Transcript of Can Money Actually Buy Happiness? | Feat. Dr. Laurie Santos | Mel Robbins Clips

Let's talk about money, though, because you have some foundational and very interesting research about money, at least in the United States. And I would love for you to share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the most famous study on money and happiness was one that the late Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman, ran back in, I think, 2009. And he asked this interesting question, does increases in your amount of money wind up corresponding with increases in happiness, which he measured in a couple of ways. First, positive emotion, Do you get more positive emotion? Do you get less negative emotion? And do you feel less stressed? And so we had this huge data set where you could plot this out across different incomes. And what he finds is that if you're in the low, low end of the income spectrum, if you're earning $1,000 a year, $30,000 a year. Yeah, increasing your salary over time is going to boost your positive emotion. You're going to feel less stress, less negative emotions. But that increasing curve where more money is more happiness, more money is more happiness, it levels off. And in 2009-ish dollars, in the United States, it leveled off at around $75,000. What does that mean? That means that if in 2009, you hit a salary of $75,000, even if you doubled your salary, tripled, quintalized, tupled your salary, you wouldn't get any corresponding increase in positive emotions.

You wouldn't decrease your negative emotions, and you wouldn't feel less stressed. Now, that is not what you probably believe if you're listening right now. Mel is going to mouth, hang It's open. It's like, no one thinks this, right? And you might be like, well, that's $2,009. The equivalent right now would maybe be like $100, $110, something like that, right? We just don't think that. We think if suddenly I could triple my salary, I would be way happier. But this research like this just shows that we're wrong. And so that raises a different question, which is like, well, why doesn't more money buy happiness? And I think it's for a few reasons. One is that as you get richer, you often tend to get busier. In fact, this is a change that we've seen in the US population. It used to be that rich people lived their lives of leisure. They look like Cary Grant, the Philadelphia story, just sitting around drinking cognac out of beautiful vases and things like that. But higher salary now usually means you're working harder, right? You're putting in more hours at work. And we know that time really matters for happiness, and free time matters for happiness.

The more you're working, the less you're interacting socially. So wealth doesn't seem to give us this social benefit we used to get before. And I think a bigger thing is that as you get more money, you just get used to that over time. If you get a little bit more money, maybe you start going to see the trainer and you start flying first class, you start eating in the nice restaurants. But if you do that over and over every day, it just becomes your day to day experience. You don't get this additional happiness boost from it. And so $75,000, it's not like a magic bullet number, but I think it's around the amount where a lot of your needs are taken care of. You got food, shelter, maybe a teeny vacation a year or something. The stuff that you can additionally buy with more money is not going to bring you more happiness.

I'm so glad that we're talking about this because I do think this is one of the major mistakes I've made in my life.

Totally.

That I think that if I can buy something or if I make more money or if I just have this much in savings, that somehow it's going to just automatically boost happiness. And it's true, it hasn't. And I will also say, though, that when I think about the times in my life where I have been struggling profoundly financially, really struggling to get groceries on the table, having my bank card bounce at the gas station, trying to fill up the card.

We've all been there. That there is a certain cruel and relentless stress that you feel when you can't take care of your basic needs that does interfere with your ability to be happy with where you are in your life.

Because I was constantly worried about it, which meant I had no time, which meant I didn't enjoy where I was at, which meant I was focused on survival. And so Is that the reason why the monetary figure, really, if you can take care of things so that you can get through your day-to-day life and take care of yourself, it lowers stress, and that's why it makes happiness available to you?

Yeah, I think when we ask this question, does money buy happiness? Part of our intuition is right. It was like, well, money can get me stuff that would lead me to be happy. Money can put me on a vacation that I can spend time with my family, can allow me to decrease these negative emotions fear of like, is the rent collector going to come? Are they going to get kicked out of my house or or overwhelmed? I have to take on more hours at work just to make ends meet. Right? I think when you get to a certain wealth level, you shut off those basic need problems that come up that very much do affect our happiness. And so from that perspective, does money matter for happiness? Yes, for sure. But it only matters up to a certain level, and that's the spot that we get wrong. And I think it's not just like all of you and I and the listener are getting this wrong. I think this is the thing that even people of extreme wealth get wrong. One of my favorite guests that I've ever had on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, was this guy, Clay Cockrell.

