Week 2 — Savoring & Gratitude

• Savoring and gratitude are a key skill set for happiness. There are two psychological patterns that undermine happiness: mind wandering and hedonic adaptation. (There are two referenced in the course: there are many more here ‣)
  • Mind wandering takes us away from the present moment and into thought: usually worry in the future or regret in the past.
  • Hedonic adaptation is the problem of the good stuff wearing out. If you have a five star dinner and two glasses of wine every night it will not have the same bang for its buck.
  • Cultivating mindfulness so as to savor an experience with sustained feelings of gratitude can mitigate these unfortunate patterns.
• There are many false goals and assumptions to unlearn (Prof Santos calls it “miswanting”)…
  • good job — The actual impact of getting or not getting one’s dream job is far less than predicted impact.
  • salary — Research by Sonja Lyubomirsky found the amount of money people think they need to be happy increases with earnings: those making $30K say they need $50K and those making $100K say they need $250K and so on. This is an obvious problem. Research from Daniel Kahneman suggests that around $108K in today’s income is sufficient: beyond this point our day to day experience of happiness starts to level off whilst overall life evaluation may continue to rise.
  • money — The correlation between income and happiness is approximately 0.1 across all studies. In 2015 the US spent $70.15 Billion on lottery tickets which is more than books, music, movies, sports, and video games combined.
  • more stuff, higher grades, and a better body — The bad news is these don’t seem to work either.
• Where does happiness actually come from then?
  • Happiness is some combination of genetics, circumstances, and intentional behaviors. Happiness is partially determined by genetics (perhaps 30-40%).
  • We can control our intentional actions and somewhat influence our circumstances. So it’s about doing more than wanting: behaviors over goals.

Yale University’s The Science of Wellbeing with Laurie Santos - Week 3