I recently went to a talk by Dr. Laurie Santos from Yale University. She teaches one of Yale’s most popular classes ever on the science of happiness and what makes humans happy. She teaches an entire semester on the course, and you can actually access the course online for free here. But if you just want the cliff notes version, here are her top 10 insights from the science of well being:
We can control more of our happiness than we think. This is super empowering to know that our happiness is really not part of our DNA (which by the way does control about 50% of our disposition to be either glass half empty or glass half full people), but the other 50% are really driven by our own perceptions and actions.
Our life circumstances don’t matter that much for happiness. So whether you were fortunate to be born into a wealthy family or have more resources available to you, this does not actually impact how happy we end up.
You can become happier but it takes work and daily effort. So just like living a healthy life, we can know that it takes healthy diet and exercise, but if you don’t actually put out the effort to do those things, the knowledge does not actually make you healthy. Similarly, we can know what makes us happy, but if we don’t actually put in daily effort to practice those things, we won’t actually have an impact on our happiness.
Your mind lies to you about what will make you happy. Our minds think certain things will make us happy or unhappy, but a lot of the times we will be wrong. For example (spoiler alert for #10), our minds think more money will make us happy, but study after study has shown that more money does not actually impact our happiness level.
Make time for social interactions. Social connections (whether with people we know or total strangers) make us happier. Even just talking to the stranger on the train, plane, or in the grocery line, connecting with people feeds our souls. And yes, this is true, even for introverts, even though you don’t think it will (see insight #4).
Helping others makes us happier than we expect. Studies repeatedly show that helping others makes us happier than we think. For example, if you give someone $5 to spend on themselves or someone else, it will make you happier to spend it on someone else. So go ahead an buy that latte for the person behind you in line, it will make you happy all day.
Make time for gratitude every day. Gratitude makes us happy AND telling people you are grateful for them, makes us even happier. Dr. Santos suggests doing a daily gratitude journal, not the same 3 things every day, but really thinking about what makes you grateful. She also suggests writing a gratitude letter and reading it to someone in person. Sounds totally scary, but not only will it make the other person happy, but it will make you happy for MONTHS to come (refer to insight #4 again for reassurance on this).
Healthy practices matter more than we expect. We all know that we should get 8 hours of sleep, exercise and eat right, but what we don’t always know is that these things actually impact our happiness more than we expect. 30 minutes of cardio can give you a happiness boost all day. Same for sleep and healthy diet. One more reason to go to bed early!
Being in the present moment is the happiest way to be. There are 2 ways to do this and get the happiness benefit. 1. savor the moment: periodically throughout the day, check in with yourself and savor the moment, really be present and experience the moment with your whole body. 2. meditate. This practice of being in the moment translates to the rest of your day.
Become wealthy in time not in money. There is a culture today of being busy and moving from one activity to the next, but what really makes us happy is having those down moments to savor and enjoy. This feeling of having the time to pursue our interests, passions, and relationships will pay us back ten fold in happiness, whereas more money will not.
The biggest thing I took away from Dr. Santos’ talk was that happiness just doesn’t happen, but (insight #3) you really have to work on it. So if you are feeling a little low on happy moments, take a minute, check in with yourself and early assess if you are putting in the work. Then, take a moment to meditate, talk to the person in line next to you, and buy them a latte, the happiness will flow from there.