How to be happier in 5 steps with zero weird tricks | Laurie Santos

• You might assume that we are creatures that are built to be happy. But the sad thing is that we're really not wired for happiness. Natural selection honestly doesn't care how we feel; it really just wants us to survive and reproduce. And that doesn't necessarily involve being happier. People are less happy than they ever have been. In the United States, around 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. We see the same kind of thing in older individuals. We're doing something wrong.

We have all these misconceptions when it comes to the simple things we could all be doing to feel better. I'm Laurie Santos. I'm a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of "The Happiness Lab" podcast. I study the science of happiness. In order to feel happier, we really need to come to terms with the fact that our mind is kind of lying to us. We experience what psychologists like Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson have called 'miswanting.'

Miswanting is the act of trying to go for certain things that we assume are gonna make us feel happy, but then they don't make us as happy as we think. Because there are these annoying features of the mind that cause us to get happiness wrong. And one of the biggest annoying features of the mind is the fact that we all have these intuitions about the kinds of things we should be doing to feel better- but the research shows that many of those intuitions are just incorrect.

Take, for example, money. So many of us think that if we just got more money, we'd feel happier. But if you have enough money to put food on the table and a roof over your head, more money isn't gonna make you happier. The same is true for so many things: getting a promotion, material possessions, getting married. We kind of get the Rolling Stones idea wrong. We think the problem is that we can't always get what we want; but the problem is that if we got what we wanted, we probably still wouldn't be happy because we want the wrong things.

A second annoying feature of the mind is the fact that we tend to not think in objective terms. We tend to compare all our outcomes in life to something else. This is what's known as 'setting a reference point.' We're constantly comparing what we have to other people: compare our salaries, compare our looks, compare how happy our marriage is, even compare how much sex we're getting. And that's a problem because it means we could be doing objectively quite well in life, but as long as there's somebody out there who's doing better than us, we're gonna feel bad.

Another annoying feature of the mind is that our minds tend to get used to stuff. When you first have an experience, it's glorious. But over time you kind of get used to it. This is what researchers call 'hedonic adaptation.' It means that things that initially impact our happiness a lot, they stop having the same impact over time. There's an additional problem with hedonic adaptation, which is that we don't really know that it's happening, and that leads to an additional bias that's known as the 'impact bias.'

We assume that if something good happens, it's gonna impact our happiness a lot and for a really long period of time- but the evidence suggests it doesn't. We're biased about the particular impact that any event might have on our happiness. That's the impact bias. When we think about the annoying features of the mind, the bad news is that those mistakes seem to be built in. Everyone's walking around with minds that will inevitably miswant.

The real way to thwart our biases is to behave differently. There's a whole set of practices I like to call 'rewirements.' All of us can engage with rewiring our own habits in order to change our behaviors and feel better. When we think about the behaviors that we need to change as part of our rewirements, there's one big one that comes up initially: social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They physically spend time around other people, and they tend to really prioritize time with their friends and family members.