Homeroom with Sal & Laurie Santos, PhD - Thursday, October 15

Hi everyone! Sal here. Welcome to the Homeroom live stream. We have a very exciting guest today, Lori Santos, professor at Yale University, who teaches a class called Psychology and the Good Life. So, it's going to be a really interesting conversation. I encourage all of you to start putting questions on the message boards on Facebook and YouTube, or wherever you're watching this, and the team will surface as many of these as possible to myself and Lori as we get into the conversation.

Before we get into that, I will give my standard announcements. A reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate and making a donation.

I also want to give a special shout out to several organizations that have stepped up, especially during COVID. Khan Academy was already running at a deficit pre-COVID. Our costs have gone up dramatically because our traffic has gone up dramatically, and we're trying to accelerate a whole bunch of things to keep everyone learning. So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and many other supporters of Khan Academy throughout the year, including many of y'all. But we still need more help, especially since we have a very big gap still for 2021. So, any help you can provide is very much appreciated.

I also want to remind everyone about a Homeroom with Sal, the podcast, which is a flavor of what you're seeing right now. It's essentially episodes of Homeroom edited into a podcast format, so that you can enjoy it while also doing things like safely driving or walking, or not being distracted by my bizarre face. So, I encourage you to check that out wherever you get your podcasts.

With that, I'm excited to introduce Lori Santos. Lori, thanks for joining us!

Lori: Thanks so much for having me on!

Sal: So, maybe a good place to start is your class, Psychology and the Good Life. What is that about, and why do you feel that it needs to be taught?

Lori: Yeah, yeah! Well, the class really started when I took on a new role at Yale. So, I'm a professor at Yale; I've been teaching there for over a decade. But in just the last couple of years, I took on this new role as head of college on campus. Yale’s one of these strange schools, like Hogwarts in Harry Potter, where there are these colleges within the college. I'm head of Silliman College. But what that means is that I live on campus with students. I'm like with them in the trenches, like eating with them in the dining hall and hanging out.

Honestly, when I took on the new role, I didn't like what I was seeing. I was seeing this college student mental health crisis up close and personal, with so many students reporting feeling depressed and anxious, or just like stressed out about life. Fast-forwarding, you know, I'd have so many conversations where students were like, "How's it going?" like "Oh, if I could just get through midterms," or "Oh, if I could just get to spring break." It was like not being present and enjoying things.

So, it made me realize that students just needed some practical strategies for how to feel better in the modern day and age. So, the class really emerged out of that. It's a psychology class; it's like a lot of introductory psychology material, but it's all about the science of well-being. It's like evidence-based strategies you can use to feel better.

And the best part about the class is the homework, which wasn't the typical Yale class homework. It was homework like meditate, or make a new social connection, or savor your next eating experience. It was homework designed to put those practices into effect.

I put this class together like a normal Ivy League class, just assuming 30 or 40 students would take it. That's pretty typical for a psychology class here, but I was astounded when over a thousand students enrolled. In the end, we had a quarter of the Yale student body try to take the class, which showed me the students are voting with their feet. They don't like this culture of feeling academically stressed and overwhelmed all the time, and I think they really wanted some evidence-based strategies they could use to feel better.

Now, on one level, what you just said is surprising that it's so popular, but on another level, it's so obvious that it should be that way, because what are we doing anything for? Why are we even living our lives if not to have a good life, to be happy, and to be in the moment and to be present?

I have a ton of questions, and already questions are starting to come in. I'm curious about two things. One is, do you think that things are different now than they were when—I think I look a lot older than you—when I went to school? I'm amazed to meet very accomplished professors who at least look a lot younger than me. But do you think things are different than when we went to school or generations past? And then, what are the main tools that you're trying to give folks to help deal with that?

