The Science of Well-being | Intro & Misconceptions about Happiness

G.I. Joe Fallacy

• Mistaken idea that knowing is half the battle
• Knowing something is not enough to actually change your behavior
• If we really want to change our behavior, we have to change habits

Savoring

• Act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it
• Intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something you love
• Boosts our mood:

1. make us remember the good things in life
2. helps thwart mind wandering, keeps us in the moment
3. helps increase gratitude

• Practice the art of savoring by picking one experience to truly savor each day

-Ex. nice shower, a delicious meal, a great walk outside, etc.
-Enhance savoring: 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
-Make a note of what you savored

Gratitude 

• Positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has received in life
• Benefits:

1. increases mood
2. lower stress levels
3. strengthens immune system
4. lower blood pressure
5. stronger social connection 

• Take 5-10 minutes each night to write down five things for which you are grateful

-Revise and reconsider goals and aspirations that will not lead to improved well-being
-Practice savoring and gratitude every day for at least one week

Things we think will make us happy (but don't)

• Understand that simply knowing is not enough to change behavior
• Examples of what things won’t make you as happy as you think they will

Jobs

• what we think we need actually jumps up every time we get more
• this is a problem for kind of finding a good job that's going to give us a good salary

Money

• psychological wealth is not financial wealth
• Ed Diener's studies look at what the correlation is between your income and life satisfaction

-poor nation: true that as your income goes up, your life satisfaction goes up
-presumably if you're super poor, you're not actually getting your even basic needs met
-wealthy nation: not really seeing any correlation

• David Myers: "Compared with their grandparents, today's young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and in fact a much greater risk of depression and all kinds of social pathology."
• Emotional well-being rises with your income but stops after $75,000. Why $75,000? Not really clear but they know that's kind of a plausible number at which you think money's not an issue
• Life Evaluation: "Imagine you could evaluate your life on a ladder numbered from 0 to 10 and the bottom is the worst possible life and the top is the best." Where do you put yourself on this ladder? What's your perspective on your own life? Not, are you actually happier, actually blue, actually stressed, but your own vision of your own life
• Even though our emotional well-being isn't going up after $75,000, we think our own evaluation of our own life is going up
• Mismatch between how we're actually feeling & how we're evaluating our real life
• high income doesn't actually mean happiness but it kind of makes you think that you must have a life that's happier when you're like, "I make $200,000. " When you think of that, you're like, "I must have a really good life" even though it's not actually translating to

Awesome Stuff

• Folks in the 1940's didn't have half the awesome stuff that we buy to make our lives happier
• science is learning is that thinking about stuff, kind of being materialistic, wanting stuff, and sort of striving to get it seems to actually make us worse off than we would be at baseline
• materialist attitudes that wanted stuff had lower life satisfaction than non-materialists

True Love

• certain number of people got married & they got asked are those married folks happier than the non-married folks? if they are happier, how long does it last? 
• married people are in fact happier in that first year or two. there is this honeymoon effect where you report being happier. but sadly, after that, it goes back to baseline

Perfect Body

• folks that lose weight, folks that are stable on their weight, & folks that gain weight—at baseline, they're about the same, but four years later, the folks that lost weight are actually in the worst category
• they're the ones reporting the most depressed mood & it's almost like double the kinds of depressed mood that we see in other folks
• people who'd eventually get cosmetic surgery were already worse than other folks
• does beauty really make us happy? do these changes in beauty we think are going to make us happy, like losing weight, or changing our hair, do they make us happy?
• these extreme changes in our looks or maybe even having these looks goals at all seems to actually reduce our well being

Good Grades

• getting a grade higher than you expected is way less high on a happy scale than you expect
• you're still kind of mostly happy, but not as good as you expect, not really any different from getting what you expected on getting 
• getting lower than you expect is way better than predicted, it's not actually going to affect your happiness that much

Why we have misconceptions

• How much do genes and life circumstances play into happiness?

-50% genetic set point for happiness
-10% effected by life circumstances
-40% controlled by actions, intentions, habits that people bring in

• We can work hard to be happier. The problem is that we are working towards the wrong things.
• The mind all the time is delivering to us these intuitions about what's going to make us happy, what's correct, etc. with full force, like that's the right answer, but it is just wrong.
• In the 1940's, people aren't seeing commercials and advertisements for things on TV and on the Internet in nearly the same way as now. all those things seep in, pushes material culture

Sometimes, the things that our brain are telling us to do are either not true or lead us astray. How do we deal with that? Mindfulness and mindful noting of different thoughts. These things that you have these cravings for are really just thoughts. Thinking of them as such can cause you to take a step back & really look at whether those things are helping you.