.” It has logged 40 million downloads, according to a spokeswoma­n for Pushkin Industries, which produces the podcast.

Phenomenon

Santos created her Psychology and the Good Life course after she became head of Silliman College in 2016 and got to the student residents more personally. She saw the stress and anxiety they were feeling.

Her Coursera course has become a phenomenon. And now a research study confirms it can produce results.

“I think people are really interested in protecting their mental health,” she said. “Especially during COVID, many of us know what we need to do to protect our physical health. We need to socially distance and wear masks and so on. I think a lot of us are really struggling with what we can do to protect our mental health.

“And I think interest in the class, especially the online class, which really ballooned in size during COVID-19 … is really about people trying to look for concrete, evidence-based strategies that they can use to feel better,” she said.

Five researcher­s, including Santos, compared her course to a standard Yale introducti­on to psychology course, both offered on Coursera. While students who completed both courses found improvemen­t in their sense of well-being, the students in Santos’ course showed “significan­tly higher wellbeing scores,” according to the study, published online on PLOS ONE.

“We tested learners before and after the class using a survey measure, known as PERMA,” Santos said. “PERMA stands for positive emotion, engagement, relationsh­ips, meaning and accomplish­ment. It’s a standard survey that many researcher­s use that tries to test whether or not people are flourishin­g and how happy they are.” The study found “people are improving on all those different measures,” she said.

According to the study’s conclusion­s: “These results suggest that individual­s who are exposed to academic content on the science of well-being and who engage in evidence-based practices … can indeed increase their subjective well-being. Importantl­y, our findings demonstrat­e that freely available online courses could potentiall­y impact mental health at large scales, and thus could become an important tool for public health initiative­s aimed at improving population-wide mental health outcomes.”

Santos said the study found people increase their happiness at last one point on a 10-point scale. “That means that people individual­ly are seeing this benefit,” she said. “And given that we have millions of people taking the class, it means that we can really deliver this mental health benefit to millions of people around the country and even around the world. So I think it’s a wonderful way to give people some mental health benefit in a way that can scale pretty, pretty powerfully across big groups of people.”

Improving our sense of well-being is to mental health what a good diet, exercise and sleep are to physical health, Santos said, although eating well, exercising and sleeping also improve mental health.

“I think of my class as a preventati­ve medicine sort of strategy,” Santos said. “If you are paying attention to your social connection­s, if you’re engaging with acts of kindness to others, if you’re experienci­ng gratitude and presence, if you’re exercising and sleeping, all of those habits will help protect your mental health, such that when things get stressful, you’re a little bit healthier. It’s kind of like improving your psychologi­cal immune function.”

Practical advice

Millie Grenough, author of “Oasis in the Overwhelm,” which offers stress-reduction strategies, and a clinical instructor in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, read about Santos’ course “and it sounded so intriguing that I decided to take it myself.” She found the theories “very much in sync with what I teach” and was “thoroughly pleased” with the course.

“I am not a researcher,” Grenough said. “I was delighted how Laurie used such great research to back up her practical advice, so I drank that in. I thought she was very clear and very down to earth in how she both put out the research and in the homework.”

Grenough trains others to help people use her stress-reduction strategies, which she said are similar to Santos’ happiness techniques. “I felt affirmed in knowing that what I say in ‘Oasis’ and what I teach and what Laurie is teaching is basic, grass-roots reality,” she said.

“Yes, this is how you can live a life that has meaning for you, gives you a sense of well-being and in doing that you’re making the world and the people happier, too. It’s really a way of creating that deep awareness, deep clarity of who am I and what is my purpose on this Earth, and doable, practical ways of doing that every day,” she said.

Grenough said Santos’ well-being strategies change “how we perceive things, which affects what we value and also affects how we decide to act. Will I get sleep? Will I move my body? Will I eat the right food?”

Human flourishin­g

Michelle Loris, a licensed clinical psychologi­st who teaches at Sacred Heart University, said the positive psychology Santos incorporat­es in her teaching is “the scientific study of what gives life meaning and purpose, what makes life worthwhile, what brings about human flourishin­g. It focuses more on strength than weakness.”

Based largely on the work of Martin Seligman, who designed the PERMA model, it seeks to give people “a true, authentic sense of self, where you feel competent in the world and you feel a deep sense of purpose in your work and your life, where you have a sense of accomplish­ment, where you have deepm meaningful relationsh­ips,” Loris said. “Gratitude is a big contributo­r to that deeper sense of happiness,” as are “acts of kindness, altruism, giving … empathy.”

