- Happiness Can Be Learned
- G.I. Joe Fallacy
- "Knowing is half the battle" is a fallacy
- Knowing is a good start, but practicing + applying knowledge is the real challenge
Your first "assignment" is to measure your current level of happiness using one or two validated psychological surveys. These scores will serve as a “baseline” of your happiness level at the start of this experience. At the end of the course, you’ll redo the survey to see if your happiness and overall mood have changed after doing these positive practices for several weeks.
PERMA (an acronym for Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment— the basic dimensions of psychological flourishing). The questionnaire is 23 questions and once you submit your responses, you will receive scores ranging from 0-10 for each pillar along with scores for overall well-being, health, and negative emotions.
- Positive emotions = 6.67
- Engagement = 7.67
- Relationships = 7
- Meaning = 8
- Accomplishment = 8
- Health = 6.67
- Negative emotions = 6.67
- Loneliness = 6
- Overall Well-Being = 7.38
The Authentic Happiness Inventory is a validated, 24-question survey that measures overall well-being. At the end of the survey, you will receive a score between 1-5.
- Your Authentic Happiness Score is: 2.54
This week you will also have an opportunity to identify your Character Strengths, which we’ll learn more about in an upcoming lecture. To identify your Character Strengths, take the online test available on the VIA website.
Greatest Strengths:
- Honesty
- Self-Regulation
- Gratitude
- Our minds strongest intuitions are often wrong
- Understand that simply knowing is not enough to change behavior
- Give examples of what things won’t make you as happy as you think they will
- Revise and reconsider goals and aspirations that will not lead to improved well-being
- Practice savoring and gratitude every day for at least one week
- Good Job
- Money / Awesome Stuff
- Perfect Body
- True Love
- Good grades
- Our minds' strongest intuitions are often totally wrong
- Our minds don't think in terms of absolutes, our minds judge relative to reference points
- Our minds are built to get used to stuff
- We don't realize that our minds are built to get used to stuff
- The process of becoming accustomed to a positive or negative stimulus such that the emotional effects of that simulus are attenuated over time
- The tendency to over-estimate the emotional impact of a future event both in terms of intensity and its duration
- Investing in experiences makes us happier than investing in stuff
- To Do or to Have? That Is the Question.
- Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases.
- The hidden cost of value-seeking: People do not accurately forecast the economic benefits of experiential purchases.
- Stigmatizing materialism: On stereotypes and impressions of materialistic and experiential pursuits.
- The mediators of experiential purchases: Determining the impact of psychological needs satisfaction and social comparison.
- Savoring
- Negative Visualization
- Make this day your last
- Gratitude
- Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life
- Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions.
- Linking financial distress to marital quality: The intermediary roles of demand/withdraw and spousal gratitude expressions
- A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way: Explaining Why Gratitude Expressions Motivate Prosocial Behavior
- Consuming experience: Why affective forecasters overestimate comparative value
- Interrupt Consumption
- Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
- Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions
- My better self: Using strengths at work and work productivity, organizational citizenship behavior, and satisfaction
- When the job is a calling: The role of applying one’s signature strengths at work
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness
- If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy
- Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Clarifying Achievement Goals and Their Impact
- Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention
- Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model
- Happy people become happier through kindness: A counting kindnesses intervention
- Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change
- Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending
- Spending money on others promotes happiness
- Prosocial spending and well-being: Cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal
- The funds, friends, and faith of happy people
- Very happy people
- Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
- Mistakenly seeking solitude
- Shared experiences are amplified
- Valuing time over money is associated with greater happiness
- People who choose time over money are happier
- The pursuit of happiness: Time, money, and social connection
- A wandering mind is an unhappy mind
- Wandering minds: The default network and stimulus-independent thought
- Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity
- Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources
- Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density
- Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering
- Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness
- Exercise treatment for major depression: maintenance of therapeutic benefit at 10 months
- Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition
- Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night
- Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleep-dependent motor skill learning
- Sleep inspires insight
- Lose Sleep, Lose Your Mind and Health
Savoring is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Often we fail to stay in the moment and really enjoy what we’re experiencing. Savoring intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something you love. For the next seven days, you will practice the art of savoring by picking one experience to truly savor each day. It could be a nice shower, a delicious meal, a great walk outside, or any experience that you really enjoy. When you take part in this savored experience, be sure to practice some common techniques that enhance savoring. These techniques include: sharing the experience with another person, thinking about how lucky you are to enjoy such an amazing moment, keeping a souvenir or photo of that activity, and making sure you stay in the present moment the entire time. Every night, make a note of what you savored (Note: you can make a list in a notebook, use a notes app on your phone, use a calendar, or whatever works for you!). When you do write things down at the end of the day, be sure to take a moment to remember the activity.
Gratitude is a positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has received in life. Research shows that taking time to experience gratitude can make you happier and even healthier. For the next seven days, you will take 5-10 minutes each night to write down five things for which you are grateful. They can be little things or big things. But you really have to focus on them and actually write them down (Again, try to develop a tracking method works for you and utilize a note on your phone, a daily calendar, a special notebook, etc). You can just write a word or short phrase, but as you write these things down, take a moment to be mindful of the things you’re writing about (e.g., imagine the person or thing you’re writing about, etc.). This exercise should take at least five minutes. Do this each night for the whole week.
