Driving a fast car. Winning first place. Getting a big paycheck. Things like this may spark joy in the moment, but they don’t necessarily bring lasting well-being.
“We get used to our life circumstances [good or bad] pretty quickly, and over time, we basically return to baseline,” says Andrew Farr, a 22-year-old recent graduate of Yale University who majored in psychology. It’s a phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation, or the tendency for our reaction to something to become less intense over time.
That’s why the things that we think make us happy often aren’t what actually make us happy, Farr says.
This is one of the lessons Farr learned from “The Science of Well-Being,” a popular Yale psychology class he took in spring 2025. The happiness expert Laurie Santos, PhD, a professor of psychology at Yale, has taught the class for the past eight years.
It started as a way to help students struggling with stress, depression, and other mental health issues, Dr. Santos says. More than 1,000 students enrolled that first semester. The class remains popular and is now also available for free online to happiness-seekers worldwide, with spinoff courses tailored specifically for parents, teachers, and teens.
More than four million people have taken the course in some form.
Here, Farr shares more of his takeaways from the class.
1. There Are Actually 2 Types of Happiness
These are sometimes referred to as “hedonic” happiness, or the pursuit of pleasure and short-term enjoyment, and “eudaimonic” happiness, which comes from having meaning and purpose. We need a balance of both in-the-moment joy and deep fulfillment for overall well-being.
Before he took the class, Farr says, he was much more focused on his daily experiences as a gauge for how well things were going. “It’s easy to get bogged down with homework and commitments and whatnot,” he says. “You don’t always step back and be like, ‘Wow, I could be very satisfied with my life.’”
Since learning this, he’s been able to look at the bigger picture and find happiness in being grateful for the opportunities he’s been given.
2. Happiness Isn’t a Selfish Pursuit
With all the suffering and injustice in the world, Farr said he used to feel that it was a little indulgent, even selfish, to spend time and energy focused on improving his own happiness. But he learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Studies dating back to the 1970s show a concept known as the ‘feel good, do good’ phenomenon. One research article composed of three studies found that feeling good predicted more action on current issues, such as climate change.
“When you feel good, you actually help others more,” Farr says.
What’s more, this kicks off a positive cycle: Prosocial behaviors (being kind and helpful) boost our well-being.
In other words, “We ourselves get happier when doing nice things for others,” Santos says.
3. Social Media Is a Happiness Thief
There’s an old adage that “comparison is the thief of joy,” and it rings truer than ever in the age of Instagram and TikTok. That’s because social media encourages an extreme version of social comparison, Santos says, in which most people share only a filtered and edited highlight reel of their life, setting the bar for happiness artificially high.
Farr says learning this encouraged him to pay closer attention to his social media use and helped him understand why spending time on these platforms sometimes makes him feel down.
Indeed, the 2026 World Happiness Report found that social media use among adolescents is inversely linked to happiness: The less time teens spend on these apps, the higher their life satisfaction tends to be.
4. If You Can’t Change How You Feel, Change How You Think About Your Feelings
In the Science of Well-Being course, Santos teaches about cognitive reappraisal, which is reinterpreting an emotion to change its meaning. The idea, she says, is that you may not be able to change a negative emotion like anxiety or disappointment, but you can change how you think about that experience, which can improve your happiness.
A good first step is something called radical acceptance. “Radical acceptance is committing to mindfully letting your emotions be there without judging them,” Santos says. For example, recognizing and accepting your nerves or anxiety around an event or activity.
Once you’ve identified and accepted how you feel, ask yourself what else the emotion could mean or how else you could interpret it in a more positive light.
As a runner on Yale’s track team, Farr says he found this useful when dealing with nerves before his races. Instead of seeing his nervousness as a bad thing, he saw it as a helpful emotion that sharpened his focus and prepared him to perform at his best.
Another example Santos points to in the class: If you’re upset because you got a bad grade or performed poorly in a work task, reframe it as a learning experience that will help you do better next time.
5. RAIN on Your Emotions
Another way to cope with challenging emotions is to learn how to regulate them. RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture) is one strategy that’s stuck with Farr. The technique, popularized by Tara Brach, PhD, teaches you to first recognize the emotion you want to resolve: “I’m sad,” or “I’m stressed.” Then allow it to be as it is.
The next step in RAIN, Santos teaches, is to investigate the emotion with interest and care, noticing how the feeling manifests in your body. Are your shoulders tense? Is your heart racing?
“Negative emotions are super important. We need to listen to and learn from them,” Santos says.
Farr realized, after taking the course, that his tendency to want to stop feeling a negative emotion often made him feel worse.
Farr says using the RAIN strategy helps him most when he is faced with multiple stressors or negative emotions at once, such as anxiety surrounding an exam, frustration about a track injury, and uncertainty about postgraduate plans.
“The ‘recognize’ step of RAIN helps me disentangle my emotions, allowing me to identify not only what I am feeling, but why I am feeling it,” he says. “In doing so, I’m better able to constructively engage with my emotions rather than simply react to them.”
The method has also helped him feel less isolated. “RAIN reminds me that these experiences are simply a universal part of being human,” he says.
6. Happiness Takes Time and Effort
Unlike your height or eye color, happiness isn’t a fixed trait inherited from your parents.
Research shows that genetic differences account for 30 to 50 percent of variability in happiness, so a substantial portion of your own happiness may depend on the actions you take to improve your well-being.
Santos says she hopes people leave her course with tools they can use to be happier — if they’re willing to put in the effort.
“We sometimes think that ‘knowing is half the battle,’ but that’s not going to affect how you feel unless you put those strategies into practice consistently,” she says. She likens it to exercise, saying, “It’s one thing to read about HIIT workouts, but if you don’t go to the gym, nothing will change about your body.”
For his part, Farr says he feels more in control of his happiness after taking the course. “I would say I’m happier, and I feel equipped to improve my happiness even more,” he says. “But it also takes effort and time.”
The Takeaway
- The Science of Well-Being is a popular Yale University course in which Dr. Laurie Santos teaches about the science of happiness. A version of the course is also available for free online.
- The course dispels many myths about happiness, including that things like lots of money or accolades will make us happy.
- It also teaches strategies for emotional regulation, including how to change your perceptions of your emotions and how to learn from negative emotions.
- While part of happiness is a stable trait, it’s also a skill you can learn, and it takes consistent effort and time to develop.
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