The Science of Well-Being

Coursera Course delivered by Prof. Laurie Santos from Yale University

Introduction
Amplifying your strengths

Misconceptions about happiness

“Good” job
Money
Awesome stuff, true love, perfect body and good grades
Awesome stuff
True love
Perfect face or body
Good grades
In summary...

Why our expectations are so bad

Our mind’s strong intuitions are normatively incorrect
Our minds don’t think in terms of absolutes
Our reference points
Ourselves
Others
Hedonic Adaptation: Our minds are built to get used to stuff
Impact Bias: We don’t realise that our minds are built to get used to stuff

How can we overcome our biases?

Hedonic adaptation and rethinking “awesome stuff”
Thwart hedonic adaptation in other areas
Savouring
Negative visualisation
Make this day your last
Gratitude
Reset your reference points
Concretely re-experiencing
Concretely observing
Avoid social comparisons
Interrupt your consumption
Increase your variety

What stuff really increases happiness

Wanting the right parts of the tings we already do want
A “good” job
Jobs that activate and use your signature strengths
Jobs that give us flow
“Good” grades
Wanting better stuff that we don’t want yet
 Kindness to others

Putting strategies into practice

“Rewirements”
Gratitude
Savouring
Kindness
Social connection
Exercise
Sleep
Meditation
Gratitude letter/visit

Resources
Books
Talks
Introduction
This course is about synthesising work in positive psychology and the science of behaviour change. Most
popular class ever taught at Yale.
ReWi app developed to track practices that science tells us increase happiness and wellbeing.
Science vs practice - knowing information/science isn’t enough, you have to put it into practice and change
habits to make it stick!
Science is giving us lots of new insights into what actually increases our wellbeing. Governments are now
starting to “nudge” us into making some of these decisions, and these programmes seem to be working!
Antidepressant use is going up, studies show we aren’t getting happier, and some groups are getting more
unhappy.
You don’t need to have all the answers in order to help others increase their wellbeing - you don’t need to
be some kind of wellbeing guru. Go on the journey with other people.

GI Joe Fallacy: Mistaken idea that knowing is half the battle. This isn’t true. Even when we know
something, it doesn’t actually change our behaviour or how we see things.

Quantifying Happiness
My Authentic Happiness Inventory score was 2.5 out of 5.
My PERMA Profilers score was:

Signature Strengths
Identified through a test on the ​VIA website​. Keep track of your top 4 strengths, and aim to amplify them.
Try to use your strengths at least once per day for a week. Suggestions on ways to use each strength
found ​here​ and ​here​.

My top character strength is prudence.

Amplifying your strengths
An intervention shown to be effective is ​using a top strength in a new way ​every​ day (for a week)​. Below
are ideas for each of my four areas of strength:
Extra reading:
● Read more about why ​Character Strengths are important from the VIA Website
● Read more about ​the main research on Character Strengths from this book
● Read more about ​the research on the power of using your Character Strengths
● Read about ​how your Character Strengths can improve your relationships
Misconceptions about happiness
Things we think will make us happy but don’t:

“Good” job
E.g. a high-paying job with high status
What counts to people as “enough money” from a job for them to be satisfied is like a visual illusion. What
we think we need jumps up every time we earn more money. Research (Lyubomirsky) shows that people
earning USD30k think they need 50k to be happy. People earning USD100k think they need 250k to be
satisfied with their income.

Money
LOTS of data on this from across many decades!
There is only a very weak correlation between income and life satisfaction. This is based on global data.
When we look at LDCs vs MDCs, LDCs have a much stronger correlation, presumably because basic
needs aren’t met at the lowest incomes. MDCs have only a weak correlation. For most of us, income
increases don’t really matter.
Historical comparisons also show that as incomes and access to modern technology and indoor amenities
like hot indoor showers and indoor toilets hasn’t increased happiness. Comparison between now and the
1940s.
David Myers, ​The American Paradox​: modern generations are growing up with more affluence, but lower
happiness and a greater risk of depression and social pathology compared to previous generations.
Kahneman & Deaton are psychologists and economists who have won the Nobel Prize in Economics: is
there a threshold beyond which more income doesn’t increase happiness. Emotional wellbeing rises with
income, but this levels off after USD75k. Therefore USD75k is a plausible number at which income cannot
further increase happiness.
This study showed that although people aren’t actually happier by any quantitative measure (reports of
sadness, level of smiling, happiness and daily enjoyment, and stress levels), they ​believed​ that their life
was better because they had higher income.
As you go up salary bands, you tend to associate with people in that band. This social comparison skews
our perception, making us feel that however much money we earn isn’t enough. This is especially
problematic with social media: people only share the highlights, worsening our social comparisons.

