Positive psychology

Better wanting

Totally new things that many of you have not said that you wanted yet or don’t think you want yet that are actually going to give you a lot of bang for your buck; things that you don’t realize are really, really good but are the kinds of things that are going to have a much bigger impact on how happy you are.

1.Good job:

One is this phenomena you guys have experienced a little bit in your testing so far, which is that you should be seeking out jobs that kind of activate and let you use your signature strengths.

They tended to be ubiquitous, so they’re kind of recognized across all different cultures. They tend to be fulfilling, so they need to be kind of things that aren’t just like traits that you have that are just willy-nilly, they kind of lead to this lasting satisfaction. They tend to be morally valued in most moral systems of the world. They tend to be the kind of virtues that don’t make other people feel bad.

If we can identify different people’s signature strengths, and you could put those strengths into action, those are going to be the spots where you do best, you kind of show the most virtue, and the spots where you feel yourself flourishing the most. Those are activities and maybe even jobs and careers where you’re going to kind of experience the most meaning. And they also found, there seems to be the sweet spot and using four of your highest seven strengths for whatever reason.

Lavy & Littman-Ovadia (2017). My better self: Using strengths at work and work productivity, organizational citizenship behavior, and satisfaction. This paper tells us that those who use signature strengths at work are more productive and more satisfied with their job

Flow comes from a concept invented by the positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. But it’s this idea that we have this mental state in which you’re performing an activity where you are fully immersed, where you feel energized, focused, you’re fully involved, and you’re enjoying it as you go. It’s like being in the zone. It’s like this period where you’re so losing track of time in this deep enjoyment of something.

So, here’s some features of it. It feels like you’re doing something that’s challenging, so your attention is engaged, but it seems manageable. It’s not kind of stressing you out, you’re just doing it at your peak level. It also seems like you’re just really, really focused on concentrating on the activity. You’re incredibly in the moment. The activity is also in it of itself, intrinsically rewarding. You’re not doing it to get some grade or get some performance. You’re just loving it while you’re doing it. You have this feeling of serenity when you’re in that moment. You can even lose a sense of self-consciousness. You often lose track of time passing.

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing ones. The best moments really occur when a person’s body and mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

For most folks who are having interesting jobs is that when they’re at work, they describe being happy, they’re in this high challenge situation, they’re really being challenged, but probably because they’re at that job, their skills are about the right fit to handle it. And they actually report having these feelings of efficacy, feelings of self-confidence.

When we have free time, we often do these boring, low skill, low challenge kinds of things that doesn’t actually make us very happy.

2.Good grades:

We set up structures for you guys that allowed you not to do these kinds of cool learning things just for the love of learning, it allowed you to do them for a different motivational factor which is something external to the situation.

Can think of extrinsic motivations, which is that you want to engage in a behavior in part to get some external reward, be it a grade, or to avoid a punishment, like you’re doing it because somebody else is giving you some outside motivation to do it. Or you could do a different task because you have an intrinsic motivation. You just do it because you like it, right?

At some point for all of you, learning was that kind of thing, it was just fun in and of itself to do this stuff. But the presence of these external motivators might have a kind of counter-intuitive effect. It might steal the intrinsic motivation, kind of move all the motivation to the extrinsic side. Is that really what happens?

As you get more and more obsessed about what that grade is, as you care about it, because it matters for your internship or it matters for you to get into medical school and so on, it’s stripping away the very love of learning that probably got you here in the first place.

3.Growth mindset

Well the idea of a growth mindset comes from a fantastic researcher at Stanford, Carol Dweck, who’s kind of studied the beliefs that we have about our own abilities and the beliefs that we have about our own learning. And what she finds is that people tend to fall into one of two categories in terms of their beliefs. Some people have what she calls a growth mindset which she thinks of as very good. This is the idea that your intelligence and all your skills and all that stuff, it can be trained, you might start with some basic abilities, but those get improved over time through hard work. The idea that intelligence isn’t fixed you can kind of change it with some effort. That’s a growth mindset. Some people kind of believe intelligence works like that, but other people have a different kind of mindset which she calls a fixed mindset, which is kind of just the opposite. It’s this belief that intelligence or your skill sets, they’re just kind of these basic qualities that are there that maybe you’re born with, and you can’t really do much with them once you have them, you kind of just have them or not.

