Mindfulness-based stress reduction

Finding an inner source of calm
Sharing a human struggle
Staying focused in a learning situation
Moving from fear to curiosity in academic learning
Feeling more self-acceptance when facing a challenging situation

What really does make me happy?

The most basic issues are

·         Exercise

·         Sleep

·         Having a sense of achievement.

·         Social connection - prosocial behaviour

·         Kindness we show others

Figuring out ways to be happier than just neutral? How can we flourish?

We have to look to social connections, community, and our ability to be kind.

Terms of Happiness

These terms are important to understanding some of the obstacles to happiness identified by researchers. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Emiliana have alluded to many of them in earlier videos. You can also hear Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the best-selling book Stumbling on Happiness, discuss several of these terms in this video on Big Think. 

Affective forecasting: The process of making predictions about how you will feel in the future. According to Daniel Gilbert, who coined the term "affective forecasting" with his colleague Timothy Wilson, affective forecasting is simply "the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like and what they won’t like."
However, as Emiliana explained in the previous video, we are often poor judges in the present of what will bring us happiness in the future, causing us to look for happiness in the wrong places.

Impact bias: The tendency to overestimate how an event or experience in the future will affect our emotional well-being, for better or worse. For instance, we often underestimate our ability to recover from difficult experiences, an ability that Gilbert calls our "psychological immune system." He documented this bias in a study that found people generally overestimate how various defeats or rejections--such as a romantic breakup or being turned down for a job--will impact their happiness.
Impact bias is a major cause of mistakes in affective forecasting. It can lead us to avoid certain decisions or activities out of an inflated fear that they will harm our happiness or to covet certain outcomes (such as winning the lottery) that don't actually boost our happiness as much as we think they will.

Set point theory: The theory that we each have a relatively stable level of happiness that is largely determined by our genes and personality. Though we might experience some fluctuations in happiness due to events big and small, this theory holds that we eventually return to our basic set point of happiness.

Hedonic adaptation (aka the "hedonic treadmill"): Our ability to adapt to changes in our life circumstances or sensory experiences. Research suggests many of us have a remarkable ability to get used to things that might initially bring us pleasure, such as getting married or winning the lottery, and even to eventually return to our happiness set point after a traumatic accident.
Some researchers, such as Ed Diener at the University of Illinois, however, have argued that the truth about hedonic adaptation and set points is more nuanced: Some people might be more prone than others to adapt to events, and a person's set point may not be stable over time. Throughout this class, we will explore research--and research-based methods--that suggest how we might counteract our tendency for hedonic adaptation and develop more lasting happiness.

Prioritizing positivity: Deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains situations that naturally give rise to positive emotional experiences. Laura Catalino, Sara Algoe and Barbara Fredrickson's study compares pursuing happiness to prioritizing positivity, and their results suggest that prioritizing positivity is a more promising approach to boosting happiness.

Ideas that challenge the notion that we can be happier

The first is that there's growing literature that we are all born with what's called a, a "set point" for happiness, that part of happiness is genetically determined. And this is work that comes from the field of behaviour genetics, and it shows that identical twins are much, much more similar in their happiness levels, than are fraternal twins. So, this suggests that happiness is heritable; it is passed down through our families, and so, a large portion, about fifty percent (50%) of happiness is genetically determined. And so, that leads some researchers to conclude that maybe it is futile, or kind of not very worthwhile to try to change our happiness levels, because it's partly genetic.

A second reason to be pessimistic is that happiness has been shown to be a trait - it's an intrinsic part of our personality. And we know that personality does not change much over time. I mean, it can change, but it is very hard to change, right. For those of us who have tried to change our spouses, or our friends, we know how hard it is. Happiness is especially, very highly related to two core aspects of personality which are extroversion, being a sociable extroverted person, and neuroticism, being neurotic and emotionally unstable person. And so, if happiness is part of our personality, how can we really change it? Studies have shown that happiness is quite stable across people's lives, so, people who are unhappy when they are younger tend to, sort of, be unhappy, as they are older.