Awesome stuff, true love, perfect body and good grades

Awesome stuff
“If only I had ___, I would be so happy!”
Mentioned in songs (​cars​, ​drinks​), social media, advertising, etc.
Already we know people in the 40s who didn’t have all the tech and amenities we do weren’t any less
happy.
Materialism: Thinking about things we want and striving to get it actually seems to make us worse off than
we would be at baseline.
Nickerson ​et al.​ (2003) looked at people’s materialist attitudes in 1976 and again 20 years later. People
who were materialistic in 1976 had lower life satisfaction 20 years later compared to the non-materialists.
They also has more mental health disorders.
So awesome stuff doesn’t make us happy, and seeking it out may actually make us ​less​ happy.
Materialism presents through:
1. Economy that relies on consumerism
2. Social media, advertising and social comparisons. Data suggest that if we use social media less,
then we would be less depressed.
MIndfulness can help: we can be be with the desire for buying something new, we can sit with it and notice
that it is there, but it isn’t getting worse. We can be mindful of how our body feels when we desire
something. We can also be mindful when we do acquire something: ​Is this really making me that much
happier?

True love
Lucas ​et al.​ (2003) Married people are happier in the first one or two years of marriage. But after that,
married people and unmarried people are just as happy. Other studies have back this up.

Perfect face or body

Jackson ​et al.​ (2014) People in a weight-loss programme who lose weight may actually have a much higher
depression level - losing weight doesn’t make us happy like we might think it does.
Von Soest ​et al.​ (2011) People getting cosmetic surgery compared with people who didn’t: did the people
who got cosmetic surgery have a change in happiness? People who would go on to get the surgery tended
to have a lower baseline level of happiness to start off with, much higher including suicidal ideation, conduct
problems and alcohol use, and lower happiness with physical appreciation. After the surgery, all of these
measures for ​worse​ for these people: surgery didn’t “fix” their problems, in fact their problems got worse.

Good grades
Levine ​et al.​ (2012) found that people predict strong positive and negative reactions to their grades, but in
reality they are all around the 6 out of 9 mark, no matter what the grade is.

In summary...
Miswanting​ (T. Wilson & D. Gilbert): The act of being mistaken about what and how much you will like
something in the future.

People often react to information above by

explaining it in one of the following ways:
1. Happiness is genetically predetermined.
2. Aside from the happiness factors listed
above, there are other events throughout
our days (both good and bad) that return us
the our baseline level of happiness -
regression to the mean.

S. Lyubomirsky in ​The How of Happiness​ shows

that genes and circumstances don’t matter as
much as we think.
Genetics does matter a fair bit: glass half full vs glass half empty.
Life circumstances (good and bad) are the smallest component
Actions/intentions/habits play a big role and is under our control!

We can work hard to be happier. The problem is that we are working on the wrong things! We have to pick
the right goals.

People may think that they are outliers, e.g. that negative things affect them worse than they would affect
someone else. Data shows that this is false - outliers do occur, but it is still the case that good and bad
situations don’t affect us as badly as we think they will.
Why our expectations are so bad
Why does miswanting occur?​ Lots of annoying features of our mind mess us up, e.g. intuition. We use
vision as a metaphor for each of these features.

Our mind’s strong intuitions are normatively incorrect

Sometimes our mind delivers us stuff that are factually incorrect. We often have incredibly strong intuitions
about our wellbeing that actually aren’t true. Even really strong, extreme intuitions aren’t as true as we
believe they are.
Most of the goals we think will make us happy don’t make us anywhere near as happy as we think they will.

Our minds don’t think in terms of absolutes

We constantly judge things in our lives relative to our reference points (a salient but often irrelevant
standard). E.g. in the image below, the two orange circles are in absolute terms the same size, but we don’t
see them that way due to the (blue circle) reference points that surround them.

We are constantly judging relative to other things out there in our world. Reference points also mess up our
happiness judgments.

Medvec ​et al.​ (1995): Reference points mess up happiness. Michael Phelps winning a gold medal is one
point of happiness. The person next to him on the podium, who has won a silver, i much less happy,
because he didn’t get gold. The bronze medal winner is happier because their reference point is not getting
a medal at all, so they are just happy to be there.
They all have different reference points.

Medvec analysed video footage of the Olympics, and

the happiness rating is consistently higher for bronze
medal winners compared to silver medallists.

Is this true for “regular” people? What we think of that

makes us happy (good job, beauty, etc.) are all
compared to reference points.
Our reference points

Ourselves
E.g. what we used to earn compared to now. This means we are never satisfied, we always want more than
we used to have, no matter how absolutely high our income may actually have been. Thus our idea of a
“good income” goes up with our current income: van Praat & Frijters (1999) found that for every $1 your
income goes up by, your “required income” that desire goes by by $1.40. Thus we are constantly below our
own reference points.

Others
I.e. social comparison, evaluating our own salary/status/possessions/abilities relative to those of other
people. If we are surrounded by coworkers who are making more than us, then we like our job less, even if
we are ourselves making a good income. People actually choose to earn less so long as others are earning
less as well - they are not looking at the absolute amount, they are looking at the relative amount.

Therefore, when people are unemployed at the same time as lots of others are unemployed, then their
unemployment has less of an impact on their wellbeing. There is a much greater wellbeing impact when
one is unemployed and lots of others aren’t unemployed.

Our minds don’t use “reasonable” social reference points; we compare ourselves against Beyonce and the
Real Housewives. People who watch more TV also have a higher estimate of other people’s wealth
(including in the world directly around them), and they also go down in their estimate of their own wealth
(O’Guinn & Schrum, 1997). As a result, they spent more money trying to keep up with the Joneses: for
each extra hour of TV watching people do per week, they spend an extra $4 a week in household spending
(Schor, 1999). We don’t seem to factor in how famous the person is, or how they got their income (e.g.
Beyonce), we still compare ourselves to them.
Kuhn ​et al.​ (2011) looked at who we try to keep up
with: if you live close to someone who has a new,
awesome car in their garage (due to winning the
lottery), then you are more likely to buy a new car. This
likelihood goes up the closer you live to the lottery
winner.

Students are also shown to be very spiteful when

others get higher grades.

Kenrick ​et al.​ (1993) looked at women’s mood before

and after looking at pictures of models. Before looking
at models, the average was 2.36 out of 4 for mood.
Afterwards their mood was 2.07 out of 4. Kenrick ​et al.
(1989) also found a similar relationship when looking
at how people rated their partner’s attractiveness before and after looking at models.

Social media presents us with a whole new set of reference points. ​Vogel ​et al.​ (2014)​ looked at the
correlation between facebook use and self-esteem, and the direction of people’s comparisons (downwards
or upwards). High negative correlation between facebook use and self-esteem. Experimental intervention
performed to determine causation, using a fake facebook feed: upward comparisons to people who seem to
have a better life, or downward comparisons to people who seem to have a worse life. Results:
● Can’t make comparisons in how self-esteem changed, as there was no “before” data or control
group
● When making a downward comparison, wellbeing was rated 3.83 out of 5
● When making an upward comparison, wellbeing was rated at 3.51 out of 5
● Upward comparisons were therefore worse for wellbeing.
● Target vs self rating of wellbeing: when looking at upward comparisons, people felt the target was
much better off than them in terms of wellbeing
If you want to do one thing to make you happier: delete social media. At least use social media less! Or at
least notice when something has been photoshopped/filtered or that people are only showing the best stuff.
Can also change comparison reference point by not just following glamorous successful people, and by
remembering that there are many people out there who are worse off: gratitude for the many little things we
have in life.

Information we get from social media isn’t an accurate yardstick for howwe should be living our own lives, in
the same way that fashion magazines aren’t a good yardstick. No one is giving an accurate reflection of
what their life is like, they are all making their life look better than it is. It’s like the top of the success
iceberg… ​iceberg is a great metaphor for social media​.

