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Interview – Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker on how to increase happiness and meaning in life:
a little bit of awe what you need to be a better person? Is your calendar the secret to happiness? What makes for a meaningful life? These are some of the things I talked about with my friend Jennifer. She's a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and has published fascinating papers on happiness, meaning, money and how we spend our time. Her book is The Dragonfly Effect. Subscribers to my free weekly newsletter get access to extended interviews. Join here. The big big…
6 minutes
What can your iPhone teach you about happiness?
bsp; A while ago I posted about using a happiness boosting iPhone app created by researcher and author of The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky. For the past couple months I've been using another app, In Flow. What I liked about this one was that it replicates the method that big happiness researchers like Dan Gilbert have used in their studies. The app prompts you at random times and asks you to fill in: How you feel What you're doing Who you're with Where you're…
2 minutes
How can you use your imagination to quickly boost your happiness?
bsp; I've posted before about how optimism, savoring and anticipation have all been shown to increase happiness. In Tali Sharot's book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain she explains a scenario that illustrates how you can use these concepts to easily make yourself happier: For desirable events, such as a foamy pint of Guinness, optimism increases the joy of anticipation by (a) increasing our expectation that we will receive our pint sooner rather than later, (b) enhancing our…
2 minutes
How To Increase Happiness, Bravery And Your Attention Span
ditation. I listed it as one of the 10 things should you do every day to improve your life. It can boost happiness. Via Shawn Achor’s The Happiness Advantage: Take just five minutes each day to watch your breath go in and out. While you do so, try to remain patient. If you find your mind drifting, just slowly bring it back to focus. Meditation takes practice, but it’s one of the most powerful happiness interventions. Studies show that in the minutes right after…
3 minutes
Here’s The Magic Number That Leads To Happiness
w much happiness does it take to make up for the sadness in life? A ratio of 3 to 1. Via Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook: Psychologist Barbara Frederickson is an expert on flourishing and has been an advocate of finding ways to bring more positive emotions into our lives. In her research she discovered a critical 3 to 1 ratio, indicating that we need to have…
3 minutes
How much happiness does it take to make up for the sadness in life?
to 1. Via Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to Retrain Your Brain to Overcome Pessimism and Achieve a More Positive Outlook: Psychologist Barbara Frederickson is an expert on flourishing and has been an advocate of finding ways to bring more positive emotions into our lives. In her research she discovered a critical 3 to 1 ratio, indicating that we need to have three positive emotions for every negative one in order to thrive. And: Frederickson has found out that…
3 minutes
What would an engineer’s system for happiness look like?
bsp; "Perhaps you're thinking: “What can two pointy-headed math geeks possibly teach me about happiness?” As any good, curious engineers would do, the two of us set out to define, measure, and discover the properties of happiness in a systematic and analytical way. Our curiosity has led us to some fascinating findings, the most important of which is our belief that happiness can, in fact, be engineered." Via Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life: We have…
2 minutes
What brings more happiness: anticipation or surprise?
bsp; What follows is a true story in which your humble narrator is faced with a real life test of his ivory tower research posts and responds by nearly losing bowel control: So you're going to give someone a gift -- is it better to tell them it's coming and let them savor the anticipation or to whallop them out of nowhere with an enormous surprise? It's a good question. A very good question. And I'm not flattering myself…
4 minutes