And he is a mental health professional that works only with the 0. 0001 %. So I think most of his clients are earning over $50 million. And the first thing that should be striking is that this dude has clients. These are people who have $50 million who apparently aren't happy enough that they need to see some mental health professional to help them get through. And a lot of their problems, amazingly, are financial. One of the stories Clay told was that there was a guy who he worked with who just bought this new yacht. His wife really wanted the yacht, and they couldn't figure out where to park it. It was causing all this marital strife. And you can look at that and you're probably thinking, poor, exploited baby, can't park his yacht while...

I was going to say, Dr. Santos, it's very petty of me to say this, but I'm like, good. I'm glad you're unhappy. I hate that I had that reaction, but I'm like, I'm glad you're freaking unhappy if you have a yacht. Like, screw you. Now I'm like, I'm a terrible person.

Oh, my God. But the flip side is, I think many of us have way less wealth levels than $50 million, have seen some of the problems that our material possessions come up with.

Of course, I'm mad that my husband is making me get up and move my 1987 Toyota Corolla to the other side of the street so that the street sweeper is coming through and we don't get towed. Right.

And to somebody who's trying to have an existence with that. No, I was going to say the opposite way. Somebody who has an existence where they would kill for that 1987 Toyota because they can't get to work and they're taking the bus 2 hours a day. That feels like, How could you ever complain about that? So this is the problem is that we don't... These material goods come with some costs that we don't expect, and they just don't continue to give us the happiness. If you were that person who is taking the bus today, every day, they would worship your 1987, your car. I love my car. It's all good. I know. I have a really crappy Nissan, too, so I get it. It's very beat up. But it's like there's somebody out there who would worship that. And this is the problem is that you've had it so long. You had it since 1997. You stopped worshiping You stop getting the utility out of it. Tomorrow, if you walked home and the car was gone and you're like, Wait, where did I park it? Did somebody steal my car? What's going on? And it took you out.

You're like, Oh, no, husband moved it or something. For that five minutes where you didn't know where it was, where it had gone, Now you'd see the value in it like, oh, my gosh, I don't know. I left my CDs in there. Like, oh, my gosh, I didn't have to get a new car. When you get it back, you're like, oh, thank goodness. That little break is breaking up what you are used to. It's a break in what psychologists call your hedonic adaptation. You just got- That's a big word. I don't know what that means. The fast definition is you just got used to something. Hedonic adaptation is you get adapted to your hedonic value.

I feel like we do that in our marriages and our relationships, too.

Oh, my God. Actually, there are curves of hedonic adaptation in marriages, and they're quite funny.

Yes, it's called my waistline.

No, the moment you get married, basically five months in, you're already getting used to your partner, and it goes down over time.

You said something earlier, though, that gave me this epiphany because you were talking about how when you're really struggling and you think, okay, money is going to make me happier because money is going to help me pay my bills. So, yes, that's true because we're lowing stress. But then you said something interesting. You said, and maybe I'll be able to take a little vacation with my family. What occurred to me is that the thing that a vacation does with your family is it gives you time with them. Correct. Yeah. And so I think maybe one of the mistakes that we're making is that we think money gives us the thing that actually makes us happy, which is more time with people we care about or more time to feel less stressed. And is that where this is going?

Yeah. There's really lovely work by the psychologist Ashley Willens at Harvard Business School that talks about a concept that social scientists are getting really excited about lately called time affluence, which is not wealth affluence. It's not the amount of money you have, but it's the amount of free time you have. If you're listening right now and you hear that term time affluence, and you're like, that is not me at all. Again, don't feel too bad because you are part of the general majority of humans on the planet right now, especially Americans right now. Most of us are experiencing the opposite of time affluence, which is time famine, where we literally almost feel like you're starving for time. Ashley Mellie Willen's research shows that if you experience time famine, that's a huge hit on your well-being. In fact, one of her studies show that if you self-report being time famished a lot, that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. Really? Those of you listening right now who are lucky enough to have jobs, something else we can get hedonically adapted to. If you're lucky enough to have a job, imagine you lost that job in the next 10 minutes, how you'd feel.

Just not having a lot of free time can make you feel that bad. And so, Mel, you're really onto something, which is that one of the best ways we can spend our money to increase our happiness is to actually use money to buy back time. And Ashley Williams does some really cool work on this. She finds no matter what your discretionary income is, because you can say, okay, yeah, that guy with the $50 million in the yacht, he can spend money to, I don't know, hire somebody to clean his house or take these unwanted tasks off his desk. He can go to the restaurant instead of cooking meals for himself. But many of us have a little bit of discretionary income. And Ashley finds that no matter what level of discretionary income you have, if you spend that to get time back and you commit to spending it to get time back, you can be happier, whether that's like hiring the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn or- Watch your kid. Watch your kid.