Hedonic Adaptation: Our minds are built to get used to stuff

Hedonic adaptation​ = process of becoming accustomed to a positive or negative stimulus such that the
emotional effects of the stimulus are attenuated over time. I.e. the emotional effects you get don’t work as
well over time. Awesome things aren’t as awesome anymore, after a while.

All the supposedly awesome things (e.g. possessions or money) tend to stick around, so we get used to
them and they become the new normal. This resets our reference point for the future.

Di Tella ​et al.​ (2010) found salary increases over 20 years didn’t have an impact on happiness.

Lottery winners vs control group: they have almost the same happiness level one year after winning the
lottery.

Daniel Gilbert, ​Stumbling On Happiness​: wonderful thing’s wonderfulness wanes with repetition.

Impact Bias: We don’t realise that our minds are built to get used to stuff
Impact bias​ = we tend to overestimate the emotional impact of things, both in terms of intensity and
duration.

Impact bias is worse for negative things: we tend to assume that the negative feelings are going to be far
worse than they actually are. E.g. for when people find out they are HIV-positive, the actual experience isn’t
as bad as people predict it will be.
This is true even when we repeatedly experience something: we repeatedly predict that a negative
experience will feel worse than it actually does.

Dan Gilbert on ​why​ we are so bad at predicting how we will feel:

1. Focalism, i.e. the tendency to think just about one event and forget about everything else that will
also happen. So don’t just think about one event, think about everything that will happen around it
too.
2. Immune neglect, i.e. unawareness of our “psychological immune system”. We actually have a lot
more resilience than we realise.

This all leads us to mispredict our own potential. Very sad!

How can we overcome our biases?
Miswanting occurs because of all the annoying features covered
above.
Overcoming cognitive biases takes effort: we have to do it
intentionally​ because our brains are naturally trying to get us to do
something else.

Remember the pie chart from Lyubomirsky: our actions can

significantly affect our overall happiness levels. With effort and
practice, we can reset our habits by practising intentional, effortful
activities.

Hedonic adaptation and rethinking “awesome stuff”

Stuff that we buy is one of the worst source of hedonic adaptation, as it stays around us and we get used to
it almost immediately.

Don’t invest in “stuff” in the first place!

It doesn’t make us as happy as we think, because we get used to it. This is true for houses, cars, etc. We
think a new car is great because it will last a long time, but in reality this is one of its worst features from a
happiness point of view; it will stick around longer t disappoint you! (Dan Gilbert)

Instead invest in experiences. Holidays, art galleries, concerts, eating out. We don’t have the time to adapt
to these as they don’t stick around! Our brains tell us that we should be investing in things that last us long
(cars, houses) because these are “good things to have”, but the reality is that short experiences will keep
us happier for longer.

Research into people who invest in experiences vs those who invest in material possessions:
● Van Boven & Gilovich (2003)
○ Something you bought to make you happy that’s >$100, how happy does it make you now?
○ Results:

● Then looked at lower income people who had less stuff, to see if this made a difference. Results in
table below show that experiences always lead to higher happiness levels than material
possessions no matter the income level, but this effect is even greater at high income levels.
Even before an experience happens, the anticipation can have big positive impacts on our happiness.
Kumar ​et al.​ (2014) found that anticipating experiences cause more excitement and happiness, which
anticipating buying material possessions causes more feelings of impatience. People also found
anticipating experiences as more pleasant than anticipating buying new things.

Kumar ​et al.​ (2014) also conducted experience sampling through a phone app that checked in with people
on a regular basis. Really clever study to remove reporting biases! Found people thinking about upcoming
experiences are happier and more excited, less impatient. This was not true for people thinking about
upcoming purchases of things.

Pchelin & Howell (2014) people forecast that buying experiences aren't going to make us as happy as
buying things, but the opposite is in fact true.

Experiences are better than things for other reasons beyond hedonic adaptation:
● It’s more fun for other people to hear about! (Van Boven ​et al.​, 2010). People relate better to you,
leads to a better impression of a person, and people rate you as better psychologically adjusted
when you talk about experiential purchases. List of adjectives that people spontaneously talk about
after their friends have told them about an experiential or a materialistic purchase:
 ● Experiences are less susceptible to social comparison (Howell & Hill, 2009). Much easier to
compare cars than holiday, for example. Thus we are less prone to the traps of reference points.
Experiential purchases make others happier by either including them or telling them about it, too.

