Rewirements
Happiness is a practice you install, not a circumstance you wait for.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Rewirements are deliberate practices that rewire your happiness, based on the premise that well-being is significantly more malleable than we assume. Santos groups them into three flavors: changing behaviors (more free time, social connection, savoring), changing thought patterns (gratitude, presence, less self-beating), and changing emotions (seeking positive states, accepting negative ones). Because our minds don't lead us toward these naturally, they must be scheduled and treated as recurring homework. The evidence shows that people who consistently engage in rewirements report significantly higher happiness.
Origin
Santos built the framework for her Yale course 'Psychology and the Good Life' — enrolled by one in four Yale students — after living on campus as a head of college and witnessing a student mental-health crisis up close. She assigns rewirements as graded homework across the semester.
Core principles
- 01Happiness is malleable — it is not fixed by circumstance, money, or genetics.
- 02Deliberate practices, done repeatedly, move your baseline happiness.
- 03The levers fall into three categories: behaviors, thought patterns, and emotions.
- 04Treat these like homework — scheduled and recurring, not one-off inspiration.
How to run it
- 1
Accept that happiness is rewireable
Reject the belief that your happiness is fixed by money, circumstances, or genetics. The studies show you can move it with a little work.
Pro tip Reframe happiness as a skill you train, like fitness.
- 2
Choose a behavior rewirement
Add a concrete action: carve out free time, initiate social connection, or take time to notice and savor good things.
- 3
Choose a thought-pattern rewirement
Shift how you think: practice gratitude, build in moments of presence, and stop the habit of beating yourself up.
- 4
Choose an emotion rewirement
Seek out more positive emotions and practice accepting and regulating negative situations instead of resisting them.
Watch out Don't chase positive emotion so hard that you treat all discomfort as failure.
- 5
Schedule and repeat
Put each rewirement into your calendar as a recurring commitment and run it over a long enough window to feel the effect.
Pro tip Advance scheduling is what turns intention into behavior for type-A people.
In the wild
Santos put rewirements directly into the syllabus of her Yale course, assigning students homework rewirement activities to complete throughout the semester rather than just teaching the theory.
→ Students practicing the rewirements over the term reported feeling significantly happier.
Common mistakes
Treating knowledge as the finish line
Knowing the rewirements does nothing; only doing them repeatedly moves happiness.
Relying on motivation instead of scheduling
The mind won't lead you to these practices naturally, so leaving them unscheduled means they never happen.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who intellectually knows well-being strategies but doesn't practice them consistently.
Not ideal for
People seeking a single one-time fix rather than an ongoing practice.
From the transcript
“Rewirements are just practices that we can do to rewire our happiness.”
“They tend to kind of have three different flavors... changing your behaviors... changing our thought patterns... and then finally there are rewirements that have to…”
From the episode
Dr. Laurie Santos: How to Break Free from the Mental Traps Stealing Your Happiness
Dr. Laurie Santos