Laurie Santos boosts joy to fight burnout
By Jamie Ducharme
A DENTAL EMERGENCY WAS LAURIE SANTOS’ wake-up call. It wasn’t even her own: One of Santos’ students at Yale University needed her sign-off before getting some work done. Instead of feeling sympathy for her student, Santos mostly felt annoyed about the extra paperwork she’d need to complete.
That reaction was unusual and concerning for Santos, a psychologist who teaches Yale’s single most popular course, on the science of happiness. She knew that cynicism, irritability, and exhaustion—all of which had been gnawing at her recently—were telltale signs of burnout, a condition that almost 30% of U.S. workers say they experience at least sometimes, according to a 2022 McKinsey Health Institute survey.
Those weren’t the only red flags for Santos. Her plate felt too full. Her fuse was shorter. Two years into the pandemic, she was tired of bending the on-campus college experience to fit a remote world. “I take such pride and compassion in working with students, and to feel like that was getting chipped away” was worrisome, Santos says. To avoid sinking into full-on burnout, she decided to take a year off from Yale and temporarily move with her husband to Cambridge, Mass.
“I’m trying to practice what I preach, both because I think that’s an authentic way to show, ‘See, seriously, this works,’” Santos says. “But also, I want to be happy.”
Santos knows what you’re probably thinking at this point: Why bother trying to be happy if even the happiness expert is burned out? But that’s the wrong takeaway, she insists. The right one is that no one is immune to burnout—especially in times as stressful as these—but we all have the power to change our situations.
WHEN SANTOS INTRODUCED her course, Psychology and the Good Life, in 2018, it quickly became the most popular in Yale’s history. More than 1,000 students enrolled, leading to logistical problems including finding a large enough auditorium and dealing with traffic jams in the dining hall as a quarter of undergraduates attempted to grab meals before heading to the same class.
Santos had a hunch the course would have wide appeal. She’d decided to start teaching it after observing Yale’s stressed-out students, whoo were constantly anxious about gradesc and their futures, seemingly muscling through rather than enjoying college. Staggering statistics around mental-health conditions and suicidal thinking on college campuses cemented her desire to help.