Thwart hedonic adaptation in other areas

Savouring
= act of stepping outside own experience to review and appreciate it. Being mindful of an experience.

Forces you to notice and enjoy experience by keeping attention on it. Start higher on hedonic adaptation
curve, takes longer to go down. Focus on experience for longer, thwarting hedonic adaptation.

Jose ​et al.​ (2012):

● Activities that enhance savouring and therefore decrease hedonic adaptation:
○ Talk to someone about how good it felt
○ Amplify experience by sharing it with others
○ Think about how lucky you are (gratitude)
○ Share it with others later by telling them
○ Showing physical expressions of energy
○ Laughing
○ Telling yourself how proud you are
○ Being absorbed by the present
● Activities that reduce savouring and therefore increase hedonic adaptation:
○ Focused on the future, not being in the moment
○ Reminding yourself it’s going to be over soon,nothing lasts forever
○ Finding another reference point and telling yourself the experience isn’t as good as you had
hoped (social comparisons)
○ Thinking about ways it could be better
 ○ Thinking it will never be this good again
○ Thinking that you don’t deserve this thing

Another way to increase savouring is taking photos of the thing you are savouring (Kurts, 2008). Don’t
focus on the future (sharing it on social media) while doing this. Instead use the photo taking to see
different aspect of experience, use camera as another lens through which to see things. Be mindful and
present.

Savour things in the past, too! (Lyubomirsky​ et al.​, 2006)

Replaying happy memories for 8 min//day for 3 days a week.
Think about event as if rewinding a videotape and playing it back.
24 minutes of doing this still had more positive emotions 4 weeks
after the intervention!

Negative visualisation
Thinking about how life would be if something good ​hadn’t​ happened (negative visualisation) increases
happiness ratings significantly compared to a control group (Koo ​et al.​, 2008). You can consider what life
would be like if you didn’t:
● Meet your spouse
● Get your current job
● Get into a particular degree or university
This breaks you out of the here and now.

Make this day your last

Pretend this day is your last. Not in terms of a terminal illness, but what if you could never do something
again, or use something again. e.g . what if you were leaving your job in two days? How would you feel?

People are happier when they think about losing something soon, because it breaks us out of our hedonic
adaptation (Kurtz, 2008). Could do the same for things like rock climbing.

Gratitude
= quality of being thankful and appreciative of the things you have.

Very powerful psychological effects, even if only done once a week. Compared to control group and a
group that focussed on negative things (hassles in their life), people who practised gratitude for a week has
an increases in their perception of their wellbeing of:
1. Their life as a whole
2. How their upcoming week will go
3. Physical symptoms of illness/pain go down
4. Better health habits, more hours of exercise
(Emmons & McCullough, 2010)
Gratitude taken to the next level involves sharing it. If you tell other people you are grateful for them and
what they do, face-to-face, then your happiness increases significantly and this affect sticks around for as
long as one month later (Seligman ​et al.,​ 2005).

This can also enhance personal relationships, e.g. marriage. Can use gratitude as an intervention to fix
marital problems, esp. when there are communication problems in a relationship. Gratitude can almost
nullify bad aspects of marriage, such as poor communication (Barton ​et al.​, 2015).

Applies to a work context, too: simple expression of thanking someone can increase their work ethic (Grant
& Gino, 2010). “I am very grateful for your hard work. We sincerely appreciate your contributions to ____.”

Reset your reference points

We are constantly comparing things, we don’t care about absolutes. The problem is that we have difficulty
controlling our reference points, and these reference points affect our happiness all the time without us
realising it.

Concretely re-experiencing
Find a way to go back and re-experience your old reference point, e.g. re-experience your old, worse job to
remind yourself that your new reference point is so much better. Go back to your old salary for a week. This
can be done literally, or you can imagine it. Then you are less likely to take things for granted.

Concretely observing
Find a reference point that’s not as good as your reference point, and concretely observe what this is like,
or imagine what it would be like to live in a different way. Or you could observe what it’s really like to have
something that you desire, and realise that it’s not as great as you imagined and/or you would still have
some of the same issues.

