Laurie Santos on the Science Behind Teacher Well-Being

Teaching is often referred to as a “calling”—but for many educators, it feels more like an endurance test. For decades, the demands of the job have expanded in every direction: longer hours, larger class sizes, wider academic gaps to close, and growing pressure to serve as de facto counselors and caregivers. It’s a recipe that can leave even the most passionate educators feeling drained. 

The kicker? The instincts teachers have about what will help bring relief are often wrong—just as they are for most people. This is through no fault of their own, explains cognitive scientist and Yale professor Laurie Santos, one of the world’s leading researchers on well-being and happiness: “Our mind is kind of lying to us,” she says. “One of the most annoying features of the mind is the fact that we all have these intuitions about the kinds of things we should be doing to feel better. But the research shows that many of those intuitions are just incorrect.” 

The question of how to support and sustain teacher well-being is a cause close to Santos’s own heart. She’s felt firsthand the strain of working in education, and acknowledges that neither platitudes around “choosing joy” nor empty calls for self-care are likely to make a meaningful impact. Instead, she advocates for larger structural changes in schools and districts rooted in teacher feedback, alongside smaller, evidence-based tools educators can use daily to reclaim a sense of balance.

During her time as a Head of College and psychology professor at Yale, Santos developed Psychology and the Good Life, a course aimed at “sharing what my field of psychological science has taught us about how to live a better life.” The class became Yale’s most popular ever, enrolling nearly a quarter of the undergraduate population. Beyond Yale, her Coursera course, The Science of Well-Being, has enrolled over four million people, and her podcast The Happiness Lab, which explores new research while challenging misconceptions about happiness, has been downloaded more than 35 million times. 

I recently sat down with Santos to talk about what school leaders can do to better protect teacher well-being, what educators can get wrong about the pursuit of happiness, and the evidence-based strategies that can help them navigate the daily challenges of the job.

TUTT: What are some of the big misconceptions about happiness and well-being that you find yourself debunking over and over?

SANTOS: A really big one is that more money would make you happy. If you're not making enough to make ends meet, yes, more money will make you happier. But the impact of money on happiness seems to level off much earlier than we think. For most people, doubling or tripling your income isn't going to help as much when it comes to feeling happier.

Another big misconception is that happiness is all about our circumstances. If I could get a promotion, if I had the perfect relationship, I'd feel better. And again, if you're in really dire circumstances, that's true. But for most of us, our circumstances aren't going to move the needle as much as we’d expect. Really, the action seems to come from changing our behaviors and mindsets.

Finally, there’s this idea that happiness means being happy all the time. Anxiety, sadness, frustration, overwhelm: We need to think of these emotions as signals; an alert system telling us changes need to be made. Those emotions in and of themselves aren't bad. 

TUTT: For a lot of teachers, that signal is often feelings of burnout. In the past, you've spoken about your experiences with burnout as a college professor. What symptoms did you experience?

SANTOS: One is emotional exhaustion: This sense that adding even one more thing onto your plate feels like it's going to break you. 

Another symptom is personal ineffectiveness: the idea that even if you did your job perfectly it wouldn't be good enough, or there are these structural things preventing you from really doing what you want to do. Running a residential college, especially during COVID, felt like no matter how much time I put in or how hard I tried to make it work, it would still be crappy. It wasn’t what I hoped a student's college experience would be. 

The big one for me though—and the breaking point—was symptom number three, depersonalization. This real sense of cynicism. When people, even the ones you’re supposed to be taking care of, like students, get on your every last nerve.

TUTT: You’ve noted that toxic productivity can also undermine teachers’ well-being. What does that look like?

SANTOS: Often it shows up in this desire for more: more testing, more extracurriculars, more students, more on your workload. Part of that is structural—school departments asking more and more of teachers—but sometimes the toxic productivity comes from us. 

Maybe I feel like I'm not doing enough. I have to make the lesson plans perfect. I have to be more involved. I think that can really lead to burnout because we're placing a set of expectations on ourselves that are too high. 

TUTT: What steps can leaders be taking to support teachers through all of this?

SANTOS: We're not going to have great teaching or live up to the standards that we want in our educational institutions unless we're protecting teacher mental health and worrying about burnout. This matters for performance reasons, but it's also true for the bottom line. School systems are worried about money. Teacher turnover, time off, and sick days cost a lot of money. But there's so much evidence that focusing on mental health and happiness can protect against that. 