Lori: Yeah, yeah! Well, there’s some data on this. I mean, the self-reported rates of mental health issues have been skyrocketing, right? And we could say that maybe that's because there was more stigma to admitting you were depressed or anxious or something when we were in school, but those rates have been skyrocketing in just the last five years, right? So, I don't think since 2016 that the stigma has gone down that much about saying, "I'm feeling anxious" or "I'm feeling depressed."

But we're seeing things like in 2016—2016—that's not a short time period—until now you're seeing data. Okay, so sorry, I interrupted. That’s worth…

No, no, it's crazy. The rates are skyrocketing since 2009, right? Just about 10 years—double the rates of depression in college-age students. Double! Right? I mean, so these things are going up fast. The million-dollar question is why, and the honest answer is that we just don’t know.

There are probably a lot of factors going on. You know, we're more socially disconnected; we're interacting more on social media and technology. I think there's a lot more pressure on students to go to a good school. This kind of meritocracy narrative has kind of embedded in all of our brains in a different way than when we were in school. So, lots of different factors, but what we know is like it is getting worse, and so we need some solutions.

So, that gets to your next question, which is like, okay, what are the solutions? What are the things we can do? One of the things the course teaches is that we're all trying to be happier. It's not like people want to feel depressed and anxious, right? The problem is that we go about it the wrong way.

Yeah! We think we need the next accolade, or we need the next paycheck, or we need to change our circumstances. And the data just suggested that that is not the path to higher well-being. Higher well-being comes from our practices.

A big thing is just social connection, you know—carving out time to spend with family members and people you care about and love. Well-being comes from being other-oriented rather than selfish. I think there's this whole idea for students nowadays that you've got to focus on you and your grades, your accolades, and your test scores. But the data suggests that happiness comes from focusing on other people.

The happiest people out there are people who do good for other people. One of the homework assignments we give in my class is that students have to do these random acts of kindness. So, you know, just a plug for khanacademy.org/donate, right? One of the leading predictors of happiness is if you donate to good causes.

You know, you can do something nice for Khan Academy and boost your well-being. But then there are other simple things, like healthy habits. Just something as simple as sleep, which we know nowadays young people are doing less of. Right? The simple act of getting seven to eight hours of sleep can statistically boost your well-being.

You know, people who are getting five hours actually have mood levels that look like they're clinically depressed, in part because they're not getting enough sleep. So, the answers are really simple in a funny way. They almost seem like kind of trite, but actually none of us are doing them, right? And so, I think seeing the science—when you see a graph that shows, hey, if you do random acts of kindness, here's your happiness versus if you don't—it's over here. It's like, oh, it's hard to argue with those data.

First of all, our philanthropy team thanks you, because I think we're going to take that clip of what you just said. And actually, I would love to see the graphs too! I'm already seeing our next email asking for donations, saying we're going to do you a favor by donating, we're going to make you happier, and here's the empirical evidence why that is true—because that feels like a win-win.

You can imagine, you know, it's sometimes hard to ask for money but—many of these tips actually have this win-win feature, right? By the act of doing something to support yourself and your self-care, you're actually helping your community. You're helping the people around you.

And we talk a lot about the evidence for emotional contagion, right? Like, my well-being is going to affect the well-being of people around me. So, by doing the right sorts of things for yourself, that's actually a way that you can help your friends. That's the way you can help your family members. It's like putting your oxygen mask on first doesn't just give you the oxygen, it kind of helps everybody around you too.

Lori, I'm not kidding. I think you've just defined our winter giving campaign: help yourself by helping the children of the world.

But going into—I mean, there's so much that you said that I'd love to impact. You know, there's already questions coming in, and I think this is on a lot of folks' mind. You know, Nish786 on YouTube is saying how can we—oh, this is—oh no, this is Selena Chang. Actually, I'll get to Nisha's question as well. You know, what advice do you have? So, you're talking about, you know, taking up time, random acts of kindness, getting enough sleep, being present. But the question here is how? You know, students need to juggle workload and other activities and stress.