Avoid social comparisons

The worst kinds of reference points are other people, e.g. through social media. Strategies that can help:
● Stop technique from CBT. Tell your brain it needs to stop making the comparison when you notice it
happening. Say “Stop” firmly out loud. Catch yourself doing this.
● Practise gratitude, as it stops social comparisons. Your attention is focussed on positive things, it
kills envy.
● Be conscious of the types of social comparisons you’re letting in. Change your feed so that the
reference points in it are healthier, e.g. people with realistic body types. Don’t allow yourself to be
making too many upward social comparisons in terms of bodies, jobs, incomes, experiences.
● Delete social media. Or really limit use, and think mindfully when you are using it, then use one of
the techniques above when you catch yourself making social comparisons.
Social media can be good for savouring, e.g. Instagram pictures. This shares with other people, which is a
feature of savouring. But we are sometimes so focussed on the sharing part, that we aren’t mindfully
savouring. Also, our act of savouring can negatively affect others through their social comparisons.
Make an active choice to use social media rather than just using it when you are bored, so that you can use
social media positively and be mindful of how it is affecting you.
Social media has moved away from just sharing things about your life and towards “curating” what you
share so that it gives people a certain impression and this lends itself to social comparisons.
Interrupt your consumption
We want good things in life to continue. But if you interrupt the good times (stop it and come back to it),
then you can reset your reference point in a positive way. Also helps with hedonic adaptation.
Nelson & Mayvis (2008) found that stopping people from listening to favourite song repeatedly with breaks
in between increases enjoyment and overcomes hedonic adaptation.
Commercials also help us enjoy programmes more compared to TV programmes with no commercials
(Nelson ​et al.​, 2009).
Applies to food and just about anything else positive: split it and enjoy it in halves or quarters.
For bad things, you want to hedonically adapt to them quickly, so bunch it up and do it altogether.

Increase your variety

When you switch things up and do/try/eat different things, then we enjoy each thing more. E.g. if you eat
different flavours of ice cream, then you enjoy the taste of each one more that you would if you ate the
same flavour all the time.
This is why experiences are better than stuff, as experiences can differ and be dynamic, whereas the stuff
you buy doesn’t change.
This applies to all sorts of routines: switch up what you do with friends, on your weekend, etc.
What stuff really increases happiness
Since we have a problem with mis-wanting, what are the things we ​should​ be wanting, but we don’t know it
yet? How do we overcome our strong intuitions about what we want that are actually not helping us live
happy lives?

Wanting the right parts of the tings we already do want

A “good” job
The thing we want to get out of our job (higher salaries) aren’t actually going to give us the happiness boost
we want. So what should we want?

Jobs that activate and use your signature strengths

Character strengths = desires/dispositions/feelings that lead to human excellence. They are ubiquitous
across cultures, fulfilling, morally-valued across the world, don’t diminish others, opposite of a negative trait,
trait-like and stable over time, distinctive, not everyone has it or has it as strongly, valued by society.

Signature strengths are the character strengths that are essential to who you are. For me these are:
● Prudence
● Judgement (open-mindedness/critical thinking)
● Leadership
● Perspective (wisdom).

Seligman ​et al.​ (2005): if you put these signature strengths into action, you will experience the most
meaning in your career. Use and activate your strengths in a new and different way every day for one
week. This leads to higher happiness levels and lower reported depression levels.

As your use of your signature strengths increases at work, so too does your productivity and job
satisfaction, due to the positive emotions that you are feeling (Lavy & Littman-Ovadia, 2016).

As you use more of your signature strengths in your job, you experience more positive affect and
productivity on the job (Harzer & Ruch, 2012). Sweet spot of using 4 of your signature strengths that gives
you the highest wellbeing ratings. Therefore jobs that use more of our signature strengths and lead to
positive experiences lead us to consider our job to be our “calling”.

Jobs that give us flow

M. Csikszentmihalyi considers flow to be an optimal experience, where you are fully immersed in an
activity, lose track of time, experiencing energised focus.

The features of flow:

● Challenging, but attainable goal
● Strong focussed concentration
● Activity is intrinsically rewarding
● Feeling of serenity
● Loss of self-consciousness
● Lose track of time
 ● Lack of awareness of your physical needs
● Complete focus on activity itself

How do we achieve this? How challenging the activity is vs how much skill you have:

Seek out careers and activities that max out our skills as the right challenge level.