How are staff members doing? What is burnout really like? Ask them what they need. That answer might be more support in the classroom, more resources, more time off, but you're not going to know what's going to move the needle unless you ask.

TUTT: You’ve said that taking a sabbatical from teaching for a year helped you re-orient yourself and combat burnout. But I imagine a lot of teachers reading this might be thinking, “I don’t have that option.” What can change look like for them?

SANTOS: Things often don't get better if you just do a bunch of yoga and have a few bubble baths. Usually you have to make a serious change vis-a-vis your interaction with your work. That could be taking some time off, or restructuring your work requirements. 

It’s undoubtedly true that burnout and unhappiness can come from having a workload that’s just far too large for our bandwidth. But sometimes, that workload isn’t coming from our bosses or our school departments. Sometimes it's coming from our own expectations. Balance can often come from looking at your own expectations about how much you think you need to do, and trying to take some stuff off your plate.

TUTT: In your course, you speak to students about the importance of valuing time over money. Can you unpack the psychology behind that?

SANTOS: We often think about affluence when it comes to money, but not time, and social scientists are learning that it's really important. Time affluence is the subjective sense that you have some free time. Not the objective amount of free time you have, but the sense that you have time to do what you need to do. 

The opposite is what many teachers feel. Time famine: You're literally starving for time. Studies show that time famine works a lot like real bodily famine, where you're increasing inflammation, stress, and you're really hurting your well-being. In fact, one study by Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans found that if you self-report being time-famished, that's as bad a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. The work on time affluence shows we need to prioritize the sense that we have some free time.

TUTT: I have a few examples of some real teacher wellness strategies that I want to get your thoughts on. Educator Daniel S. suggests giving yourself “one small thing each day that's just for you,” like eating your lunch without grading. He says these tiny pockets of “breathing room” help keep him from running on fumes.

SANTOS: I love this idea of breathing room. You’re allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to reset, which is the opposite of our fight or flight system. The parasympathetic system is our rest and digest. Super powerful. 

But you're also asking yourself what you need, which is one of the questions I like to ask when I'm engaging in a self-compassion practice: "What do I know about what I need right now?" or “Do I have any glimpses of something I might need?” If you ask these questions, you might actually get those tiny glimpses. Perhaps it's a break; five minutes of quiet. One of the things we know from the research is that happiness is all about small baby steps and practice. Are you exercising a little bit more? Getting some social connection? Just like we rewire other kinds of things, we can rewire our happiness through our behaviors and our mindset shifts.

When we think about happiness, we often think it's all about these big changes. But it can be two minutes in the car, or a moment of crunching through those carrots in your lunch bag. These are tiny little things we can give ourselves. And if we're giving ourselves the right things—what we really need in that moment—it can have a huge impact.

TUTT: Here’s another wellness strategy: High school teacher Marcus Luther writes down one daily win in his calendar before leaving his classroom. 

SANTOS: We naturally have what psychologists call a negativity bias. Teachers often notice all the bad things: When the lesson plan didn't go right, the strange thing a student said to you. It takes some work to notice the good. So this practice of scribbling down one win really just comes straight out of the work on positive psychology showing the power of noticing blessings.

The sad thing is there are many wonderful things that happen in the classroom, but that's not what gets our attention. This practice causes you to notice them. And it's both beneficial when you notice those individual things and train your attention. If you do this practice every day, that means you're on the lookout for the good stuff. You're shaping the bias that you're bringing by paying attention to what's happening during your day, and you're doing that in a really positive way.

TUTT: Last one: Teacher Donna Paul has a daily two-minute routine where she “talks to her stress” with a quick written back-and-forth conversation about what's weighing on her. This gives the stress a chance to “say what it needs to say,” and when she reads her words back, she often experiences some clarity.

SANTOS: This reminds me of researcher Kristin Neff at UT Austin, who studies self-compassion and suggests a self-compassion practice that consists of asking yourself, "What is going on?" 

The answer could be: I'm really stressed right now. I'm pissed about this decision that was made at my school. I got this email that's making me feel frantic. You can’t show yourself compassion without first naming and understanding what’s going on. Taking the time to mindfully acknowledge it can be incredibly powerful.

Another thing this practice does is help you express exactly what the stress is telling you. This is similar to a technique researchers call affect labeling. You're not just saying "There's a lot going on"—you're labeling specific emotions, which helps you identify what you need. 

If you're feeling overwhelmed, then the answer for how to get help looks different than if you're feeling sad about something. Working through what your stress is telling you can be essential because then you understand what you need to address it.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.