Professor brings ‘Good Life’ course to millions free online

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.

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 well-being 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 wellbeing 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.”