The Science of Happiness

You might be wondering why I've been blogging prolifically lately.  Last Monday, we had an in-service at school conducted by Shawn Achor, a social psychologist who studies Positive Psychology (or, the science of happiness and potential).  It turns out that it's all very scientific and brain based.  Our brains have these great things called mirror neurons, which essentially activate in response to what's in our visual field.  Our brain almost thinks we're looking at ourselves and causes the response we see to be enacted in our brains.  They are the reason we yawn when we see others yawn or nod when we watch others nod.  We smile in response to people smiling at us.  Unfortunately, they also mean that it's easy to be drawn in by negativity in the world around us.  It turns out that we can be happier and come closer to reaching our potential if we can develop an immunity to that negativity and teach our brains to seek out what is positive.

Our bodies have two possible reactions to a stressful situation: 1) we embrace our strengths, use our resources (including our social networks), reduce stress, and ultimately succeed; or 2) we spend all our resources on areas in which we're poor, focus only on the negative, divest from our social networks, increase our stress, and ultimately fail. 

So why do we want to be happy? Positive brains perform better because happiness causes a neurotransmitter called dopamine to be released in the brain, and dopamine enhances memory. So we learn and remember better when we're happy. If we're usually happy and then encounter a stressful situation, our brain is more likely to go about finding creative, new ways to solve the problem rather than shutting down like a quivering mass of stressed out jelly. When we're negative, our brain deletes possibilities that are in the environment; when we're happy, we add possibilities. Our brain also invents what is called a "counterfactual" to measure the stressful event against. Think of the counterfactuals as "what might have been." Counterfactuals can be either negative or positive...the upshot is if you're happy, then you're more likely to think "thank goodness no one died when I rear ended that car" than "now I have to call the insurance company and pay the deductible to have my car repaired and go through the inconvenience of dealing with this mess."  It turns out that it's actually pretty easy to teach our brains to create positive counterfactuals.

Long story short...we learn better and respond better to stress when we're happy most of the time, and there are some good ways to retrain our brains to be happier: 1) listing 3 gratitudes every day; 2) journaling; 3) meditation; 4) exercise; 5) random acts of kindness. AND doing something for 21 straight days creates a life habit. For me, blogging is journaling, and it's making me happy...so I'm going for 21 straight days of blogging, and I'm on day 9.

I know it sounds like a lot of psycho babble when I write it, but it was a fantastic in-service. I encourage everyone to take a look at Shawn Achor's work and consider reading his newest book. He explains it much better than I do.  He works with a lot of institutions, from colleges to wall street investment bankers. He is hired to teach people to be happier so that they can be more effective workers. He's an engaging and lively speaker and a brilliant psychologist. In fact, you can watch his lecture online if I'm not convincing (or if I'm so convincing that you want to know more).  If you don't buy into it, just support me for 12 more days...I should feel pretty happy by then!