My learning from “The Science of Well-Being”, Yale’s most popular class

With shelter-in-place in effect, I decided to leverage my now more abundant than ever indoor time and take some online courses. Right when I was deciding what course to pick, I saw a news article somewhere about “Yale’s most popular class ever now free online” (essentially something like this).

It was intriguing, and the topic seemed adequate for this time of uncertainty where all the changes are happening… as in one of the things that does not change is people consistently want to be happier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to consider myself a pretty happy person. However, it never hurts to be happier, so I signed up for this class: “The Science of Well-Being” on Coursera back in late March.

The course is 10 weeks long, but of course you can always follow it with your own speed or “binge watch”. I chose to follow it at the designed pace, giving myself ample time to do the “rewirement” assignments (more later) and digest the materials. I just finished the whole course this week and decided to write down what I learnt for my own review purpose in the future, and for anyone out there that may find my notes helpful!

This is also my first article on Medium :-). I’ve been a reader for almost a year now and read tons of articles about how beneficial writing can be for multiple purposes. I’ve been wanting to start writing but… well, just haven’t. In this class, the professor talked about how “savoring” can make you happier, and “sharing with others” is an effective way to enhance savoring. So here we are: I grew determined to start, electing to make this a writing and savoring exercise.

Note that this is not a short article… My goal is to document my learning comprehensively so I can come back later to this one-stop shop to refresh my memory. If you prefer something shorter, see my other article that is 1/3 the length of this one with my top learning: “My top learning from “The Science of Well-Being”, Yale’s most popular class”.

First Thing First: Measure Your Baseline Happiness

To know if this course actually worked, i.e. if you get happier in the end, the first thing to do is to measure your starting happiness as a baseline, for comparisons at the end. There were three options and I did each of them. For the first two, I couldn’t find a public link to share the questionnaires easily… it seems you’ll need to create an account and take the tests from here, or of course just go to Coursera and take the class.

1. PERMA (an acronym for Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — the basic dimensions of psychological flourishing). The questionnaire has 23 questions and my overall well-being (0–10) was 7.56. You can find my detailed results in the screenshot below.
2. The Authentic Happiness Inventory. The questionnaire has 24 questions and my overall authentic happiness (1–5) is 3.38.
3. Just ask yourself, on a scale of 1–5, how happy are you with your life right now? My result: 4.

Find and Use Your Signature Strengths

This is another assignment for week 1: find your character strengths and use the top ones once a day all week long to increase your happiness.

The VIA character Strength Survey helps you find your character strengths and takes about 15 minutes to complete. The result is a ranked list of your 24 character strengths. I loved this survey and thought the results were highly accurate. I even asked my boyfriend, siblings, friends, and coworkers to do it too. It was really fun looking at your own and other people’s results. I felt I gained a better understanding of myself and others discussing about the results. See my top 4 character strengths below.

Even better, the VIA website gave you detailed description of each character strength and tips to use it. You can also read 340 Ways to Use VIA Character Strengths by Tayyab Rashid & Afroze Anjum to get a quick overview and find tips that work best for you. For example, my top character strength is Humor, and I did find doing some of the suggested activities make me feel happier.

Notes and Exercise for Each Week

Now that the initial assignments/tests are out of the way, the 1st to 6th week of the class consists of course videos, weekly “rewirement” activity, quiz, and optional readings. I’ll be focusing on the first two.

What’s “rewirement”?

“Rewirement” is a big part of this class and something I’ve never seen before. They’re essentially practices aimed at rewiring our habits. Research suggests that if we do these rewirements as prescribed, we should get a boost in our mood and overall well-being. Each week, we are assigned a set of “rewirement” activities to do each day. That’s the reason why I decided to follow the class week by week to really practice these activities.

Week 1

In professor Santo’s welcome letter, she mentioned what the class is about:

“Over the next several weeks, we’ll explore what new results in psychological science teach us about how to be happier, how to feel less stressed, and how to flourish more. We’ll then have a chance to put these scientific findings into practice by building the sorts of habits that will allow us to live a happier and more fulfilling life.”

Also why she started this class:

“In Spring 2018, I taught ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ for the first time. I created this Yale course because I was worried about the levels of student depression, anxiety, and stress that I was seeing... I originally developed this course to teach Yale students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and how to live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling.

I had no idea it would become the most popular class ever taught at Yale University… I was flooded with requests from people around the world to find a way to share the content of this Yale class more broadly. This Coursera class is an attempt to do just that… During this course, you’ll have the opportunity to enhance your own well-being by implementing a few simple research-based methods to your own life.”

