As head of Silliman College at Yale University, Laurie Santos interacts closely with students. Over the past few years, she’s grown more concerned about their mental health. “I came to realize that college students were more depressed, anxious and overwhelmed than students realize,” says Santos, who is also a professor of psychology. “I was really worried about what I was seeing.” So she designed a new class, called the Science of Well-Being, that teaches students, in essence, how to be happier.
Launched in January, the class has quickly become one of the most popular courses at the college. It covers what psychological research says about the things that makes us happy and, more important, how to put specific strategies into practice. More and more, mental health providers are learning that happiness can, in fact, be taught and learned.
The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California–Berkeley offers an online course called the Science of Happiness. It is co-taught by Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, the center’s science director. While this course has been offered for more than a decade, it was started for much the same reason as Yale’s course. “People’s lives are more stressful and difficult than we would expect, given the degree of comfort and privilege most of us enjoy in American middle class society,” Simon-Thomas says.
Though there are some biological contributors to happiness, like family history of depression or other mental illness, “those predilections are not 100 percent of the story,” Simon-Thomas says. “We know now that much of our daily experience depends on how we live our lives.” In fact, as a rough scientific estimate, she says that about 40 percent of perceived happiness depends on how we live daily. “We have quite a bit of control over that,” she says. “We can choose to walk outdoors or watch American Idol, but because we know that a walk outdoors leads to objective happiness, that’s the better decision. Those are the kinds of moments we hope to give people more leverage on.”
[Read: Money Can Actually Buy Some Happiness. But How Much?]
Happiness Takes Work
The tough part, Santos says, “is that it takes work. You don’t just hear about the science of happiness and instantly feel better. You have to change your behavior. It takes work and effort every day.”
The first step comes with understanding what science tells us about what truly makes people happy. “It’s not the stuff we think. It’s not salary and a big house and lots of new tech gadgets,” Santos says. Rather, it’s about simpler things, including taking time for social connection, proactively experiencing gratitude and finding ways to stay in the moment. “All these things matter more than we think,” she says. Another misconception is that changing life circumstances, such as a job or where we live, can lead to more happiness. “Happiness comes from changing our mindset, not our circumstances,” she says.
The leading predictor of happiness is what social scientists call prosocial behavior — how people interact with other people. Simon-Thomas says courses like hers teach “how to leverage and bolster prosociality. How to be a more authentic and emotionally rich person because you trust the community of humans around you to be supportive.” This interpersonal social space is the most promising opportunity for people to increase their own levels of happiness, she says: “Very happy people are people who have strong social support.”
Simon-Thomas also teaches an important distinction. “The most problematic misconception is when people think happiness is about smiling and being cheerful all the time, but those moments are specific emotional states, like amused, proud, grateful, that respond to a specific context. Those aren’t equivalent to happiness,” she says. “Happy people have an easier time enjoying those states, but they are also very comfortable with appropriate moments of anger and sadness and fear. Thinking you just need to smile all the time and fake it till you make it and put on a surface act is pretty problematic.”
[See: 6 Proven Ways to Bring Happiness to Your Life.]
Doing the Work
In her course, Santos first presents empirical research. “There’s lots of cool work studying what makes happy people happy, and we talk through that work so students can see the science directly,” she says. “But more importantly, I give students the assignment of actually doing the practices that increase subjective well-being.” Those practices include meditating, taking time off from work and daily chores, exercising and sleeping more. “Since happiness comes from our behaviors, simply having students do better practices can have big effects,” she explains.
As a final exam, Santos assigns what she calls the Hack Yo’Self project. Students design, run and write their own self-improvement project. “They systematically change their behaviors and test if it made them happier. Students did lots of things, from exercising more to limiting social media to doing more creative projects to trying to develop better habits,” she says.
Similarly, the Science of Happiness course surveys literature on the topic and directs students to try practices that research has shown improve happiness in measurable ways. That includes self-monitoring. “Students have to notice where their happiness is currently and reflect on that,” Simon-Thomas says. “Most of us just wait for happiness to happen, but that isn’t the most promising route. We need to audit it and pay attention to what contributes to it.”
[See: 10 Tips to Lighten Up and Laugh.]
Other activities include what Simon-Thomas calls “three good things.” Students must document three things in their daily life that can increase optimism and orient them toward positive and joyful feelings. She also promotes “random acts of kindness,” such as holding doors open for people and offering help to others who need it. One week is dedicated to inner awareness — mindfulness, breathing exercises, focusing on thoughts and judgments that emerge daily, compassion-focused meditation — “all to attune to where you are right now,” she says. Another week is about increasing gratitude, and another works on reconciliation and conflict resolution. “There are important properties and advantages to apologizing and forgiving others,” she says. “Science shows that holding grudges is very harmful to the grudge holder.”
Both professors say their students self-report higher levels of perceived happiness after the courses. Simon-Thomas also asked students to nominate a friend to speak about them, and those friends saw her students as less sad, anxious, complaining or self-oriented. Follow-up surveys four months later showed that those improvements remain. (With one unsurprising exception: 2016. “The year of the election, the benefits declined, stress and anxiety went back up, so contextual factors can contribute” to perceived happiness, Simon-Thomas says.)
Looking for crib notes to these courses? Both Santos and Simon-Thomas offer a few key strategies to learn how to be happy. Increase your social connection. Take time for the people you care about. Exercise more often. Sleep a bit more. Be mindful, grateful and generous.
And notice they say nothing about buying the latest smartphone.
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