I think there's a lot of kids saying, "That sounds nice, but I got my—you know, I got to prepare for the SAT. I got this grade. I got this project. I got to get my extracurriculars right." I mean, right now, we're in college admission season—for, you know, the early decision. Just the words have stress in it. Right? What would you tell these folks?

Lori: Yeah, yeah. Part of it is honestly getting your priorities right. It's recognizing that you are not your grades. Right? You are not your accolades. You are not what happens on that early decision. You know, that you will live and have a happy life even if you don't get into your first choice school, or worse, the school your parents think you need to go to, right? Like there are a lot of healthy paths.

The other thing is that we know that people who are feeling burnt out, you know, if you're really in serious mental health dysfunction, like you're not gonna be learning well. Right? You know, when I look out at rates and college rates of depression at places, like 40% of nationally college students report being depressed, over 60% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious—like they're not learning the stuff I’m teaching them, right?

You have to support your mental health first, and then those academic achievements come later. This is the thing that's so shocking to students, but like the data just bear this out. In my class, I teach all about the evidence of sleep for improving grades, right? Like just the act of sleep means you’re gonna be more likely to get higher grades.

And I have students who are like, "Okay, it's midterm season. This feels really counterintuitive to me. Normally, I would stay up, like, tons of hours and not get any sleep, but I'm gonna try it." And then they would come back to me afterwards and report, "Like, you were right! Like, I did better on my midterms this year than I have in years, and I feel better!" Right? Because I’m not like super sleep deprived.

So, I think it's a matter of like overcoming these misconceptions we have. We think we need to be on full throttle 100% of the time, and that's the way to get stuff done. But counterintuitively, focusing on your well-being first might actually be a way to make those grades, those accolades, all that stuff easier, and then you get both for free.

Sal: No, I can't reinforce more of what you just said. You know, I had the blessing of my first job after business school. I worked for a small hedge fund in Boston, and my boss, who was actually a Yale grad, by the way—his name is Dan Wool. I remember I was ready—I was like, I'm in a hedge fund; I'm gonna work 80 hours a week. I'm ready to just—and I remember him telling me after like the first week's Excel, "Why are you here? The market's closed. Go home."

I was like, "Okay, Dan, I'm gonna go work from home." He's like, "No, no, Sal. Our whole job is not to make bad decisions and make a few good decisions. The best thing you can do for your work is to go home and live your life and not think about work for the next whatever 12 hours or 16 hours." And it was kind of this mind-blowing thing to me, but he was right. I mean, he was a very successful investor. I learned a lot from him.

It also created time and space for me to do things like Khan Academy. So, I—completely resonates with what I've heard. You know, actually, 76 questions actually were very similar to the previous question, but I'll ask it again, because I think you're chipping away at what people's world view a little bit. I'm sure you've experienced this every term that you teach the class, where people are like, "Okay, maybe I could sleep a little bit more." Maybe I could do a few random acts of kindness, but there's still all the stress, and I still have all of this—Nisha's saying, "How do you stay cool and content?" Do you have peer pressure? You see other people doing this? You have all these responsibilities?

And I think adults are—it's not just college students; I think adults are in the exact same boat.

Lori: No, totally! I mean, you know, it was one of the reasons my class went so viral, right? I was giving this stuff to Yale students, but I got all these emails, like, "I'm 40. I'm 50. I need these tips too!" Right? I mean, I think, you know, we as adults don't necessarily know how to do it, and I think that's why there's so much mental health dysfunction.

But I think we've really gotten off track, right? I mean, I think one of the things that's surprising is that the research suggests that if you focus on happiness first, other good stuff will come. Right? We think we have to get the good stuff first, and then we can be happy. We need like perfect grades, get into the perfect college, and then I’ll be happy.

The data is funny; it suggests the causal arrow goes the opposite way. There's data, for example, that if you are in a more positive mood, that you're more likely to find a creative solution to a tough problem. They did this study with doctors who have a kind of like, you know, house level medical diagnosis that’s really tricky. If you're in a positive mood, you're more likely to see the problem.