Walk the dog.

Exactly.

Or just like- Dropping off some laundry at a local laundermat to wash and fold it for you. And I think if you can shop on Amazon and you're hitting the shop now button on Instagram or social media, that's discretionary income.

Exactly. And this stuff arrives. And one One of the extra hacks you can do to make this an even more effective strategy is whenever you do that, reframe the amount of time you saved. We were here in Boston. Before I came to the studio, I stopped at this local coffee shop that was right near there, and I just got breakfast. I got this nice little egg sandwich. It's a little egg souffle. It was delicious.

Oh, it is my favorite egg sandwich on the planet with that mustardy aioli and the arugula and the bacon. Girl, I'm with you on that.

Let's go. But if I had to I think that myself, I would have to souffle the egg, I don't know, it's that 20 minutes to get the nice pop of the egg. I'd have to have gone to the grocery store to get the stuff. I'd have to chop up the tomato because it's a nice slice of tomato. I probably saved least 45 minutes buying that egg sandwich at the shop. What did I do with that 45 minutes? Now I have some of that 45 minutes to talk to you. Maybe I take a nice walk. That framing technique matters. So every time you get takeout, go to a restaurant, every time you drop your clothes off at the laundromat, if you, again, have enough discretionary income to maybe hire somebody to mow the lawn or clean or something like that, reframe it and say, oh my gosh, by spending that money, I saved X amount of time. And literally give it, it's an hour and a half, hour 20, whatever. And then ask yourself, what did I do at that time? You're making the face that a lot of my students make when they experience this smell, which is like, you have this breath of, I have an hour, an extra hour.

You know what else I also love about this? Is that you just We just did something really important, which is you put value on your time. And what we've been doing wrong is we've been putting all the value on the thing.

Or the money that we can use the time for, right? Right. Where you Just to switching our time into money of like, well, if I work an extra hour, if I take overtime, or we don't realize that what that money is supposed to be for is to make our lives better. And often what makes our lives better is free time time. Individuals who self-report being more time affluence, so they feel wealthy in time, they're more social. There's these funny studies where you just convince people they're a little wealthier in time. You have people do a little scram.

How do you convince me that I'm wealthier in time?

Well, psychologists have these very funny hacks. So one funny hack is I give you a little word scramble to do. So there's scrambled up words and you have to unscramble them. But then I make those words be affluent in time. Things like vacation or time off, like holidays. I Have you have you have words where you're like, oh, yeah, I'm wealthy in time. And then all of a sudden, I give you the opportunity. They have subjects in a coffee shop, and you can have the opportunity to just chat with somebody. And I just sit back and watch. Do you chat with people more when you have that moment of feeling a little bit more wealthy in time, and you do.

And then you also feel happier because you've just connected with somebody.

Exactly. There's also studies showing that people who are wealthy in time do nice stuff for other people. Actually, the most terrible one was a study that was done back in the day, and this This is back in the day when the ethics of studies maybe weren't so great. It was in the '70s. But there was a group of researchers who are studying Princeton seminary students. So these are people who are studying to be a priest. And the study is that you have to go and give a surprise lecture about the story of the Good Samaritan, which, if you don't know, is Jesus was walking around and saw somebody doing nice stuff. It's about doing nice things for people in need, right? But these different seminary students were put under different time pressure. So some were told, you got a couple of hours, you get to cross town and go give this, but you got some time or really high time pressure. Actually, you got to go right now. You just don't have time. You got to get over there. What the researchers did was they staged someone en route to this lecture that was in need.

It was set up to look like an unhoused person who'd maybe been hurt. The seminary student has to literally walk over this person to get to the lecture. The question was just, do you stop to help?

Okay. This is somebody who is studying to be a priest. Correct.

We would think you would be- He's about to give a story about why Jesus values doing nice things for people in New York. Okay, so you are crying. He's in his head thinking like, How do I think about how to tell people to do nice things when you're going to move.

Let's just be honest. If you fail this, you should get kicked out of seminary school. That's basically what I'm going to say there.

Basically, the people who are in a rush pretty much never stop to help someone. On, which is really sad.

Which explains the state of society today.

Which actually explains the state of society today. We're rushing around. We all feel so busy. I think time famine has felt like it's going up around. We just don't have the bandwidth to help other people. We don't have the bandwidth to help the planet. There's lots of evidence that if you're feeling under more time pressure, you don't recycle. I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm guilty of this myself where it's like, I got to wash the thing.

I'm literally like, I look, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm like, wait, landfill, recycled.

