The Science of Wellbeing

Count your blessings. Be grateful. Savour the moment. Perform a random act of kindness every day.

If, like me, you’re one of life’s rational sceptics, you’ll be naturally resistant to the saccharine exhortations from the airport bookshop self-help section. But over the years, I’ve been won over by what neuroscience and psychology tells us about how small a role the rational brain plays in our decision making. Life hacks that help you bypass counterproductive emotional hard wiring have a real benefit.

But my rational side still likes to understand what I’m doing and approaches that have a scientific basis have much greater impact on my behaviour.

Step up Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University, with The Science of Wellbeing. What started off as a response to concern about growing levels of stress and anxiety amongst Yale students has turned into an online course that has been accessed by over three million students worldwide.

The 10 week course broadly splits into two halves. After an opening introduction, four weeks look at the best academic evidence about happiness and wellbeing:

• Our misconceptions about what makes us happy.
• Why our expectations are so bad.
• How we can overcome our biases.
• Stuff that really makes us happy.

Santos goes in some depth into the underlying academic studies that support her conclusions and provides all references for the interested reader. But she also keeps the discussion elevated to a level that enables us to keep a strong sense of the key conclusions. Filmed live in front of a student audience in her Yale residence, doing the course gives a real sense of going back to college.

The second part of the course looks at application. After a session on strategies to put the research findings into practice, four weeks are devoted to your own personal ‘rewiring’ experiment, finishing with a peer reviewed assignment. Full references and further reading are provided for the keen student.

Much of the content and themes will be familiar to those of you that have read my The Life Factor e-book or my reviews of Stumbling on Happiness and Happy Money. Our mind plays tricks on us and is unfortunately not a reliable guide to what makes us happy. Things we think will make us happy generally don’t or at least not for long: a great job, higher pay, a great body, stuff. We underestimate our superpower of psychological adaptation. As a result, we consistently overestimate how much, and for how long, things will affect our wellbeing. We also tend to get drawn to these things that don’t make us happy rather than the things that are shown to do so: interpersonal connection, experiences, generosity, community.

Unfortunately, the rewiring is hard. We can’t think our way to change, but we can, over time, act our way to it. This requires experimentation, small steps, and formation, and reinforcement, of good habits.