There's evidence suggesting that your mood levels and your cheerfulness levels at 18 actually predict how much you're going to make when you're 30 years old. Right? And so all of you students out there who are making yourselves miserable by not sleeping and worrying about college, turns out the causal arrow might go the other way. Your cheerfulness right now might be predicting a whole host of stuff that's going to affect your salary later on.

And so I think it's a problem. I think as a society, we really have it backwards. We actually need to be putting our oxygen mask on first. It doesn't just affect like, "Oh, we feel good—that feels nice." It affects the bottom line in a deep way.

That's super powerful. And there are a bunch of questions there, and there are a lot of the same flavor where I think people are—they see the goal; they've heard what you just said. I think you're convincing them. But, you know, from Facebook, Dolce Castro Garcia is currently over-stressing and feeling like I'm drowning in schoolwork. How can I deal with that in a healthy way that allows me to keep working but not feel like I can't breathe? Thanks!

I love the Science of Well-Being course. YouTube, Casually Obsessed, says, "What is the best way to reclaim your attention span?" I think people are just looking for, yeah, you know, baby steps.

Lori: Yeah, yeah! Well, a lot of the practices that really help—the good news is they don't take a lot of time. And actually, that's one of the other tips, is that a big predictor of people feeling awful—like serious depression—is people's level of time famine.

So, this feeling that you're really hungry for time, you're just frantic about time all the time. And what's amazing is that time famine and the data suggest is going up, even though our free amount of time is actually going up too. It's like the perception that we're so stressed for time is going up even as we have more free time.

So, we don't want to like take more time up or get more stressed. Like you don't want to get all stressed out about like doing more of these wellness activities, right? But the good news is that a lot of them don't take very much time. Right? Like you can do a random act of kindness in two minutes. You know, you could do a quick five-minute meditation and just follow your breath for five minutes. You're not gonna lose that much, you know, study time if you take five minutes to do a meditation.

And what you'll find is the act of doing that is going to give you back dividends in terms of your attention and so on. So, one of the things I recommend is, especially in this Zoom time when we're all experiencing so much Zoom fatigue right now, is in between classes or in between meetings, just a three-minute deep breath meditation, where you just breathe in deeply. Ideally, breathe into your stomach, so big stomach breath in, and then a really slow exhale.

And again, it sounds, you know, silly. You know, people say like, "Oh, take a deep breath," when you're trying to be like all, you know, worried about you being stressed and things. But scientifically, what happens is that that deep breath activates your vagus nerve. And if you're taking a biology class on Khan Academy, you probably know that we have this thing called the sympathetic nervous system, right? That activates—that's our fight-or-flight system. That's like, "Oh gosh, a tiger is coming!" or "An exam's coming! I'm so freaked out!"

What you want to activate to decrease that stress is your parasympathetic nervous system—the other part. And you do that through activation of the vagus nerve, right? When you're taking those deep breaths, there's no tiger that could be coming to get you, and it just signals to your body to kind of go back to that de-stress mode. And that takes like three minutes.

And so, you know, that's one quick tip that you can kind of build in. But another one is just, again, it's a broader, more meta issue, right? One of the reasons we're so stressed is that we're going after the wrong stuff. You know, what if everybody on this call prioritized making a little bit more time for the people they care about, even if it's just like 10, 15 minutes a day? You know, yeah, you'll have less time for school. That's okay! Like the priority is social connection.

That would pay huge dividends where you're feeling a little more socially connected. You get a little bit more laughter in your day. Like, the problem is that we have these priorities that might not be getting us the things we want, including good grades, you know, the best jobs afterwards, and so on. We might be going about it the wrong way.

Sal: No, that so resonates. And, you know, I've shared this on this live stream many times. I've become a religious meditator. I do it every day for half an hour. And you're exactly right! It's very easy to rationalize that, and you don't have to do half an hour. I started doing 10 minutes a day.