Finally, a sneak peak of what’s to come:

1. Misconceptions about happiness
2. Why our expectations are so bad
3. Strategies to reset our expectations
4. What stuff really increases happiness
5. Putting strategies into practice

Rewirement exercise for this week: use your signature strengths in new ways every day for a week. More info was provided in the “Find and Use Your Signature Strengths” section above. With shelter-in-place, some options like “going out and observe nature scenery” was impossible…

I still followed through and realized I was leveraging quite some of my signature strengths already. For example, there was a tip to “expand your knowledge in an area of interest through books, radio, internet, etc.” for people with Curiosity as their signature strengths. It ranked 2nd for me. It was interesting to be more mindful and double down.

Week 2

This week is about busting the misconceptions about happiness… Good jobs, lots of money, awesome stuff, true love, the perfect body, the perfect grade, etc., these things that lots of us think make us happy don’t really make us that happy.

There was quite a bit of experimentation and research done comparing predicted happiness and actual happiness when it comes to gaining or losing common things we think would make us happy. The difference is much smaller than what we’d expect.

A few really interesting findings stood out to me:

1. Income doesn’t have that much impact on happiness but the impact is definitely much larger in poorer nations. The reason is once you get enough money for basic needs, money has negligible effect. Moreover, $75,000 was found to be “a plausible number at which people think money is not an issue”, based on surveying 450,000 Americans in 2008-9.
2. True love, at least from what Disney told us, is amazing. However, research found married people are happier in first 1–2 years but after that the difference between married and unmarried is negligible.

Rewirement exercises for this week:

• Savoring (definition below): I didn’t really do it everyday… the 5 activities I savored were a nice shower, a delicious meal, a great drink, my comfortable bed, and watching the moon. To enhance savoring, I took photos of my food (I had a habit to do that anyway) and shared some of my experience with my boyfriend, the person I have easiest access to being stuck at home… It made me realize how I was used to some of these and never paid attention or tried to enjoy, e.g. I often forgot if I already rinsed my hair or not during the shower thinking thousands of different things.

“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. When you do write things down at the end of the day, be sure to take a moment to remember the activity.”

• Daily gratitude journal (definition below): Again, I failed to do it everyday… the things I felt grateful for included financial stability, my boyfriend, online entertainment, knowledge, friends, family, cars, freedom, my job, etc. I did find myself repeating some of these in the end and was surprised at how hard it was to think of something new… I mean there must be much more things I’m grateful for, right?

“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.

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.”

Week 3

This week’s focus is about why our expectations are so bad. In other words, why does “miswanting” (i.e. the act of being mistaken about what and how much you will like something in the future) occur. Why? It has something to do with a few annoying features of our minds:

• Our mind’s strongest intuitions are often totally wrong. A classic visual example:

• Our minds don’t think in terms of absolutes, i.e. “our minds judge relative to reference points, where reference point is a salient but often irrelevant standard against which subsequent information is compared”. One example is our idea of “a good income” goes up with our current income. Another example is we compare ourselves against people on social media or TV and think lower of ourselves. A classic visual example:

There’s this experiment which really demonstrates how we judge relevant to reference points that totally blew my mind. In order to ensure other people do not get higher salary than me, I’m willing to choose a lower salary, and it’s not just a little lower but 50% lower! What’s crazier is, I think I can relate. Assuming everyone does the same job, I just can’t stand the unfairness…

• Our minds are built to get used to stuff, and hence hedonic adaptation happens, i.e. “the process of becoming accustomed to a positive or negative stimulus such that the emotional effects of that stimulus are attenuated over time”. One example that was previously mentioned: “Just married!!” becomes “Just… married” after 2 years. Getting into a great school or landing a great job was dream come true but the awesomeness wanes over time.
• We don’t realize our minds are built to get used to stuff. Oh well, the fact that our minds are built to get used to stuff, which can work against us in the pursuit of happiness, is already bad. Not realizing the fact just makes it even worse.

Rewirement exercises for this week:

• Random Acts of Kindness (definition below): Performing kind acts was actually much easier than I thought. Put another way, while I would hope those in my social circles would consider me a generally nice person, I have not been as charitable in my life as I probably should be. I found opportunities to voluntarily take over work from a coworker when she was sick, donated $20 to support local restaurants, recommended books/movies to people, etc. There was indeed a sense of happy fulfillment afterwards, especially regarding the actions that were not openly called for. Being thanked or not was actually secondary.