The final reason to be pessimistic and something that I am particularly interested in right now, something I am doing research on is a phenomenon called "hedonic adaptation." And what it shows is that human beings are remarkably adept at getting used to any positive changes in their lives. So, we move into a beautiful new house, we buy a new car, we get a new job- and at first it is really thrilling, it gives us a happiness boost, but over time we get used to that and no matter what kinds of ups or downs in life we have, we sort of, tend to go back to our baseline.

Now how long do you think it took for people on average to get back to their baseline, after getting married? Ten years, right after the wedding? Two years; now that's an average so, actually, what I am really interested in is what about those people who got happier when they got married, and stayed happier, for years and years, above their baseline?

Hedonistic adaptation is a phenomenon that we get used to really quickly the changes in our lives. And so, if that's the case, no matter what positive, thrilling, wonderful events happen to us, we won't be happier because we just get used to it and we just want more; we go back down to our baseline. So, those are three reasons to be pessimistic.

Tom Gilovich who is a professor at Cornell of psychology. looks at the differences in happiness that are related to material possessions versus experiences and what he does is ask people to look back at a time when they spent a bunch of money on a thing or spent a bunch of money on an experience and asked them how happy you are. He asks them a little bit later to talk about or to rate how satisfied they are with that particular experience or having spent money on a thing. It turns out that satisfaction goes down a lot when looking at people who spent their money on material possessions and satisfaction sort of persists in the upward direction, it goes up and it increases when people invest in experiences.

Again, these are some of the habits of thinking, expectations that we have: we should get things; we should worry about how hard challenges in life are going to be; that doesn’t fit in to our scientific understanding for what brings people the greatest amount of happiness.

The last thing I want to touch on is the way people think about happiness and money. Danny Kahneman from Princeton University has discovered by looking at the relationship between money and life satisfaction or happiness is that there is indeed an increase in happiness when you think about the income levels that allow people to have their basic needs met. But once you get to a certain threshold, which in his study was about $75,000 a year, the line plateaus. Happiness doesn’t continue to go up.

Again, there isn’t a good case to suggest that continually seeking more and more money is going to continually increase your happiness. Again, I’m simply trying to point out some of the obstacles in the way we think about the world and ourselves that might make it harder to pursue happiness.

Prioritizing Positivity - Laura Catalino

“Prioritizing Positivity”: deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains SOME situations that naturally give rise to positive emotions.

This way of pursuing happiness involves carving out time in your daily routine to do some things that you genuinely love, whether it be writing, gardening, or connecting with loved ones.

Prioritizing positivity also involves heavily weighing the positive emotional consequences of major life decisions, like taking a new job, which have implications for the daily situations in which you will regularly find yourself. This way of pursuing happiness means proactively putting yourself in contexts that spontaneously trigger positive emotions

First, rather than set the unrealistic goal of feeling positive emotions all—or even most—of the time, let go of extreme ways of relating to your happiness. Just because you’re striving to experience happiness doesn’t mean you should be striving to feel joy, contentment, gratitude, peace (or any other flavor of positive emotion) every second of the day.

Second, reflect on the activities that give you joy or contentment. This thought experiment should be highly personalized. For some, the activities that spark happiness are cooking elaborate meals and attending public lectures. For others, the activities are watching basketball and going to their children’s soccer practices. (If you have trouble coming up with ideas, here are two activities that, research has shown, elicit positive emotions in most people: connecting with a loved one and doing something physically active.)

Finally, once you think of a couple of activities, schedule them into your upcoming week. To ensure that you actually do them, consider transforming the activity into a social obligation. If running is something you enjoy, set up a specific time to go running with a friend, so that you’re more likely to follow through. Repeatedly incorporate these activities into your daily life; they don’t have to assume large blocks of your time. If carving out even 20 minutes each day to read a novel inserts a dose of tranquility into your life, then incorporate this ritual into your daily routine.

Letting go of wanting to feel happy all the time also encourages less self-consciousness about happiness. This may be helpful because many peak, pleasant experiences, characterized by total absorption in an activity, a phenomenon known as “flow,” are marked by a lack of self-awareness.