But you can rationalize, "Oh, I don't have time for that half hour! I gotta get the kids ready, I gotta, you know, have these meetings, etc." But for me, it's clear causality that if I meditate, I kind of disassociate myself from all of these made-up tigers in my head. They're like, "What are people going to think of me? What if that initiative Khan Academy doesn't work? What if we're not able to raise enough money?" All of these tigers that really aren't going to eat me, and that frankly I forget the next week.

But if I just take a—I actually view it as my 30-minute vacation. I feel like I'm on the beach, even though it's just in my head. That, you know, Marcus Aurelius, the famous Roman emperor in his Meditations, he said, "You know, people want to always say they want to go to the beach or get away from it all. All you have to do is go inward." All you have to do is realize that you can just get away from it all if you kind of separate yourself from your identity, your ego—all of these things that you identify with.

And, I gotta say, it always works! It changes my mood. I become more affectionate to my wife. I give her a hug and a kiss. Instead of trying to get my kids out the door as fast as possible, I'm hugging them. You know, if they're like, "Daddy, I'm late," I'm like, "It's okay!" You know, and we're happier.

So, I completely agree with what you're saying. Are there other—I'd love to, you know, from the science—are there things that surprised you? Things that you're like, "Wow, yeah, that's even another data point that's so counterintuitive or surprising?"

Lori: I think another one that really surprised me is the importance of something like gratitude, right? It sounds so cheesy, like, "Oh, be grateful!" Like it's some bad, you know, social media thing that your parents will share on Facebook or something like that. But the data suggests that like the act of complaining, which kind of feels good—like we have this prediction that will feel nice to gripe and complain with our friends or, or make memes complaining about stuff and talking about how crappy everything is—like the data really suggests that that's actually the opposite.

Taking some time to count your blessings, even when things feel really bad, even when things feel really stressed, is a way to kind of give yourself a well-being boost, right? There’s data suggesting that the simple act of scribbling down three to five things you're grateful for every day significantly boosts your happiness in as little as two weeks.

But what's more surprising is there's data suggesting that experiencing gratitude can actually bump up your willpower, right? You know, some of you have to sit down and do that college application or that hard project that you gotta start work on, and it feels really tough—you want the willpower to sit there. It turns out what gets you that is gratitude. The simple act of recognizing that you have benefits in life makes you feel like, "You know, things are going pretty good. I can do this thing that feels a little hard."

And so, again, that feels so totally counterintuitive to me. If you ask my brain, "What would feel better? Like griping and complaining to your friends or reading a lot of angry memes on Reddit or something like that?" I'd be like, "That—That’s what my brain thinks is gonna feel good." But actually, what would feel better is, you know, to text a friend of mine and say, "You know, hey, I'm so grateful. I don't say this often, but thanks for being there. I'm really grateful for you!" Or to a parent or something like that—or even just privately write down on your phone, on some app, the things that you really love in life and the things that you're really proud of.

Like it sounds cheesy, but it really works!

And that is so easy! I mean, you literally—it takes seconds. It just at the moment when you see someone, if you appreciate them at all, let them know that.

You know, all the questions that have been coming in, they're a lot of the same flavor. I mean, what you've seen as a college head, just a lot of stressed-out folks, and I think we're making headway in this conversation. My question is, why is your course kind of just like a one-off course? Why shouldn't—I mean, to me, this feels obvious. I've talked to other university presidents, professors, guidance counselors. This should be like, I don't know. It feels like it should just be part of the tissue of our education system, and probably more!

Lori: I mean, I agree completely. We're trying to get this content into as many high schools right now as we can. So if you're a high school student and you really want to see this content, or if you're an educator and you want to see this content, let me know, and then we'll really try to get it in! Just drop me an email, and I'll be happy to send you more information.

But, yeah, I mean, I think what's amusing is that this stuff is needed to educate students well, right? We simply are not meeting our mission to teach students computer science or math or Chaucer with 40% of young people reporting that they're too depressed to function most days. Like the content is just not getting in there!