“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. Just make sure you’ve finished seven total new acts of kindness by the end of the week.”

• Make A Social Connection (definition below): COVID-19 actually gave me a good excuse to reach out to a lot of old friends and ask how they’re doing, especially those overseas. Even though sometimes the conversations didn’t last long, simple greetings brought back memories and made me feel that we’re still a part of each other’s life. However small that part may be, the connection is nonetheless quite heartwarming.

“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.”

Week 4

The previous two weeks were kind of sad… we learnt misconceptions about happiness and the reasons why our expectations are so bad. Finally, this week is about how we can overcome those annoying features and biases. These are the strategies:

• Getting over getting used to stuff: Don’t invest in stuff in the first place. Invest in experiences instead. If you buy stuff, no matter how amazing it was to start with, it sticks around and you get used to it. While experiences last much shorter. Once it was over, it became memories that you cherish and savor. I echo with this so much and am slightly proud that I choose experiences (e.g. traveling) over stuff (e.g. expensive car, clothes, watch, bag, etc.) almost all the time. Studies show that even the anticipation of experiential purchases create more happiness than material ones, and also feeling that money was better spent afterwards.
• Thwart your adaptation by Savoring: Savoring was a rewirement exercise for week 2 and was defined there. In short, it is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Sharing with others and focusing on the now really helped me enhance savoring. Thinking it would be over soon, it wasn’t as good as I hoped, or I’d never get it this good again all hurts savoring.
• Thwart your adaptation by Negative Visualization: Picture what it would be like if something never have happened. For example, envision never having met your partner, never gotten accepted to a good school or company, etc. It helps you renew your appreciation of things as they are, and realize how truly lucky/happy you are again.
• Thwart your adaptation by Making This Day Your Last: If this is not another typical day and the end is near, you’ll see things through new lenses and appreciate how they are. Everything you’re so used to now seems so precious, knowing that it won’t be there tomorrow. I also think this is a good way to help you identify what are some important things you never get to do yet and prioritize them.
• Thwart your adaptation by Gratitude: Gratitude was a rewirement exercise for week 2 and was defined there. In short, it’s the quality of being thankful and a tendency to show appreciation for what one has. Writing a gratitude letter to someone who has helped you, or even just thinking about things you are grateful for, have positive and long lasting effects on happiness, sometimes as long as six months.
• Reset your reference points by Concrete Re-Experiencing: Find a way to go back and re-experience what your old reference points were like instead of just getting used to the new reference points. For example, you got an awesome job and you started taking it for granted. Try to imagine or even visit your previous workplace to remember how bad your old job was, which would give you renewed appreciation for your new job.
• Reset your reference points by Concrete Observations: Go and concretely observe other reference points. Really see what the other side is like. Most likely your fantasy becomes reality, and you end up liking what you have a bit more.
• Reset your reference points by Avoiding Social Comparisons: Practice the stop technique — be mindful and when catching yourself doing social comparisons, ask your brain to shut up and stop. Going back to gratitude exercise is also helpful, since humans have limited attention. So if you spend that on gratitude, it will kill envy as you likely don’t have enough bandwidth. Or, of course, just uninstall social apps.
• Reset your reference points by Interrupting Your Consumption: Intuitively we want good things in our lives to continue. However, if you force yourselves to have interruptions and go back to it later, you’re resetting your reference points in a good way. For example, if you listen to a song you like over and over versus listening to it with breaks, the latter actually boosts your happiness… Similarly, commercials can make you enjoy the TV program more when you come back from the break… I admit I didn’t see that coming with all my ad blockers. In conclusion, split awesome things you love in life. Pause and come back. It helps to bump you out of the hedonic adaptation curve and to get a good reference point. Conversely, do things you don’t like in one go…
• Reset your reference points by Increasing Your Variety: Switch things up, and when you go back to the same thing again you feel better. Also space out good things in your life more so you don’t get used to it. Along that line, it echos with the first strategy “Getting over getting used to stuff”, as experiences are more dynamic than materials.

Rewirement exercises for this week:

• Exercise: this is sadly the one I failed at the most… I only did it 3 times a week. Thanks to the treadmill I bought during Christmas last year, I can easily exercise at home. But that also took my excuse of not following through away… I somehow found committing to exercise difficult and am still figuring out what the barriers may be. I’m not sure I feel happy after exercising, more obligation fulfilled and relief. Certainly helps my sleep though, which is another exercise for this week.

“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. 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.”

