My top 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” (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. So I signed up for “The Science of Well-Being” on Coursera.

I finished the whole course recently 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! In this class, the professor talked about how “savoring” makes you happier, and “sharing with others” can enhance savoring. So I decided to make this a writing and savoring exercise!

This article covers my top learning. If you’re interested in reading my full learning, check out my other article: “My learning from “The Science of Well-Being”, Yale’s most popular class”. I first wrote that one and then condensed it to this, thinking there much be people out there who do not read articles that take longer than 10 minutes just like me 😅

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.

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.
2. The Authentic Happiness Inventory. The questionnaire has 24 questions and my overall authentic happiness (1–5) is 3.38.

Find and Use Your Signature Strengths

The VIA character Strength Survey helps you find your character strengths. 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 gained a better understanding of myself and others discussing about the results. See my top 4 character strengths below.

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.

This class covers…

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.”

The 1st to 6th week of the class consists of course videos, weekly “rewirement” activity, quiz, and optional readings. The 7th to 10th week is about picking one “rewirement” and stick to it for 4 weeks. In the end, remeasure our happiness and reflect on the “rewirement” challenge.

A. 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 if we do these rewirements as prescribed, we should get a boost in our mood and overall well-being.

Why is rewirement important? The class introduced the “G.I. Joe Fallacy”: “the mistaken idea that ‘knowing’ is half the battle”. Just “knowing” all the science, research, strategies, etc. 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.

Here is a quick breakdown of the rewirements taught in the class:

• Signature Strengths: use your top character strengths in new ways
• Savoring: take time to savor the things you enjoy
• Gratitude: express gratitude for the people and things in your life
• Kindness: increase your acts of kindness
• Social Connection: make connections with strangers and acquaintances along with scheduling time for the people in your life
• Exercise: increase your physical activity to 30+ min. a few times a week
• Sleep: make sure you sleep 7+ hours a night several times a week
• Meditation: meditate for 5–10 minutes if you are a beginner or increasing your time in meditation if you already meditate regularly

B. Misconceptions about happiness

It’s important to bust misconceptions about happiness… Good jobs, lots of money, awesome stuff, true love, the perfect body, the perfect grade, etc., these things that we think make us happy don’t really make us that happy.

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.

C. 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. 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:

• 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”. Getting into a great school or landing a great job was dream come true but the awesomeness wanes over time.

D. Strategies to reset our expectations

How can we overcome those annoying features and biases to reset out expectations? Here are some strategies:

• Getting over getting used to stuff: Don’t invest in stuff in the first place. Invest in experiences instead. No matter how amazing stuff was to start with, it sticks around and you get used to it. While experiences last much shorter. Once over, it became memories you cherish and savor. I echo with this and am slightly proud I mostly choose experiences over stuff.
• Thwart your adaptation by Savoring: Savoring 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, etc. hurts savoring.
• Thwart your adaptation by Gratitude: Gratitude is the quality of being thankful and a tendency to show appreciation for what one has. Writing a gratitude letter to someone who helped you, or just thinking about things you are grateful for, have positive and long lasting effects on happiness.
• Reset your reference points by Interrupting Your Consumption: Intuitively we want good things to continue. However, if you force yourselves to have interruptions and go back later, you’re resetting your reference points in a good way. For example, if you repeatedly listen to a song you like versus listening to it with breaks, the latter actually boosts your happiness… Split awesome things you love in life. It helps bump you out of the hedonic adaptation curve and get a good reference point.

E. What stuff really increases happiness

Learning how to overcome our biases and annoying mind features is one thing, but what about stuff that really increases happiness? There are essentially two parts:

Wanting the right parts of what we already want: for example, a focus on grades can undermine intrinsic motivations (engaging in a behavior because you enjoy the activity itself) and also hinder a growth mindset: “intelligence can be trained and most basic abilities can be developed trough dedication and hard work”. Instead of wanting good grades, want a good mindset.

Wanting better stuff that we don’t want yet: kindness, social connection, time affluence, mind control and healthy practices. Research shows that people who have higher kind motivation, kind recognition and kind behaviors are happier. Even thinking about kind acts increases happiness.

People with close social ties are less likely to fall prey to stressful events, and, happier. Even random connections can increase our happiness! Epley et al. asked people on public transportation to have a conversation with a stranger, keep to themselves, or do what they usually do. The ones making and receiving conversations both ended up with highest happiness. So, talk to random people on the street! It’ll make both of you happier than you’d expect.

Research done by Havard psychologists shows our minds wander 46.9% of the waking hours! Unfortunately, mind-wandering was found to have a negative impact on happiness. Meditation is a practice of turning our attention away from distracting thoughts towards a single point of reference. The practice of meditation can curb mind-wandering and makes us happier.

F. Putting strategies into practice

There are strategies that help us really change our behavior and create new habits that improve our happiness: situation support and goal setting. The former is about fixing bad environments and promote healthy ones. As for goal setting, I really like the WOOP framework by Gabrielle Oettingen. 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 helpful in creating long lasting habits in studies. I especially echo with the part about planning specifically. I can come 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 other priorities”, etc… Foreseeing those scenarios and planning for them can be challenging, but useful and rewarding.

Conclusion

Towards the end of the class, I measured my happiness again, and it 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. Originally, I was pretty skeptical this class could do much. So, however tiny the improvement is, as long as positive, I’m happy.

• Authentic happiness (1–5): Increased from 3.38 to 3.63.

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! I hope my sharing is useful to you and am happy to discuss more about my experience. Again, this article covers my top learning. If you’re interested in my full learning, read my other article: “My learning from “The Science of Well-Being”, Yale’s most popular class”.