And so I think we really do need to think seriously about whether or not educators need to be building this kind of mental health protective strategies into their content that they're already developing.

Yeah, and it's so simple! I mean, I'll say what I'm getting from you—sleep, meditation, gratitude, being present—all of those things. I mean, you forgot the most important: random acts of kindness and donate to Khan Academy, right?

Oh yes, and random acts of kindness and donating to Khan Academy—yes, maybe the most important one!

I'll put it—they're all very important! You know, where's your level? What are you looking into now? What are your areas of research? What are the questions you're trying to learn more about?

Lori: Yeah, well, we're doing two things on the kind of publicizing side. As I said, we're really trying to get this content into as many schools and classrooms as possible because I do think it—I mean, the data really just suggests it makes a huge difference in terms of boosting people's well-being, but also giving them the bandwidth, you know, to achieve in other domains too.

But another thing I'm really struggling with is why this stuff is so hard, right? Like I'm the professor that teaches this stuff, right? I know the data; it should be really easy for me to meditate all the time and do these random acts of kindness and, you know, get enough sleep, and it's still hard for me.

And so I'm really interested in this disconnect between knowing what you should be doing and actually putting it into practice. And so we're trying to come up with different techniques we can use to nudge people's behavior or that you can use to nudge your own behavior in the right way. I think the next class that I teach at Yale will be about those kinds of things.

Sal: Alright! Now, you know what you're supposed to do. Alright, let’s actually do it!

And what do you think? I mean, you mentioned the sympathetic, parasympathetic, which is—yeah, we humans, maybe other animals do it too, but if there's a tiger, yeah, it makes sense that your body goes into overdrive. You know, all of your stress hormones get released, and blood flows to your muscle. But then we have this chronic stress of like, "Oh, I better do good in that thing three weeks from now," or "I better raise enough money for Khan Academy, otherwise it'll all go away," or, you know, and it's like you're constantly being chased by a tiger.

Why? What's going on in our heads? Is that evolutionary favorable? That's made us plan, and, you know, we're miserable, but we're able to make a more successful society? I mean, why does that exist?

Lori: Well, natural selection is not about us being happy. Natural selection just wants to put our genes into the next generation. And I think, you know, that's worth remembering—that you're walking around with this baggage in your head that's not about your bandwidth. It's ready to push you, you know, to the point of your breaking point, right?

And I think, you know, if you look at evolution, you see that there are these different rhodic creatures who reproduce so much that they die in one generation. And I worry that this is what we're pushing our students towards, right? You know, they're at the breaking point in terms of their mental health to kind of achieve the kinds of things we want them to achieve.

And I think part of it is we need, as a society, to kind of scale that back, or else the consequences are going to be really steep. But I think the beauty is that you can, even if you don't feel like your school is doing that or your family's doing that, you can scale it back in your own head through the kind of practices we've been talking about.

You know, even just this idea of acceptance, right? You know, like your college admissions process is going to be what it’s gonna be. You've done your best; can you just be with that and accept that? You know, the uncertainty of the modern era is, you know, going out like—COVID and all the things we're facing—like you can't stop that uncertainty necessarily, but can you stop your reaction to the uncertainty?

And I think that's one of the things we realize is that there's a lot of stuff you don't have control over—which can really affect us—but there's always one thing you do have control over, which is your own attitude, which is your own behavior.

And as you're talking about, Sal, there are all these techniques, like Marcus Aurelius talked about, that you can use to kind of come to acceptance on that. One of my favorite ones is a technique called RAIN. This has been popularized by a meditation teacher named Tara Brach. And it’s a technique you can use whenever you're feeling a negative emotion.

The acronym RAIN stands for: Recognize, like, "Oh, this is sadness; this is frustration; I'm mad at my parents; this is fear about college; this is stress." Recognize what it is. Then Allow it, like, "Okay, you're cool. You can be here." Like it's like a bad dinner guest or like a bad person who showed up at your house—you don't kick them out, but you just allow it. They're just going to be there, and they're going to go.

