The Big Lies & the Truth About Happiness with Dr. Laurie Santos

One of the big things that affects happiness is social connection ... Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social; they spend more time, like just physically spend more time, around other people, and then they tend to prioritize time with their friends and family members.

There's so many surprising benefits of fun—it reduces your inflammation, it improves your heart condition, it can improve your relationships. It actually stimulates brain growth. This is why very young kids play a lot and baby animals play all the time, because play and doing fun things can actually increase brain growth. But it also has a surprising effect on your productivity.

Right now, nationally, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days, over 60% say that they feel overwhelmingly anxious, and more than 1 in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year.

And this is hedonic adaptation. All the best things in life, we kind of just get used to over time.

You'd think that we'd evaluate our life in objective terms ... But we don't; we really think relative to expectations.

The hedonic adaptation for negative stuff actually kicks in faster and better than hedonic adaptation for positive stuff. We get used to the bad stuff even more quickly.