The free Science of Happiness class from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is PACKED with content. I binged the first week’s class in one day, which included at least a dozen articles and videos. Here are some of my takeaways:
— Happiness takes work. While everyone has the capacity to increase their happiness and well-being, it doesn’t come by accident. Berkeley professor and course creator Dacher Keltner says we need tools and practices to pursue happiness.
— Happiness studies first began around 2,500 years ago with ideas raised by Buddhism, Confucius and Aristotle. But modern happiness research, with its connections to positive psychology, is much more recent, within the last two decades.
— Happiness isn’t just about feeling good, it’s about doing good. Researchers, such as Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the lecturers in the Science of Happiness class, now define the concept as “the experience of joy, contentment or positive well-being combines with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful and worthwhile.”
— Happiness thus can be broken down into EUDAIMONIC, which comes from meaningful pursuits, and HEDONIC, derived from pleasure or goal fulfillment. Happiness does NOT mean always feeling satisfied, feeling pleasure all the time and never feeling sadness or anger. (I think this confuses a lot of us, because it sounds like happiness includes sadness. Or happiness is the sky and sadness is the umbrella. Or something like that.)
— Experiencing the full range of human emotions actually contributes to overall happiness and health. This brings us to my favorite new word of the week: EMODIVERSITY, or the breadth of emotions in the human experience. Research at Harvard found that, among 37,000 respondents, emodiversity was the greatest predictor of physical and mental health.
— Happiness is good for you. Science shows happier people experience greater longevity, better physical health, richer relationships and more creativity and innovation.
— Social connection, kindness and “pro-social behavior” are key to human happiness. Professor Emiliana Simon-Thomas says, “When it comes down to the most promising way to be happy, we have to look to social connections, community and our ability to be kind.