• Sleep: I love sleeping, and I thought it would be so easy for me to follow through on this. However, when I really paid attention to it, I actually noticed it wasn’t so… Sometimes my bad napping habit prevents me from sleeping well at night. Sometimes it takes a few hours for me to fall asleep. Sometimes I felt I didn’t really sleep at all and I knew everything that happened, e.g. cars passed by, sun went up. Sometimes I was “dreaming” all night long about some nonsense that seemed so important and once waking up I felt all energies wasted… it’s kinda hard to describe. Anyway, this one was unexpectedly hard. A good and deep sleep is indeed amazing.

“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.”

Week 5

Learning how to overcome our biases and annoying mind features is one thing, but what about stuff that really increases happiness? That’s the focus of this week. There are essentially two parts:

Wanting the right parts of what we already want

Taking “wanting a good job” for example. Remember I said I really loved the exercise to find and use my signature strengths in week 1? Turns out if you use them at work, your productivity and job satisfaction increase significantly, i.e. using signature strengths can turn a job into a “calling”!

We should also try increasing the “flow” — “the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment (aka ‘the zone’)”. The figure below really says it all. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who recognized and named “flow”, said it so well and really made me rethink what I want or enjoy in life… is it really leisure over work?

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Another trick that helps is to combat having extrinsic motivations (“engaging in a behavior to earn external rewards or avoid punishments”) undermining intrinsic motivations (engaging in a behavior because you enjoy the activity itself). For example, a focus on grades can undermine intrinsic motivations and also hinder a growth mindset: “the belief that intelligence can be trained and that most basic abilities can be developed trough dedication and hard work”, which is the opposite of a fixed mindset: “the belief that basic qualities like intelligence and talents are fixed traits”. So, instead of wanting good grades, want a good mindset instead.

Wanting better stuff that we don’t want yet

There was five shared in the class. Want to take a guess what those are?

Here you go: kindness, social connection, time affluence, mind control and healthy practices. Did you guess any?

Kindness: Research shows that people who have higher kind motivation, kind recognition and kind behaviors are happier. Even merely thinking about kind acts increases happiness. Another study shows if you were given $5 or $20 bucks, spending it on someone else gives you higher happiness than spending on yourself. And the amount of money doesn’t make a big difference. Now that may be different from what lots of us may expect! An extended study gets the conclusion: “spending on others increases happiness across cultures and income levels.”

Social Connection: People with close social ties are less vulnerable to premature death, more likely to survive fatal illness, less likely to fall prey to stressful events, and, happier. Even random connections can increase our happiness! Epley and Schroeder asked people on public transportation to have a conversation with a stranger, keep to themselves, or do what they usually do. The ones making conversations ended up reporting highest happiness. What about the people being talked to? The results were similar. So, talk to random people on the street! It will make both you and them happier than you’d expect.

Time Affluence: Do you value money or time more? I find my answers changing pretty often… gonna cheat a little and say it depends. Research shows more people value money (69%) than time (31%). However, those who value time are happier (4.89) than those who value money (4.22). This leads to the conclusion that prioritizing time over money is associated with greater happiness.

Mind Control: It’s about becoming Professor X… not really. It’s really about controlling our own minds better. A mind-blowing fact about our minds is how often it wanders… 46.9% of the waking hours! It was shown in research done by Havard psychologists Killingsworth & Gilbert in 2010. Unfortunately, mind-wandering was found to have a negative impact on happiness.

The formal definition of mind-wandering: “A shift in contents of thought away from an ongoing task and/or from events in the external environment to self-generated thoughts and feelings.”

Why do our minds wander so much? We owe it to our brains’ “Default Network”: “a network of interacting brain regions known to activate ‘by default’ when a person is not involved in a task. It comes on within a fraction of a second after a task.” So, we can say it’s kinda designed that way. As Gilbert put it, “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Now, meditation came to rescue. It is a practice of turning our attention away from distracting thoughts towards a single point of reference, e.g. the breath, bodily sensations, compassion, a specific thought, etc. The practice of meditation can curb mind-wandering and makes us happier. It also has other benefits like increasing brain grey matter size, reducing stress, improving our academic performance, etc.

Healthy Practices: exercise and sleep. Straightforward, huh? Research shows exercise reduces depression even more than medicine, has positive connection with academic achievement, and positive connection again with cognitive performance in older adults.

Research also shows sleeping enough(7+ hours/night) can make us happier and even improve learning. In a study, Walker et al. trained some people and gave them a test after 10 hours. When it was overnight with enough sleep, the test results were much (~2x) better. So, our brain does some magic and consolidates learning during sleep… and that’s why naps were recommended to provide this kind of boost during the day.

Rewirement exercise for this week:

• Meditate: I was really happy that the class provided a bunch of guided meditations so I could easily follow… the body scan one worked the best for me, as in I found my mind wandering the least. 10 minutes actually passed by really quick following these guides. I felt my brain being clearer and focused after the meditation, so I leveraged that span to read and was able to do it faster. It seems that the guides always emphasize having your spine straight for the meditation exercise… not sure why. I was contemplating doing it lying down and seeing if that helps me sleep.

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.

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.

• Gratitude Letter/Visit: Since it was recommended to deliver the gratitude letter in person, my natural pick was my boyfriend due to shelter-in-place… it’s really weird how much impact COVID-19 has, even for this online class. He was originally a bit suspicious and thought something bad had happened. I read the letter in one go kinda fast, feeling quite awkward. He was really happy and touched afterwards. He also decided he was going to give this class a 5 out of 5 rating… LOL.

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.

Week 6

We came a long way to knowing what we should want in week 5. This week is about learning strategies that help us really change our behavior and create new habits that improve our happiness.

Situation support

Fix bad environments and promote healthy ones. For example, put your unhealthy snacks out of sight while making fruits and vegetables within reach. Set reminders and put up visual cues so you don’t forget to practice new habits regularly. Moreover, find people to join you so you can support and share with each other, while both getting happier!

Goal setting

Goal specificity: The formal definition of goal specificity is the degree of quantitative precision with which a goal is specified. Put in effort to make sure your goals are specific, e.g. where, when, how often, etc. Research shows that the more specific your goals are, the more task strategy you come up with, which leads to better performance.

Goal visualization: This is also helpful, especially with the “mental contrasting” technique: “a visualization technique involving first thinking of a positive future outcome followed by thinking of obstacles”. It’s interesting that in addition to thinking about the positive outcomes that motivate us, thinking about obstacles that may get into our ways actually get us prepared and become more practical about how we can achieve the goals.

Goal planning: Come up with an explicit plan to help you achieve your goals in each scenario you may encounter, especially the ones that really test your willpower. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at NYU, invented the term “implementation intention”, a self-regulatory strategy in the form of an “if-then plan” that can lead to better goal attainment.

WOOP: Putting all these goal strategies together, there’s this final WOOP framework by Gabrielle Oettingen, an NYU professor, that I really liked. Essentially, it’s a four step process:

1. Think about your wish, as specifically as possible
2. The best outcome
3. Potential obstacles
4. Your if/then plan, again as specifically as possible

This method was proved to be quite helpful in creating long lasting habits in a bunch of studies. The acronym is kinda cute and easy to remember. I especially echo with the part about planning as specifically as possible. I have no problem coming up with quantitatively measurable goals for things I want to do repeatedly, but sticking to those was still difficult. It often came down to “I’m too tired today”, “I have more important things to finish first”, etc. that led to this perpetual postponement… Foreseeing those scenarios and really planning for them can be challenging, but rewarding. It’s almost like you need to beat your future self so you can continuously become better!

Rewirement exercise for this week: Surprise! There’s none.

Week 7–10

No more course materials! We were asked to pick one rewirement and stick to it for 4 weeks, whichever that may be, out of whatever reasons. What’s important is to make it into a long-term habit. One thing that was shared early on in the class was the “G.I. Joe Fallacy”, which I think is good to call out here: “the mistaken idea that ‘knowing’ is half the battle”.

Just “knowing” all the science, research, strategies, etc. from this class is not going to change our behavior and make us happier. We need to put in the hard work to really practice changing our behavior, and making it part of our “new normal” — a term we probably all heard too much in the post COVID-19 world.

Guess what I picked? Meditation! Would that be your pick too? I’ll share about my experience in week 10, the last week of this class.

Week 10

The class reconvened one last time to discuss about the 4-week long rewirement challenges and how those went. Everyone was asked to measure her/his happiness again to compare with the baseline that was measured ~10 weeks ago. There’s also an assignment to reflect on the rewirement challenge.

Peer-graded Assignment: Reflect on the Rewirement Challenge

Prompt 1. State the rewirement you chose to practice and why why you picked it — perhaps it was something you were meaning to try for a while or perhaps the scientific research discussed in lecture was particularly compelling. Explain why you thought the behavior would fit into your life. (1–3 sentences)

Ans: I picked meditation because I’ve heard from other classes and people how powerful it can be. I practiced meditation 3–5 times in the past, but never successfully made it a habit of mine. To be honest, I had been a bit doubtful, especially that I felt asleep during my very limited tries… I wasn’t surprised its benefits got brought up again in this class, and decided to give it a real shot.

Prompt 2. Describe how you socially committed to your chosen rewirement. Who did you talk to about your 4 week challenge? Were you specific about what you planned to accomplish? (1–3 sentences)

Ans: A tip to help us stick to our selected rewirement is to make a plan, as concrete as possible, centered on items like: how many times a week, when, where, who, with whom, etc. So I socially committed to meditation by telling my boyfriend about it. I told him I was taking this class and I would meditate a few nights a week in my office chair, needing a quiet environment in that room during that time. He also meditates so he’s very supportive.

Prompt 3. Elaborate on any strategies you implemented for building habits. Did you rely on situation support to design a better environment? Did you set effective goals combining implementation intention and mental contrasting (via the WOOP framework). (1–3 sentences)

Ans: I tried to make meditation as easy as possible, and I know I would likely need to follow a guide since I’m a beginner. I started with using the playlist from the class, then downloaded this app called Calm to access more options. Calm also helped set an alarm everyday to remind me of meditation… but I didn’t really follow that. I still remembered to do it a few nights a week when sitting at my desk and after wrapping my day.

Prompt 4. List how many times you completed the activity in the past 4 weeks and compare that to how many times you planned on completing the behavior? State the tools you used to monitor your progress — did you use an app, a notebook, a calendar, or something else? If you’re willing to share, post a picture or document of your tracking system in the next prompt!(1–3 sentences)

Ans: I did it around 3 times a week, so it was not too bad. Ideally I would like to do it every day. I didn’t really use any tool to monitor my progress… I just kept a mental count, knowing there’s no need to lie to myself about how often I did it because it’s really for my own good.

Prompt 5. Compare you happiness scores. Did your score change at all? Did your score go up, down, or stay the same? (1–2 sentences)

Ans: Both my scores from PERMA (7.56 -> 7.9) and Authentic Happiness (3.38 -> 3.63) went up. I was a bit surprised as my scores started off pretty high in my opinion… maybe it has something to do with me taking those surveys right after I meditated :)

Prompt 6. Describe the experience of trying to build a new habit. What were some triumphs? Some setbacks? How did you feel during the process and how do you feel now? (2–4 sentences)

Ans: I honestly originally wanted to do both meditation and exercise. The latter was a failure. The former was pretty successful and I think it’s because of how easy it is: I can meditate on the spot pretty much, whenever and wherever. Plus, I just happen to sit in my home office chair a lot so that’s a pretty good setting. I really did start feeling calmer and finding concentration easier after I meditated. I was planning on meditating right before I went to bed, but sometimes I just felt quite good that I wanted to apply that focus on reading and brainstorming stuff instead of wasting it and going straight to bed…

Measure your happiness, again!

As shared in the peer-graded assignment, my happiness went up by all measures, woohoo! Let’s look at it in more details…

• PERMA (0–10): My overall score went up from 7.56 to 7.9. It may not seem huge but I’m satisfied. As aforementioned, I didn’t take this class because I was unhappy. Definitely not. At the beginning I was pretty skeptical this class could do much. So, however tiny the improvement is, as long as positive, I’m happy. Now, if you look at the breakdown, I improved in almost all categories, most notably in increase of positive emotions and reduction of loneliness. No change in meaning of life… so that’s probably where I will focus more on.

• Authentic happiness (1–5): Increased from 3.38 to 3.63. Again, I’m happy with the improvement.
• Self reported happiness scale (1–5): It went up from 4 to 4.5. I doubt I would ever give it a 5 anyway, feeling that there’s always room for improvement.

Conclusion

I wrote this article shortly after I finished the course, and it took me two weeks on and off to finish it. Phew! I enjoyed going through the course handouts, my notes, and some course videos again to renew my memory and get a better grasp on some concepts. The biggest takeaway to me is, we really have the power to increase our own happiness, and there are a lot of resources out there to help us achieve so!

The idea to share my learning publicly definitely gave myself an invisible bar. I wanted to make sure I could articulate things correctly and clearly. Overall, it was a fun exercise and I now feel I have an even deeper understanding of the course materials :)

I hope my sharing is useful to you and am happy to discuss more about my experience here and there. Remember, the class is still available online, for free! If my article intrigues you, definitely consider taking the class yourself.