Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos taught Psychology and the Good Life, the most popular course ever offered at Yale, to 1,200 students in spring 2018. The class had to be moved to Woosley Hall to accommodate the students.
Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos taught Psychology and the Good Life, the most popular course ever offered at Yale, to 1,200 students in spring 2018. The class had to be moved to Woosley Hall to accommodate the students.
Laurie Santos is a psychology professor at Yale who teaches about the science of happiness.
NEW HAVEN — Laurie Santos could see it coming, the potential for burnout even while loving her work.
As a psychology professor at Yale University, famous for teaching the most popular course in Yale history, “Psychology and the Good Life,” she knew the signs. So Santos, who also is head of Silliman College and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast, is taking a year’s leave from Yale.
“One of the things that really mattered to me a lot is that I didn’t want to just be the person telling people about these strategies. I wanted to embody them. I really did want to practice what I preach, because otherwise, why would you listen to me?”
Santos began her 10-year term as head of Silliman in 2016. She said she knew if she did not take a break, “I would not be listening to the emotional signs I was experiencing and taking appropriate action to take care of myself.”
Burnout in the workplace is rising as the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its two-year mark, but it was an issue before then. According to an Indeed survey, 52 percent of employees said in 2021 they are more burned out than a year earlier, up from 43 percent in 2020.
Santos breaks down burnout into three components. “One is a sort of emotional exhaustion,” she said. “You’re really just kind of emotionally tired and exhausted all the time.” Getting more sleep won’t solve it, she said.
Another symptom is “a feeling of personal ineffectiveness,” she said. “You just feel like you’re pushing against the tide or you remain really not so optimistic that what you’re doing is working.”
The third element is more of a social symptom, Santos said, a kind of cynicism in which we see bad intentions on the part of co-workers, in which “you think the people in the system are out to get you.” Researchers call this depersonalization, and it can come across as feeling annoyed with colleagues, or even family members, for minor reasons.
There is a psychological tool called the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which consists of a series of questions, such as, “Working with people the whole day is stressful for me” and “I feel tired as soon as I get up in the morning and see a new working day stretched out in front of me.”
While the problem has been most publicized during COVID among first responders and hospital staff who have had to face more sick patients than usual, it’s true in many industries.
Santos said she can’t point to any studies that show the pandemic has increased burnout, but said, “I think if you think of the features of burnout, there’s reason to suspect that the pandemic didn’t help. Depersonalization, being cynical about your colleagues, gets easier if you’re only interacting with them through screens and emails. If you don’t have the chitchat at the watercooler that builds trust, it’s easier for these things” to increase.
Santos said it may seem that those likely to burn out are “low-paid workers who are really at the bottom of some work totem pole or the bottom of the hierarchy.” But that’s not the case, she said.
“If you look at the numbers in the Great Resignation, it’s people in their late 30s and early 40s, it’s people in midcareer stages who are often in some ways almost at the top of their game [who] are the ones who are experiencing burnout,” she said. “That’s telling and speaks to the fact that this shouldn’t just be solved at the individual level.”
Santos said employers need to be concerned about the problem. “I think we need to think structurally about how we make workplaces less likely to do this to people,” she said. “It’s in employers’ best interest to notice that people are being burnt out. It’s in managers’ best interest.”
The Maslach inventory could be given to employees “and if people score highly, take action to give people back a sense of personal accomplishment, efficacy, to build more trust and less cynicism.”
Santos’ leave will begin July 1 and end in fall 2023, but she’ll come back for 2023 commencement. “I love my kids. I don’t want to miss their graduation,” she said. “I’ve grown up with them.”
Santos had planned her leave for the 2020-21 academic year, but when COVID hit, she knew she had to stay for her 500 Silliman residents. “They’re amazing; I adore my students,” Santos said. “They’re the most curious, interesting, talented humans on the planet. It’s such a privilege to be their head of college. But running a college like that during COVID was challenging.”
Affectionately known as “HoC Santos,” she said being head of college has been “an enormous privilege.”
“This is the thing about burnout, is that when you’re experiencing it, even things about your job that you used to like before start to become exhausting, annoying,” she said. “So that might be a symptom for people to pay attention to: Even the parts that you liked before are no longer feeling fun. That’s a good sign.”
Santos became nationally famous when she first offered “Psychology and the Good Life” in 2018, lecturing in Woolsey Hall in order to fit the 1,200 students who enrolled. She’s teaching it a second time this semester, with the enrollment capped at 500. There was a waitlist of 600.
