Yale professor Laurie Santos created a bit of a stir when she developed the course “Psychology and the Good Life”. The essence of the course was teaching students about what research tells us actually makes people happy. And further to that, what we can do to move the happiness needle. Oh to have had this course when I was a freshman…
It quickly became the most popular course on campus, with up to a quarter of students signing up. Yale moved this course online in 2018 and began to offer it for free. Hundreds of thousands of people have gone through the course.
You may notice a theme from my prior writing, but someone in our household suggested that it might be a good idea to check this course out. Yes, if you thought I was referring to my wife Valerie, please give yourself a bonus point. Valerie had heard about it on Santos’ podcast “The Happiness Lab”.
I am a curmudgeon in many ways, but I believe more firmly every day that life is too short to be a miserable so-and-so. Considering that all of Professor Santos’ methods don’t require pharmaceuticals, commercial or recreational, nor do they cost anything but a bit of time and effort – why not give them a try? (If Valerie was narrating she might add “he said to himself grumpily”.)
In the interest of accountability, I am going to post some thoughts about each week of the course and share some of the insights. If you want to play along by taking the course and maybe adding your own reflections, please do. Sign up at www.coursera.org (search for “The Science of Well-being”).
Week one is a bit of a softball, and doesn’t try to scare you too much. One main point is that many Americans are not that happy. I was wondering about Canada. Looking outside the course materials, Canada is the 11th most happy country in the world according to the World Happiness Report for 2020, with the US coming in at number 18. On a global scale that is still pretty good, but that doesn’t lessen the feeling of less-than-awesomeness for many people. I should add that the 2020 report averaged data from 2017-2019, which is from the pre-Covid era. Current figures? Who knows {shudder}.
As for individual well-being, three options were given for the students to test their well-being before they do the rest of the course. Both the PERMA survey and Authentic Happiness surveys have online tools, but there is also the option for the student to indicate how happy they are on a scale of 1-5.
FYI, I scored 7/10 for overall well-being on the PERMA survey, which is exactly what I said in the survey as my own perceived happiness. On the Authentic Happiness survey I scored 3.25/5. So you might say “happy-ish”. OK, not bad, but let’s see if the next nine weeks make a difference.
The other test looked at relative strengths. What about your character is particularly developed? The survey indicated that my top strengths were: 1) Creativity 2) Love of Learning 3) Honesty and 4) Kindness. Even hearing such nice things from a computer algorithm is somehow warm and fuzzy. The challenge / assignment is to use those strengths in new and exciting ways in the week ahead. Stay tuned.
It does feel good to have a journey of self-improvement started before the January 1st onslaught of “new year, new you” hubbub. This year an invitation to hit the gym sounds about as appealing as falling face first into a petri dish in a biological weapons lab. Flexing happiness muscles from the safety of the home office seems like a much better idea.
Next week I will report back and talk about the week two topics and tools: Myths about Happiness, Savouring and Gratitude.
Photo by Stefan Ivanov on Unsplash
It sounds like an interesting course. I’ll look into it after my current exploration into creativity which, I have a feeling , may have some overlap.