What makes you happy?

On 20 March the world will celebrate the International Day of Happiness, observed to promote human happiness and wellbeing. However, research reveals many of us harbour entrenched misconceptions about what makes us happy.

Yale University professor Laurie Santos – worried about the levels of depression, anxiety and stress she was seeing in her students – established a 10-week course on the science of wellbeing and vital strategies to help us make wiser choices and live more fulfilling lives. It became Yale’s most popular course, was subsequently offered free to the public and has so far attracted more than four million learners from around the world.

The Science of Well-Being course reveals misconceptions about happiness, scientifically tested ‘annoying features’ of the mind that lead us to grossly overestimate how much we think something will make us happy and offers exercises to help us appreciate the truly good things in life.

Here are seven key lessons from the course.

1. Understand what makes you happy

Many of us believe that having a high salary, a fancy car or the perfect body will bring us sustained happiness. However, these things only make us happy temporarily, before we return to our baseline happiness level and move on to the next big thing. In fact, we derive more happiness from our experiences and everyday fulfilling moments.

2. Use your character strengths in your work

Instead of focusing on a big salary, Santos recommends working in a job where you use your character strengths, such as your attention to detail, creativity or social intelligence; these can be identified using the VIA Character Strengths Survey. In doing so, you can increase your sense of purpose, job performance and wellbeing.

3. Practise gratitude

To help us stay alert to dangers when we were hunter-gatherers, our amygdala is programmed to remember more negative things than positive ones. To supersede this, gratitude journalling cements the good things in your day and life in general. Each night, spend a few minutes writing down five things for which you are grateful. Studies show this quick and simple practice can improve your mood, lower stress levels and strengthen your immune system.

4. Increase social connection

Studies show that people who experience social isolation have a 32% higher risk of dying early, compared with those who are not socially isolated. Santos recommends increasing social connection on a daily basis, whether that’s chatting to a stranger at the bus stop or making time to meet a friend for coffee.

5. Be kind to others

Happier people think about doing kind things and are more motivated to do them, and we should therefore be seeking opportunities to do good things for other people. This includes random acts of kindness towards strangers, being kind in our relationships and volunteering for a worthwhile cause.

6. Practise savouring the good things

Savouring, or the act of pausing to review and appreciate the good things or moments in life, is key to happiness. Whether you’re enjoying a moment with a friend, time out in nature or eating a delicious piece of cake, pause and appreciate it for what it is. Feel and acknowledge that joy, talk about it, write about it in your gratitude journal, or even take a photograph to engrave that feeling in your mind.

7. Know how to set goals effectively

We’ve all done it – made bold decisions to exercise more, meditate daily or learn a language. But studies show such resolutions are often too big and, with no plan as to how they might be achieved, they fall quickly by the wayside as life gets in the way.

To help you establish a plan to achieve your goals, Santos recommends the WOOP method:

Wish – set a meaningful goal or wish

Outcome – think about how it will feel to have this goal or wish fulfilled

Obstacle – roadblocks will inevitably get in the way when working towards a goal. Imagine in detail what these might be

Plan – devise in-depth strategies as to how you will overcome the obstacles that may get between you and achieving your goal.

What is the Science of Well-Being course?

Focused on the art of being happy, Yale's Science of Well-Being course is designed to get participating students to increase their own happiness and build more productive habits. To achieve this, the course explores misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and the research that can help us change. You will ultimately be prepared to successfully incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life.

What modules does it cover?

The course looks at everything from misconceptions about happiness and why our expectations are so bad, to how we can overcome our biases and a deep dive into the stuff that really makes us happy.

What is the duration?

The course runs for 10 weeks and is provided online via Coursera. At time of writing, there have been 4,816,699 enrolments with an average rating of 4.9 stars.

Who is the instructor?

Professor Laurie Santos is an expert on the cognitive biases that impede happiness. She has been featured as one of Popular Science’s ‘Brilliant 10’ young minds and was named TIME’s ‘Leading Campus Celebrity.’ Santos is also the podcast host for The Happiness Lab, which launched in 2019 and has over 90-plus million downloads.