Research shows that happy people are motivated to do kind things for others. Over the next seven days, you will perform seven acts of kindness beyond what you normally do. You can do one extra act of kindness per day, or you can do a few acts of kindness in a single day. These do not have to be over-the-top or time-intensive acts, but they should be something that really helps or impacts another person. For example, help your colleague with something, give a few dollars or some time to a cause you believe in, say something kind to a stranger, write a thank you note, give blood, and so on. At the end of each day, list your random act of kindness (You can make a list in a notebook, keep a running note on your phone, log in a daily planner, or whatever method works for you). Just make sure you've finished seven total new acts of kindness by the end of the week.
Our social connections matter. Research shows that happy people spend more time with others and have a richer set of social connections than unhappy people. Studies even show that the simple act of talking to a stranger on the street can boost our mood more than we expect. Over the next seven days, you will try to focus on making one new social connection per day. It can be a small 5-minute act like sparking a conversation with someone on public transportation, asking a coworker about his/her day, or even chatting to the barista at a coffee shop. But you should also seek out more meaningful social connections too. At least once this week, take a whole hour to connect with someone you care about— a friend who’s far away or a family member you haven’t talked to in a while. The key is that you must the time needed to genuinely connect with another person. At the end of the day, list the social connection you made and notice how you feel when you jot it down. (Remember to keep track of your connections in your preferred rewirement tracking method).
Research suggests that ~30 minutes a day of exercise can boost your mood in addition to making your body healthier. For the next week, you will spend each day getting your body moving with at least 30 minutes of exercise. Set aside a location and time (write it in your calendar!). Then hit the treadmill at the gym, do an online yoga class, or throw on some headphones and dance around your room to cheesy pop songs. This isn’t supposed to be a marathon-level of activity; it’s just to get your body moving a bit more than usual (Note: if you have physical limitations that prevent you from doing this weeks activity, do plan to skip it for obvious reasons). At the end of the day, make sure to log your activity. Be sure to take a moment to notice how much better you feel after getting some exercise in.
One of the reasons we’re so unhappy in our modern lives is that we’re consistently sleep deprived. Research shows that sleep can improve your mood more than we often expect. For the next week, you must get at least seven hours of sleep for at least four nights of the next week. I know, I know. You’re super busy this week. There are deadlines to meet, friends to see, errands to run, etc. But sleep is going to make you feel better— both physically and mentally. So pick four nights this week, note them in your calendar, and get ready to get some much needed sleep. Also be sure to practice good sleep hygiene too— no devices before bed and try to avoid caffeine and alcohol on the days you’re getting your sleep on. Each morning, be sure to log your amount of sleep in the tracking method you’ve been using for the rewirements. Make sure you get four nights of 7+ hours over the course of the week.
Meditation is a practice of intentionally turning your attention away from distracting thoughts toward a single point of reference (e.g., the breath, bodily sensations, compassion, a specific thought, etc.). Research shows that meditation can have a number of positive benefits, including more positive moods, increased concentration, and more feelings of social connection. For the next week, you will spend each (at least) 10 minutes per day meditating. Find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed while you’re meditating. If you are new to meditation, you can try one of three guided meditations available on SoundCloud. And remember— meditation isn’t about the meditation itself; it’s about building a skill that we can use later. Lots of people find it hard at first, but stick with it and see if it allows you to feel a bit calmer over the course of the week. At the end of the day, log when and how long you meditated in your preferred tracking system.
One of your last rewirements is one that research suggests will have a big impact on your happiness and that of another person. This week, write a letter of gratitude to someone you care about. For this assignment, think of one living person who has made a big difference in your life, but whom you never properly thanked. Then find a quiet spot when you have a half-hour free and write a heartfelt letter to that person explaining how he or she has touched your life and why he or she is meaningful to you. Your letter can be as long as you want, but try to make it at least 300 words or so. Then you must deliver that letter to the person in question. Just say you want to talk to that person without explaining why. You could read the letter to your chosen person over the phone or Skype, but for an extra huge happiness boost, we recommend scheduling a time to visit this person in person to share your letter. However you meet up, you should read the letter aloud. We also recommend that you both have some tissues handy for this one. A gratitude letter is one of the most powerful tool for increasing happiness because it can forge social bonds and really change someone’s life.
To see if this course (and doing the rewirements specifically) has helped you feel a little happier, we want to you retake your level of happiness using the same survey(s) you started with. You may have used the PERMA Profiler, the Authentic Happiness Inventory, or the 1-question happiness scale ("On a scale of 1-5, how happy are you with your life right now?").
Also note, you may have taken the Authentic Happiness Survey and/or the PERMA Profiler on the University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness website depending on when your session started. You may log back in to that website to generate your scores or take the surveys embedded in the course here and here.
Keep track of your score and compare it to your baseline measure.