When are people most in flow? People report apathy and boredom when they are doing leisure activities,
but report flow states when they are working (Lefevre, 1988). Ironically, we still prefer to do leisure
activities, even though these give us more negative emotions. There’s therefore a disconnect in our beliefs
about work vs leisure. Sometimes the leisure activities we choose are more apathetic and boring that we
think. Instead choose more engaging activities that allow you to gain skill, this will lead to better outcomes
in terms of feelings.

“Good” grades
Focussing on good grades steals away our enjoyment of learning. Learning for the love of learning has
been pushed away, now we have external motivators.
1. Extrinsic motivators are external, e.g. a grade or reward.
2. Intrinsic motivators come from enjoyment, internal motivations.
Extrinsic motivators may reduce the intrinsic motivation.

External motivation (e.g. money, grades) can undermine or even kill the internal motivation that you
originally had (Deci, 1971).

Focus on grades can also undermine the growth mindset. Dweck found growth mindset happens when
people believe that they can influence their intelligence through learning. Fixed mindset that intelligence
and talent are fixed. People with a fixed mindset are more likely to focus on grades, whereas growth
mindset people do care about grades, but they believe that grades can be influenced with hard work.

People with a fixed mindset are more worried about grades, and lose confidence and drop out when they
do poorly. Those with growth mindset are focused on learning the material, and use poor performance (e.g.
grades) as a push to work even harder. People with a growth mindset had higher final grades, controlling
for other factors (Grant & Dweck, 2003). People with a fixed mindset also had a drop in intrinsic motivation
when they struggled and got lower grades, and tended to ruminate more on whether or not they were good
at a subject that they found tricky at a particular point in time.

Neuroscience evidence about how the brain reacts to bad feedback, e.g. poor grades: fixed mindset brain
waves show more attention to the right/wrong feedback, whereas people with a growth mindset brain
waves show that more attention is given to what the correct answer is, which helps with learning (Mangels
et al.,​ 2006).

You can learn to have a growth mindset! Blackwell​ et al.​ (2007) taught people about growth mindset, and
found that their grades went up following this intervention. Thus, we don’t want good grades, we want good
mindsets!

Wanting better stuff that we don’t want yet

Kindness to others
There is a connection between people who do random acts of kindness for others and overall happiness.
Happier people tend to think about doing kind things, remember the kind acts they have done, and are
doing kind acts more than unhappier people (Otake ​et al.,​ 2006). When people then tracked their acts of
kindness, their happiness score goes up; this without actually doing any extra kind acts, just tracking
existing ones.

When people do 5 acts of kindness in a ​day​, wellbeing increases substantially, whereas when people do 5
acts of kindness ​spread over a week​, wellbeing doesn’t change (Lyubomirsky ​et al​., 2005). More in a short
time is therefore better.

Dunn & Norton found that people who spent money buying something for someone else were happier than
those spending money on themselves. It didn’t matter how much money was spent ($5 or $20). This was
true across cultures and irrespective of relative wealth/income level (Atkin ​et al.​, 2008).

There are constant trade-offs between time and money: to get more of one, you need to give up some of
the other. About half of people prioritise money, and the other half prioritise time, when faced with a
trade-off situation. People who habitually prioritise time over money tend to be happier than the rest; time to
do things and spend with others makes you happier than money.

Charitable giving opportunities that allow you to see the impact that your generosity is having tend to have
greater happiness boosts.
Putting strategies into practice
“Rewirements”

Gratitude
Positive emotional state.
Recognise and appreciate what you have received. Little or big things, must really focus on them and be
specific. Imagine the person or thing that you are grateful for. Should take about 5 minutes.

According to Robert Emmons, gratitude:

1. Heals
2. Empowers
3. Energises

It is an affirmation of goodness, not perfection. It attributes this goodness to a person or some other source.
Being grateful is a way of life, a deep-routed attitude.

Increases mood, lowers stress levels, increases social connections, helps with immunity. Start by writing
things down or taking photos of what you’re grateful for. Take a moment to experience the gratitude.

Savouring
Step outside of experience. Review and appreciate.
Stay in the moment. This intensifies & lengthens positive emotions that come from doing something.
Savour one thing a day.
Techniques:
● Share experience with someone else
● Think of how lucky you are to enjoy this
● Keep souvenir or photo
● Stay in the present moment the whole time
Remember the activity when you make a note of it.