And then you Investigate, like, "What does it feel like in my body?" Get that kind of bodily awareness. And then you do the end, which I think people who study at Khan Academy struggle with; the end is Nurture, which is like the self-compassion.

This is not going to help you to beat yourself up. So what can you do to nurture yourself? Like it sucks to feel uncertain or frustrated or sad or scared or whatever you’re feeling. What can you do to be nice to yourself, not in a like, "Again, I'm going to blow everything off and watch Netflix" or like, "You know, scroll on Reddit"? What can you do to be really nutritiously nice for yourself? What do you actually need right now?

And so that practice is one that I use myself, especially a lot of in the COVID time, when there's a lot of uncertainty and scary stuff happening. Like recognize like, "Oh, this sucks, but I can be with it and investigate and kind of nurture it."

This is exactly what the Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were talking about—you can't control the outside world, but you can control your reaction to it.

Just touching on that same idea, this question here from Facebook, Gisella Padilla-Bovino. I mean, you've touched on this, and I'll expand her question a little bit. She's asking, "What other micro habits do you suggest for everyday well-being?" I'll extend it, and this conversation’s gone way faster—the more I enjoy it, the faster it goes. You know, I know what other micro habits—I think we're all looking for these very insightful—I mean, call them hacks, call them whatever you want—but they're micro habits. But I'm also curious about your day.

Like make it tangible for us! I mean, you're—by external observer—you’re a professor at Yale. Seems like a stressful job. You have a lot of responsibilities. How do you give us a day in your life and how you manage these things?

Lori: Well, you said some of them—meditation is huge! Gratitude, I really just—I have like a little notes thing on my phone where I just try to write things down.

Another new one that I think can be really powerful for students is making good use of what's called time confetti. So, I mentioned that we're all feeling more time famished, but we actually have more time—that's a disconnect!

What’s up? What's up is that we have more time, but it's broken up into these tiny little chunks. This is what researcher Ashley Williams calls time confetti, right? Like little pieces here and there. And it can feel like, "Oh, I don't have that much time. I have five minutes." Like I'll just scroll on social media or I'll do something stupid. I'll get like a little dopamine reward hit but not achieve anything real for my nutritious healthiness.

Ashley Williams suggests making what she calls a time confetti list. Like when you have that five minutes here and there, what can you really do with it? Again, not schoolwork. Like what can you do with it to connect with a friend or have a good moment with your family or experience some gratitude or just do those deep breaths that I mentioned.

And so this is a technique I've stolen from Ashley. I actually have a list of my time confetti list, and it's hard! You know, if this call ends a little early, I'll look at it, I'll be like, "Oh, I'll check my email," or "I'll do—I’ll, you know, scroll on Reddit," or something. It's like, "Nope! I look at my time confetti list, and I'm like, 'Oh, I should text a friend' or 'Oh, I should set up that coffee date for the future that I've been putting off!'"

Right? Like what things can you do nutritiously for your well-being, not just like blow off the time? Then you'll kind of feel like you're a little less time famished, and that can do wonders for your well-being.

Sal: I love that! I love that term, time confetti, because now that you've named it, I'm like, "Yeah, there's tons of time confetti all over the place!" You know, one thing that once I started getting into meditation—now I'm almost—one could go addicted to it. You know, even when I'm in a traffic light, normally, if I was at a big intersection, I'm like, "Oh, there's two, two and a half minutes of my life gone."

Now I'm like, "Oh, I got two and a half minutes of—now I'll call it time confetti." And I'll, you know, I don't close my eyes because I need to pay attention to the light, but I'll say, "I'm just going to look at this very meditative red light and just breathe deeply." And then, like, I'm like, "Oh, it's over. I gotta go!"