Growth mindsets show no decrease in intrinsic motivation when grades are bad fixed mindset folks drop a lot. Overall growth mindset had higher grades whereas and higher performance increases. So, both the final grade and the kind of slope of increase. Fixed mindsets you only achieve good grades at the end if you’re achieving good performance in the beginning and at any point where your grade drops, any signal that things are going bad, grades get even worse over time, you see a performance drop over time, and as you might guess there’s some emotions that go with this fixed mindset.

ERP caps to kind of measure people’s attention over time and where they were devoting their attention. And this was the task they gave folks. They had students answering these hard questions on a computer and the way it works is I’d ask you a hard question you have to do it, give your answer and then you’d get two things. First you’d get feedback, I would just say right or wrong you learn whether you got it right or wrong. And then, second after that you’re going to get the correct answer if you got it wrong. And then, what they did at the end of this you do all these hard questions, you think it’s just like doing these questions and then I say surprise, we’re going to see how much you really learn. We give you all the correct answers, do you actually remember them? And we’re going to see how this varies depending on different mindsets. And so, here’s what these folks find, what they find is that there’s a difference in when attention signals in the brain are on depending on your mindset. So, if you have a fixed mindset, all the kind of ERP signals that are associated with attention come on when I tell you whether you’re right or wrong, that’s when you’re like was I right or wrong and you find that information out. If you have a growth mindset in contrast those brainwaves kick on more when I show you the correct answer. You don’t care as much if you’re right or wrong. You’re sitting there waiting to soak in like oh hey what was the correct answer so I can learn something.

Mangels et al. (2006). Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model. This paper tells us those with growth mindsets tend to focus on learning-related goals and bounce back better from failure increasing the likelihood of learning success

4.Kindness:

We should be seeking out opportunities to do acts of kindness. Sounds less like the thing that your miswanting is telling you than getting good grades and getting a high salary. But it turns out this has much more happiness bang for your buck, just simply doing kind things.

Well, what you find is that consistently, happier people are thinking about doing more kind things and are more motivated to do them. They’re having more recognition of kind acts so they remember them more. And if you actually look at kind behaviors, they are doing more than people who are unhappy. The big kind of bang for our happiness buck is making you do a bunch of acts of kindness in a single day. Why? Probably just forces you to see them all and think about it all at once.

People predict I am totally going to be happier if I spend that on myself than if I spend that on somebody else like duh, right? They also make a prediction about the money. They say I’m going to be way happier if I spend the 20 bucks than if I spend the 5 bucks. because obviously 20 bucks is 4 times better than the 5 bucks, right? But it turns out that what really happens is different. What really happens is you get a super strong significant effect that the money you spend on other people makes you happier than the money you spend on yourself, which is pretty cool. The other thing you find is that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend. So the folks that spend $20 on somebody else are just as happy as the folks that spend $5. It doesn’t matter the amount. And again, this tells us two things. One is it is the case that doing kind things with our money for other people is good, but we also don’t realize that. This is another spot where we are miswanting in a bad way.

Dunn et al. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. This paper tells us spending money on others makes you feel good

5.Social connection:

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that that’s what I want in life”

Some wise person

Just how much do you hang out with people that you’re close with? And so, Myers has looked at this and found a bunch of things in his lovely review on this topic. He notes that, look, close ties with people – having a social connection is good for all kinds of health related stuff. It can actually make you less vulnerable to premature death. So, if I look at whether or not you’re going to die, if you’re an elderly person, you have more social connections, you tend not to. It can make you more likely to survive a fatal illness like cancer or heart disease and so on. And it makes you less likely to fall prey to the sorts of stressful events that mess up your life. All kinds of health consequences to social connection. But there’s also all kinds of happiness consequences too, at least when you look at who’s happy, who’s unhappy.

What you find as you look at their number of close friends, very happy people have more. If you look at the number of strong family ties, very happy people have more. And even if you look at the number of romantic ties, things like marriages and stuff, very happy people have more and have better ones.