You just opt out. But imagine it was like that Sunday morning feeling where you got nothing to do, and you're like, I could wash the glass a little extra to put it in there. We're hurting ourselves, each other, the planet, just because we don't have any time.

Okay, now I'm depressed.

So there is good news.

But the good news is- The tire is flat. Now I'm leaky.

Dr. Santos, I going to be happy? But the beauty is that you can... First of all, you can prioritize your free You can spend money to get back more. But these little hacks of just remembering what free time you do have, right? I bought my egg sandwich and that saved me 45 minutes. That alone can put me in the headspace to have a bit more free time. Another one of my favorite hacks is to find ways to use the free time you do have. The journalist, Bridget Schult, coined this term that I absolutely adore, which is called time confetti, by which she means the little five minutes you have here and there. We don't think it's that much, so we usually just blow You pick up our phone. Yeah, you pick up your phone, you scroll Instagram, check your email. But those five minutes add up. In fact, Ashley Willings and her colleagues estimate that we actually have more free time now than we did 10, 20 years ago. What? I know. It feels In a way, that's true. But the difference is it's broken up in stupid ways. It's these little five... We don't have these big chunks anymore.

We got five minutes of time confetti, 10 minutes of time confetti here and there. So it doesn't feel like a lot, so we just blow it. But those are perfect moments to engage in all these to fill up our leaky tire. I think we'll start talking about some of it.

Let's do that. Okay, so let's fill up the leaky tire. We're going to take our time confetti five minutes at a time, and we are going to start rewiring our brain for happiness. In the course, you teach five ways to rewire your sofa happiness and fill up this tire. So what's the first way that you can rewire your mind for happiness?

The first step is to engage in more social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests happy people are more social. People who self-report being happy or physically spend more time around other people, less time alone, and they also spend more time with their friends and family members. So they prioritize time, not just with any old human bodies floating around there. They pick time with people they care about. And this seems to be true both for introverts and extroverts. Really? Yeah. So the key that other people matter for introverts and extroverts is some work by nick Eppley and his colleagues. He does these studies where he just basically forces people to be a little bit more social than they normally would. So he walks up to people. He's at the University of Chicago, so he does this on the L train.

Well, I know this study where he forces people to talk to strangers on the train and to work.

Yeah. And just for a $5 Starbucks gift card, everybody's willing to do this.

People sign up for that to talk to a stranger?

People will do anything for a five dollar Starbucks gift card. It's really the engine of all social science research. People are like, I don't want to do this. It's like, Five dollar Starbucks gift card. People are like, Okay, fine. I'll talk to someone.

Because Now, notice my reaction. And as you're with Dr. Santos and I, you probably have the same reaction as you're listening to us. Like, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't do that for a five dollar Starbucks gift card.

There's no way you would talk to... I mean, like you just got to talk to some rando person on your commution.

But I think the important thing here is that our reaction is that this is not going to be fun. Correct. Our reaction is so much so, I don't want a gift card to do that. Yeah. And so we all would go into that situation and say, oh.

Right.

But what did the research find?

Well, nick actually did that comparison. He asked people, hey, if you were in these two conditions, first of all, would you do it? And how would it feel? And people said exactly what you're saying, Mel, and what I'm sure if the person listening right now is thinking, where I was like, no, I don't want to do that. It would feel terrible. Not just it would feel neutral, but it would feel actively awkward or yucky or whatever. And what he finds is that it's just the opposite. People who spend their train ride talking to a stranger experience positive emotion. They feel more energized. They feel less lonely. And in fact, enjoying your solitude on the train makes you feel a little anxious, yucky. I mean, we can simulate. You're like, oh, yeah, if I tell you, yeah, just don't talk to anyone. Enjoy your solitude. What happens? We start ruminating. We get in our head, right? Just this simple act of talking to a stranger makes us feel good. But the reason I love Nick's research is he tested this extrovert, introvert question. And what he finds is that there's no difference in the happiness boost that extroverts and introverts get.

Where there's a difference is on that prediction question. If I ask you, hey, how bad is it going to be to talk to someone on the train? Extroverts think pretty bad, but introverts think like, Bad. Yeah, like the most horrible thing. But what's striking is they're wrong.

I do think it's a skill to just learn how to talk to people. And the fastest way that I've taught myself how to do it, and again, I've been doing this now for decades because I get very anxious when I feel lonely.

Yeah, because you're good at it. You do this for a living, right?

Well, yeah. I also do this to make my life better. So saying hello Hey, good morning, to the person who I am... Let's say we're ordering an egg sandwich. As a person is ringing me up, I'm like, Hey, how are you doing? And most people look at you like, Oh, hi. And then I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I love your nails. And, Oh, Well, thank you. And a compliment.

