Better Wanting
As a course first designed for overachieving Yale students, it is no surprise that Professor Laurie Santos starts the week by offering some thoughts on alternatives to seeking “great” (prestigious, high paying) jobs and excellent grades.
On the topic of jobs, we would be better served by finding jobs that allow us to use our strengths in new and creative ways. The signature strength assessment from week one can help point out some potential areas of focus.
Santos also describes the concept of “flow” which was popularized by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. {Note: for a more in-depth read check out “The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium” which includes a discussion of flow and much more.} Flow comes when we take on a task that is challenging but manageable. The task at hand can absorb us to the point where time passes quickly. We are fully engaged, without the anxiety that comes with exceeding our capacity, and certainly aren’t bored as we would be in a task that is way too easy for us. Seeking a job that provides us opportunity for experiencing flow, or taking on tasks within our jobs that do the same would be a plus.
In general, work turns out to be more pleasurable than we guess. Least happy day of the week for many people? Sunday. All our work and chores are done for the week, so we should just be chillaxing and loving it, right? This points to the concept that even our leisure should be challenging if we expect it to contribute to our well-being.
So how about grades? Remember when we were kids and learning was just about having fun? Somewhere along the way, many of us started looking at the letter grades and who was on the Honour Roll or not. Learning for its own intrinsic rewards is a much bigger contributor to happiness. It is not subject to some outside gauge or social comparison.
It is also helpful to correct a common myth: that our learning ability is fixed. In fact, there are no “math genes”, so we should all relax about that. If we can look at learning with a “growth” mindset, the potential for us to make positive changes in our learning and performance is much better. I once heard an educator say that in her classes kids were not allowed to say “I can’t do math”. But they were allowed to say “I can’t do math – YET”. It is a very subtle but important distinction. I intend to explore this growth mindset by making my next course a calculus course. Don’t worry, I won’t devote future postings to tales of solutions to differential equations.
In the discussion of further concepts to improve well-being, Santos touches on kindness, connection, time affluence and meditation.
Kindness – doing things for others produces more happiness than simply being selfish. This is especially true when we can see the direct results of our charity. Humans are very social creatures who have depended greatly on each other for survival over millennia. So it should be no surprise that kind acts that boost our social connection (and maybe some hope of reciprocation during lean times) feel good. Interestingly, we get a similar feeling whether we spend $5 or $20 on others. So even a small amount really does make a big difference, for us and the friend we share with or charity (hopefully for animal welfare) we donate to.
Connection – the flip side of connection – isolation – is a major downer when it comes to our happiness level. If we feel alone, even a king’s ransom in money is not enough to offset the bad mojo.
In Santos’s interview with Nicholas Epley, he indicates that we underestimate how good it will make us feel to connect with total strangers, and how receptive they are if we engage them on the bus or in a line up or on the street. His experiments, which often involve bribing test subjects with a $5 Starbucks gift card (crack cocaine for the urban commuter), include getting people to talk to strangers on the subway. It turns out that people really enjoy the experience.
Epley also describes a study where some participants were asked to make eye contact with the patrons at an art gallery or museum. The participants who made eye contact with the patrons gauged the crowd to be friendlier than if they just observed them and did not make a specific effort to connect.
A couple of bonus nuggets from the Epley interview: 1) His observation that “Happiness is a mood state, and moods don’t last”. So much for the one-time, magical pill! This is a somewhat disheartening but realistic acknowledgement that building up our well-being must be an ongoing practice. 2) His “practice what you preach” approach – whereby he keeps stationery on hand to send out gratitude letters, and keeps his flip phone (not smartphone, note!) tucked away at any time the phone could distract him from building connection with real humans.
Time Affluence – on Dan Harris’s excellent “Ten Percent Happier” podcast I heard Santos describe this as “JOMO” – the joy of missing out. Basically we are happier if we have more time for the things that matter in life, and don’t try and overschedule ourselves. We can give ourselves more time affluence by avoiding commitments. Warren Buffett claims that his biggest success has come from one word: “No”. Sometimes happiness comes from what we aren’t doing! We can also take a look at what we can reasonably outsource (especially tasks we aren’t fond of – like a deep housecleaning). We know that a bunch of extra money doesn’t contribute to happiness, so trading money for time is a heckuva deal.
In the Harris interview Santos also describes “time confetti”, those bits of time that make up a fair bit of our total available spare time. We often have a fair bit of spare time, we just fill it in ways that don’t make us happy (hello doomscrolling). She suggests that we make a list of things that contribute to well-being and can fit into our bits of time confetti. Like writing out a gratitude note, phoning a friend you have been meaning to call, meditating or getting in some movement (you can even get an awesome calorie-burning workout in as little as 10 minutes with zero equipment, through high-intensity interval training).
Meditation – A half hour of meditation, once a day for eight weeks actually increases the amount of grey matter in your brain! Meditation helps tame what is often called “monkey mind”, but Valerie and I affectionately call it “squirrel patrol”. You know, when our minds are still for about a millisecond then race off to chase down a ”nut” of past disappointment or future obligation. Neuropsychologists call this “activity in our default network”. Apparently really long-term meditators are good at shutting this down. But the general point is, every little bit of meditation, of any kind, can be a big help.
Meditation keeps you in the here and now. Living in the past is depression, living in the future is anxiety as the saying goes (author unknown, although this is often incorrectly attributed to Lao Tzu).
One of the “rewirements” for the week was to meditate at least 10 minutes each day. I have been reading and hearing about the benefits of meditation for YEARS. But somehow I could not bring myself to do it. But in the interest of accountability to myself and to you, dear reader, I sucked it up and got it done. There are a million different meditations out there, including some free links in the course. You can also find them on Spotify or search YouTube or elsewhere. Or you can just sit and breathe, focussing on each breath in – and out. I have deliberately tried different styles at random and even did some affirmation-focussed meditations that normally would have triggered the gag reflex in my less open days. Most recently I shifted to chill, ambient, background music and have tried to extend my meditation time. The goal, as one helpful narrator said in my random meditations, is both discipline and kindness. So we aren’t wrestling your mind per-se. If our minds wander off, we make a gentle correction and resume the steady focus on the breath. I try to break it into 10 breath increments. If I can get 10 good breaths in a row without going on “squirrel patrol”, that’s a meditation win in my books. I don’t spike my meditation pillow or anything, just so you know.
The other “rewirement” was to prepare a gratitude letter to someone who made a difference in your life and then present it to them. You can read my gratitude letter here. I had not made contact with the person in question for over thirty years and have not heard back yet but stay tuned.
Week 6 focusses on setting ourselves up for success in making changes, like developing habits to improve our well-being. In the meantime, feel free to share anything you are doing to boost your own happiness. Drop a note in the comments section below.
Photo by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash