Laurie Santos
Take your team beyond short term to work at their fullest so they will thrive at their job and fulfill themselves. Dr. Laurie Santos is a cognitive scientist, renowned wellbeing expert, and host of the hit podcast The Happiness Lab, which has been downloaded over 100 million times since its inception. She is a professor of psychology at Yale, where she teaches Psychology and the Good Life, the most popular course in the history of the school.
Dr. Santos is at the forefront of the “feelgood revolution”,combining her scientific training and expertise to help us rethink happiness and guide us to our best lives. Rather than seeking quick-fix solutions for short-term goals, she focuses on the deeper sense of wellbeing that comes from purpose and human connection, and examines how our increasing reliance on technology can inadvertently pull us away from the human interactions that are essential to flourishing. She offers actionable advice and takeaways for how to live a happier, more resilient, and more meaningful life, even during times of global uncertainty and crisis.
Dr. Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology and the former Head of Silliman College at Yale University. She has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, NPR, GQ Magazine, Slate, CNN and Oprah Magazine. Dr. Santos is a winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association. She has been featured as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” and was named TIME's “Leading Campus Celebrity.”
Topics
Thriving Through Crisis: How to Foster Happiness When the World Feels Overwhelming
Dr. Laurie Santos discusses the tools that science provides for managing stress and building a life of happiness, even when a crisis looms. Whether it’s the toll of environmental disasters and wildfires, the challenges of political instability, or the anxiety that pervades modern life, this talk shares the latest research and offers actionable, science-based insights for creating lasting positive change. Participants will leave with practical habits to reduce stress, foster resilience, and improve overall well-being, regardless of external pressures.
The Science of Happiness
In this session, Laurie Santos explores what new results in psychological science teach us about how to be happier, how to feel less stressed, how to flourish more, and how to put these scientific findings into practice by building the sorts of habits that will allow us to live a happier and more fulfilling life.
Psychology and the Good Life
The class Laurie teaches at Yale, Psychology and the Good Life, presents a set of scientifically-validated strategies for living a more satisfying life. Her lecture will be a very short précis version of the course — She will introduce some misconceptions we have about what makes for a satisfying life and explain how our minds lie to us about what will make us happy, suggesting that some of the things we think matter for our happiness simply don’t. Laurie will take a quick look at the psychological biases and dumb features of our mind that lead us astray, biases that make it hard for us to see what makes us happy and cause us to seek out the wrong sorts of things (a phenomenon she refers to as miswanting). Laurie will end with what psychology research shows about what we really should strive for to live a happier and more satisfying life.
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