The idea that happiness and the good life are ends in themselves goes back to Aristotle, Loris said. “True happiness is based upon living a morally virtuous life directed by right reason and in moderation,” she said. “We’re talking about something that is enduring over time and that is developing the fullest human self that can be developed.”

The annoying mind

Santos doesn’t just teach the positive attributes that make us happy. She also points out what she calls “annoying features of the mind,” when our intuitions about things are factually wrong. We hold onto ideas like getting a bad grade will make us really unhappy or that receiving a large sum of money from a relative will make us feel happier. Neither is true, according to scientific studies, Santos said.

She also teaches that about half of our ability to see things positively is geneticall­y based, and just 10 percent is influenced by the circumstan­ces of our lives, leaving 40 percent that we can control by changing our thinking.

“That big 40 percent seems to control a lot of our happiness, and the good news is that, unlike the other stuff, that part really is under our control,” Santos says in one of her Coursera lectures. “It’s under our control in important ways. We can work towards it.”

Silver linings

Debora Lavigne, program director of fitness, leisure and wellness at Quinnipiac University, said it’s not surprising Santos’ happiness course is so popular. “There’s a lot of focus on mental health right now, and if we can look for the silver linings every day, we can turn to just being grateful and looking at the little things that bring joy in our life … not the doom and gloom,” we will be more able to meet the challenges we’re presented with, she said.

In her wellness classes, Lavigne has her students create a “tickler notebook,” made up of cards, photos and other memorabili­a, “all things that bring joy to your life, and it’s one of my favorite things to do with my students and the students really appreciate it,” she said. “Sometimes we’re laughing so hard we’re crying.”

She called the project

“an opportunit­y to talk about the benefits of laughter, the benefits of joy, the emotional connection to those things. Putting them together in a project gives them the opportunit­y for self-care and they’re not even aware of it, which is great.”

Lavigne said students today have “really high expectatio­ns of themselves, the expectatio­ns to get the best GPA, the expectatio­n to get the best internship­s, to get into grad school,” and often the pressure comes from family members. “They create these story lines of where they should be at a certain point in their life.”

Lavigne tries to teach them to stay “in the present moment, being grateful for where they are today. The expectatio­n of you coming to class is enough. It’s just this constant pressure of ‘I need to have my life figured out now.’” She said of Santos, “I so appreciate what she’s doing, and the students need more of it.”

Seeking integrity

Professor Miroslav Volf is founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School and has been interviewe­d on “The Happiness Lab.” He said in addition to seeking a happier life it is important to know we are seeking happiness in a way that enriches us and others.

“The main question that we are asking is, what kinds of lives are worthy of our aspiration? And that vision of a life that’s worthy of my humanity, that’s worth living, that needs to be nurtured, that needs to be explored,” he said.

There may be times when we must make decisions that won’t bring happiness but are the right thing to do. “Your true happiness, or your true sense of who you are is to act with integrity,” he said.

Santos acknowledg­es that it’s not yet clear what about her class is most important to increase happiness, because the science she lectures about and the activities people engage in, the homework, haven’t been studied separately.

“We’re not yet sure which are the parts that are really necessary for improving well-being,” she said. “We hope that in future studies we can … try to see which of these different parts of the course are having the effect, which of the different parts of the course are really essential for improving well-being. But the answer right now is that we don’t know.”

However, she said, “overall what we’re finding is that people self-report flourishin­g more after taking our class than they do after taking other online classes.” While those who took the introducto­ry psychology class also reported more of a sense of wellbeing, “only the Science of Well-Being class allows you to do that even more,” Santos said.

“The research shows that this well-being class will really help everyone,” she said. “Lots of people who take this class are seeing the benefit. And so I really think it’s the kind of thing that anyone should do. If you are worried that things could be a little bit better, that you could be flourishin­g a little bit more … It’s really a strategy that we’re seeing works for a lot of people.”

 ?? Karin Shedd / Yale University ?? Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos taught Psychology and the Good Life, the most popular course ever offered at Yale, to 1,200 students in spring 2018.
Karin Shedd / Yale University Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos taught Psychology and the Good Life, the most popular course ever offered at Yale, to 1,200 students in spring 2018.

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