Savouring boosts our mood in the following ways:

1. Thwarts hedonic adaptation - it helps us remember the good stuff in life.
2. Thwarts mind wandering, keeping us in the moment.
3. Helps to increase gratitude.
Savouring can be done by taking a photo; track your savouring using your phone with an app like ReWi.

Kindness
Research: happy people are motivated to do kind things for others. Kindness increases our mood.
Acts of kindness include helping someone with something, donating time or money, saying something kind
to a stranger, writing a thank you note, give someone a compliment.
Do one nice thing a day.

Social connection
Research: happy people spend more time with others and have a richer set of social connections. It
increases our positive mood significantly.
Social connections include talking to strangers!
Make connections throughout the day, but at least once a week take a whole hour to connect with someone
you care about.
Notice how these connections make you feel, both at the time and after the event.

Exercise
Research: 30 mins a day boosts mood. Can decrease depression symptoms as much as medication, and
can increase academic results.
Apart from the gym, walking, running, etc, this can also include yoga and dancing.

Sleep
Research: sleep can improve our mood more than we often predict. Increases mood over time, cognitive
performance, decreases risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.
7 hours is the minimum for number of hours of sleep per night. Aim for 8!
Avoid: caffeine, devices, alcohol.

Meditation
= turning attention away from distracting thoughts and towards a single point of reference, e.g. the breath,
bodily sensations, compassion, a specific thoughts, etc.
Research: meditation can lead to more positive moods, increased concentration, more feelings of social
connection. Spend at least 10 minutes per day meditating.
Meditation isn’t about the meditating itself, it’s about building a skill that you can use later.
Event + response = experience. We can choose our attitude and our response to a given event in our lives.
Practice the kinds of responses that you want to have, e.g. mindfulness. Mindfulness is a combination of:
1. Attention to the present moment
2. Attitude of acceptance, non-judgement
Has a history in Buddhist philosophy. Mindfulness is cultivated through mindful meditation.
Mind wanders uncontrollably to:
1. Memories
2. Planning
3. Judging that mind has wandered
Notice this, accept it, return to breath. This is how you practice and develop skill of mindfulness so that you
can apply it to everyday events. Your mind becomes stronger and more flexible.
Mindfulness used in Western medicine for 30 years. 100 studies consistently show that mindfulness
reduces:
● Stress
● Anxiety
● Depression
● Addiction
● Problem eating
● Chronic pain
● Blood pressure
And increases:
● Cognitive function
● Cellular health
● Overall wellbeing (happiness)
This is because mindfulness changes our brain. Experience-based neural plasticity: changes to brain.
People who practice mindfulness show decreased activity in the amygdala when under a stressful situation.
Meditation also reduces the size of the amygdala. Therefore mindfulness changes how your brain reacts to
stress, and how your brain is structured over time.
Mindful awareness and acceptance of pain without making judgements about the goodness or badness of
it. “Can I be OK with this feeling?” This decreased pain ratings. This even showed up in brain scans, with
lower brain response to pain. The more time spent practising mindful meditation, the less pain people report
from the same stimulus.

Gratitude letter/visit
Write a letter of gratitude to someone who has made a big difference in your life, but whom you have never
properly thanked. Explain how heshe has touched your life and why he/she is so meaningful to you. Aim for
at least 300 words. Deliver it by hand, or read over phone/Skype - whichever way, it is essential that you
read it out loud to them.
Resources

Books
● Martin Seligman, ​Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being - and how to
Achieve Them​ (a fantastic overview of positive psychology from the father of this discipline)
● Ed Diener, ​Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth​ (a nice introduction to the
science of well-being from one of its pioneers)
● S. Lyubomirsky, ​The How of Happiness​ - lots of research in this by the author!
● Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, ​Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
(a nice introduction to the science of behavior changes and how we can work with some of the
glitches of our own minds)
● Daniel Gilbert, ​Stumbling on Happiness​ (a laugh-out-loud book that provides important insight into
why we often fail to know what will make us happy)
● Robert Emmon, ​Thanks! The New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier​ (a nice introduction
to the work on gratitude and happiness)

Talks
● Martin Seligman’s ​TED Talk - The new era of positive psychology
● Dan Gilbert’s ​TED Talk - The surprising science of happiness
●