Yes, huge.

And a smile. What I find is it's almost like popcorn. If I walk in and I'm a popped colonel and I'm warm, there's something about complimenting somebody's socks or complimenting their nails or being like, even if they serve you the cup of coffee, you're like, oh, my gosh, that's so beautiful. Thank you. Oh, I really needed this. There's something about your warmth that always gets returned. And then I feel lifted by that interaction, and it helps me.

Yeah. And this was something that nick Eppley said on my podcast. He said, look, Laurie, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. If somebody waves at you, you're going to wave back, right? And then that just gets the social connection off the ground. And for both individuals, it winds up feeling better. And I bet same thing, true of you at the coffee shop, when you say, oh, my gosh, this latte looks so pretty or nice meals, that person might not have predicted that they wanted to talk to you. But afterwards, They're happiness leaky tires a little bit more filled up.

Absolutely. So the first takeaway I absolutely love, and the tool for me, nobody waves, but everybody waves back. So always be the person who waves. I love that. What is the second way we can rewire our brains for happiness?

Well, it's related to the first. It's another way to exploit social connection, but it's becoming a little bit more other oriented. What does that mean? It means like, instead of doing stuff for yourself, like self-oriented, you get a little other oriented. You spend your money and your time on other people. This is a spot where I think our intuitions are like an overdrive in the wrong direction and our culture takes us in the wrong direction. I had a little bit of a moment when you said spend your money and time on other people, I'm like, But Dr..

Santos, I don't have any time for myself. So why the hell am I going to give my money and my time to somebody else? My kids are draining me dry. I've given my time to my work, so now you're telling me I got to be other oriented. Give me a break. My gas is leaking here out of this tire. What do I do?

So one of the surprising things, again, spot where our intuitions are wrong. I'm going to say this and you're listening right now and you'll be like, that's not true. But what the research shows is that the act of doing something nice for somebody else makes you feel like you have more time. It's one of these hacks that gives us more time affluence. Think about it. You're at work and somebody is going through something tough. You say, well, what can I take off your plate? Can I help you with something? Just like, out of the goodness of your heart. What does that tell you? You're like, well, I must have more openness on my plate if I'm going to help this other person do something.

That's true. And if you're the one that holds open the door, it means you got some more time because you're not rushing through it. Exactly. Oh, that's interesting. That's sneaky.

It's sneaky. But it's a funny hack to make yourself feel like you have more time is to opt to do something voluntarily for others. And I think that's the keyword, though, voluntarily. Too often we feel overwhelmed when we feel the have tos in life, the shoulds of life, right? I'm supposed to do this for other people. If you're doing lots of stuff for other people and you don't have a choice, maybe you're caretaking for an adult in your life or helping someone out or stuck in childcare. If you feel like you have no choice, then that doesn't count. But if you willingly are like, oh, yeah, I got time to do that. I'm going to choose to do that with my time or my money. Now that's when the benefits start to kick in. Wow.

So the second thing that rewires your brain is this real focus on other people. When I think about some of the research that you mentioned earlier, especially around loneliness and it doubling and just how it's true, everybody seems to feel very lonely right now.

Totally. I mean, the rates of loneliness are like at 60 %, and every demographic group levels of loneliness are going up.

So does your focus on these small social interactions these small ways to be more outwardly focused and kinder to other people, which is going to boost your happiness. It's also going to deceive you into thinking you have more time because you're really taking the time to do this. Does it also have an impact on your feelings of loneliness? For sure.

I mean, that might be one of the hugest impacts it has. In part because when you reach out to other people, chat with the breast at the coffee shop, talk to someone else, reach out to an old friend, another good one, those just are actions that make you feel feel less lonely. One of the fastest hacks to reduce loneliness, if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, I'm feeling a little lonely, is to try to help the loneliness of somebody else. Like, literally take out your phone, scroll through the contacts, pick the name that you think might be feeling the most lonely, having the toughest time, and just send them a text that says, Hey, just thinking about you. Was listening to this cool Mel Robbins podcast. We were talking about friendships, and it just made me think about you. It'd be great to connect.

Yeah, and better yet, share them this episode, and let's talk about it. It's something that you can talk about.

What does the science really say, practically, that you can do to feel better right now? You can actually become happier, somewhere between 5 to 15 % happier. If I said, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You're like five out of 10. Wherever you're feeling right now on how happy you are with your life, you can pop up a little bit.