Alright, but I love that! And you can—

Sal: One last question, because we've been kind of talking about it on the margin. You just alluded to it—you know, a lot of people are talking about social media. Even in the recent trends, you know, we've had people like Jonathan Haidt on this live stream talk about—he seems to point the finger at social media being a reason why especially this generation of young people who grew up on social media seem especially prone to anxiety or depression.

Are there some rules that you would recommend, even that you're practicing yourself or that you would want to do with your, you know, the students you work with or your family?

Lori: Yeah, I think—the rule that I use a lot and I suggest a lot to my students is to kind of mindfully pay attention to what feels nutritious. This is hard, right? Our brains are telling us to go after the wrong stuff, and this is natural selection's fault, right?

Like, you know, when I'm having a bad day, I'm like, "Cupcake!" You know? Like, go inward and sit and plop down and watch Netflix. Turns out those things will not nutritiously feel good for my well-being. Like calling a friend, doing something active, trying to learn something new—those actually are positive forms of leisure that will make me feel better.

The problem is your brain doesn't notice it—it leads you the wrong way! And so mindfulness can help here, right? And part of me actually just literally takes a view of like when I'm done an activity, think about like, "What did that feel like? Was that nutritious? Was that good?" Like, "Do I feel yucky now?"

And then that causes your brain, like the loop that forms habits, to notice, like, "Wait, hang on! That wasn't rewarding in a really nutritious way! Maybe I shouldn't do that anymore!" You know? So when you're done—social media, whatever it was—take a moment to notice, like, "How'd that feel? Do I feel great now? Do I feel crummy? Do I feel kind of more apathetic?" Same with like TV sometimes, right?

Like, you know, there's good TV and positive TV where you can learn, but then there are times it just makes you feel kind of gross and apathetic. Notice that! And then notice the opposite—like when I called a friend or tried to learn something new or did that big deep breath or did that 10 minutes of meditation, how do you feel afterwards?

The problem is we're so busy we don't notice our own rewards. You know, we just assume, like, "Oh yeah, that scrolling on social media thing felt awesome," and we don't take the time to be like, "No, it didn't! It actually felt kind of crummy!"

But you need to do that like two seconds of your time confetti to take time to notice what's feeling good, and that can kind of steer you in the right direction.

Sal: No well, this was a super interesting conversation! I could talk for many, many more hours. I hope we get more chances to discuss this, but thank you so much, Lori! This was hopefully very helpful and hope brings a lot of people on this journey to having a healthier, happier life.

Lori: Thanks so much for having me on. This is great!

Sal: Well, thanks everyone for joining. Hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I did! I definitely am going to tweak a little bit of my time confetti, although I have to say I'm, you know, not to get, you know, half of my meditation is to kind of disassociate myself from my ego and my identity—but, so, you know, over the last several years, probably been induced by stress, I have—as I've told many of y'all—doing a lot more meditation. It's been a game changer for me.

So, I'm gonna underline everything that Lori just said. If you're really daring, think about cold showers. You can read up about them. They're a little bit painful going in, but as Lori said, when you're done, you feel great. And actually, you'll save time because your showers will be shorter.

But don't do it if you're sick! I don't want to, you know, people to get in trouble if someone gets a cold or something like that!

And yeah! And physical activity—you know, one thing I've been trying to do when possible when I'm on Zoom or anything like that, I try to go for a walk. I tell people, like, "Hey, I'm gonna turn the camera off, go for a walk. I want some fresh air. I want to walk around; get my blood flowing."

And these have been the type of life hacks and everything that Lori just mentioned. You know, gratitude—I just got feedback at work that, you know, I'm not thanking people enough. And I was like, "How did I become that grumpy person who doesn't thank people?"

Over the last week, I've been trying to thank people more. And Lori's right, it makes you happy.

And I'll just remind everyone again what Lori said: by donating, doing good for others, it'll make you happy. So that's going to be my new pitch when I ask for philanthropic donations for Khan Academy.

So with that, thanks everyone! I'll see you on Tuesday, where we'll do an Ask Me Anything. Have a great weekend!