What people predict is probably what some of you might predict which is that the solitude condition is the best of positivity followed by the control, and then, the connection when you have to actually talk to somebody on the train, it’s going to make you feel weird. It’s going to be awkward, looking and have to talk to that person it’s like going to suck. But what actually happens is, in fact, just the opposite. The solitude condition is the lowest one. People actually reduce their positivity from when they go on the train. People don’t like that. And they get a big boost in positivity when they do the connection. That’s on the train and you might say like, well, the train, you know.

Like, well one of the reasons people miss-predict this is they think like nobody is really going to be happy if I start talking to them. People are like, you know, working, and they don’t want to get interrupted. It’s just going to be socially awkward. So, is that really the case? What happens to the person who is talked to? And maybe, this is a kind of sad affect. . Like, it is the case that the other people you talk to are going to be happier too, even though you don’t realize that.

1. Epley & Schroeder (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. This paper tells us that talking to strangers makes us happy. Even if you are reluctant to talk to a stranger, you and the stranger get a happiness boost after talking to each other
2. Boothby et al. (2014). Shared experiences are amplified. This paper tells us sharing experiences with another person makes them better

6.Time Affluence:

But that’s what you get. You get this idea that being rich in some sense is being rich with money. But psychologists talk about a second kind of affluence. One that’s often at odds with this kind of wealth affluence, and that’s the idea of time affluence.

People that prioritize time over money, people that say they’re more, are happier on average than the folks who end up prioritizing money over time

1. Whillans et al. (2016). Valuing time over money is associated with greater happiness. This paper tells us that prioritizing time over money – as a stable preference – makes you happier.
2. Hershfield et al. (2016). People who choose time over money are happier.As the title suggests, this paper tells us those that choose time over money are happier – the paper also reveals that the majority of people choose money over time.

7.Mind control:

By this, I don’t mean the kind of cartoon, sci-fi mind control, where you are going to controlling other people’s mind. I actually mean controlling your own mind and stopping it from being all over the place, all of the time.

Mind-wandering, which as you can guess, is a phenomenon in which you’re shifting the contents of your thought away from whatever task you have ongoing and to event and from events in the external environment, so the things in your here and now to other self generated thoughts and feelings often things that are not in the here and now. In fact about 46.9 percent of the time just under half the time, we are not thinking about things in the here and now, we are not thinking about what we’re supposed to be focused on, we’re kind of out there wandering around.

But there’s also a set of parts of the brain – a network in the brain that seems to be on all the time when we’re not really focused on anything, when we’re off mind wandering. And that’s a set of regions that folks have referred to as the default network. It’s the default network in part because it’s the network of brain regions that kicks in by default whenever we’re not doing a task, whenever we’re doing something else. It turns out it also has some interesting energetic properties where it might be more efficient to run this network of the brain than all of the other networks of the brain that are focused on a task which is why we might default to it as much as we do.

So one of the strange features of this default mode network is that it seems to be a set of regions that are really fast. They can come on within a fraction of a second when you stop doing a task. These are the regions of the brain that help us do a different set of tasks, namely think outside the here and now. They get us out of our own reality experience and let us think about something else.

All this goes to see that what this default network seems to be doing is all the kinds of things that our minds do when we get out of the here and now, when we think about the past, something that happened before, think about the future, something is going to happen later, or think about what somebody else is thinking. In addition, what they found is that mind-wandering as they predicted had a pretty negative impact on happiness. Such that you’re less happy in most of the domains in which you are mind wandering.

” It’s pretty cool. We might be one of the only species that does it. “But it comes at an emotional cost. A wandering mind, in some sense, is an unhappy mind.”

Some wise person

Mason et al. (2007). Wandering minds: The default network and stimulus-independent thought. This paper tells us our brains are wired to wander – mind-wandering is associated with activity in the brain’s default network which is the cortical region active when the brain is at rest

One of those sorts of ways is amazingly meditation seems to be building in brain tissue and kind of strengthening our brains over time. Finally, there’s lots of evidence, new evidence suggesting that meditation can actually help you increase the things that we also see can increase happiness. Things like social connection and kindness and so on.

1. Brewer et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. This paper tells us meditation stops mind-wandering
2. Fredrickson et al. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. This paper tells us that meditation makes you happier
3. Hölzel et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. This paper tells us meditation increases gray matter