“There was a sense when I first taught it, I didn’t need to immediately teach it again because a quarter of the entire campus took it,” she said. “And then we had COVID.” But those who couldn’t get into the class can watch it livestreamed. A version, “The Science of Well-Being,” is also available for free to anyone on Coursera, the online course platform.
Silliman College, one of the few residential colleges where first-year students live rather than on Old Campus, is also home to the Good Life Center, Yale’s first wellness center, which Santos founded. She is known as an approachable, involved head of college.
“Honestly, I would say she is the best head of college on campus,” said junior Jonathan Oates of Knoxville, Tenn., one of two Silliman co-presidents. “In a really unique way she really cares not only about the health and well-being of students” but goes “out of her way to know us on a personal level.”
Every Monday at 10 p.m., “she takes an hour or more of her time to just sit and chat with 20 or 30 students about what they want to have happen in the college” and helps to make that happen.
Oates said he’s disappointed she won’t be around during his senior year, but said, “I understand it’s time to take a break and I know she was working really hard during the pandemic.” Arielle Baskin-Sommers, an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry, will be acting head.
Shandra Ahsan, a sophomore from Amarillo, Texas, said Santos kept in touch last year when “everything was online the entire year and Yale was dead.”
“She made a very concerted effort to try to know her students as best as she could,” Ahsan, a biomedical engineering student, said. “She made sure to keep in touch even when I was at home and not on campus.”
She said Santos “was super on top of everything, never cutting corners on any Silliman tradition” and even introduced a winter wonderland festival “that was really beautiful and thought out.”
“I’m really glad she’s taking the time to sort things out because there’s a lot of compassion you have to show to yourself,” Ahsan said.
Santos said it’s important to see the signs of burnout looming. “I think as individuals we need to notice when these things are happening, like a hand on a hot stove that’s hurting, and react as though your hand is on a hot stove, and really think about [are] there ways to scale back.” While not everyone can take a leave from work, she said it can help to take up a new hobby or interest “to take your attention off of work just so you can kind of build your identity in something that’s different than burnout.”
Another issue for people is what Santos calls “time famine,” the subjective feeling that you have no time to yourself. Meetings and constant emails and texts all add to this. The opposite, time affluence, is also subjective. Santos once canceled a class so her students would experience the ability to spend their time as they wish. One student told her it was her first free hour at Yale.
“The key note that I like to emphasize with my students is that time affluence isn’t the objective amount of free time,” she said. “It’s your subjective sense that you have some. … Sometimes a half-hour canceled meeting can make you feel like you have more time in the world. It’s only 30 minutes but … for me it’s like, ‘oh, my God, I can breathe, I can learn a new language, I can go skiing.’ The whole world opens up.”
Santos admitted, “If there’s one thing I fail at the most from all the things I prescribe to other people it’s time famine, and it’s not protecting my time. I do amazing things. I have amazing students. I teach an awesome class. I love working on my podcast. But when you add up all those jobs together, there’s a lot of time.”
It’s important to build in free time, Santos said. “Time famine is never great, but there are strategies you can use,” she said. “So there’s times when you can feel really busy, but you don’t feel time famished. And I think you just need to feel like at the end of the day I have a break or I have a vacation coming up or … just like a meeting got canceled and you get the extra half-hour. It’s the subjective sense of how much time you feel like you have open. That’s what matters.”
It’s also important to “give yourself rest,” Santos said. “And I think if you feel like you’re at work all the time, you can’t be in full rest mode. So I think putting screens away, doing that stuff can allow you to feel real rest.” Meditation also helps, she said.
“I think you need techniques to feel like you can be empathic and connect with people again,” Santos said. “And that involves making sure you connect with people you care about.”
During her year off, Santos plans to get back to one of the topics in her podcast: having fun. In one episode, she went surfing, or tried to. “I did not get up on the board, but it was still just beautiful and fun,” she said. “And I feel like I learned a lot. It’s like when you think about time, it’s like that hour is so much more enmeshed in my time than any other hour for the past month.”
[email protected]; 203-680-9382
Ed Stannard is a reporter whose beats include Yale University, religion, transportation, medicine, science and the environment. He grew up in the New Haven area and has lived there most of his life. He received his journalism degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and earned a master’s degree in religious studies from Sacred Heart University. He has been an editor at the New Haven Register and at the Episcopal Church’s national newspaper.
He loves the arts, travel and reading.
