Increase Happiness with the Science of Well-Being Course

About four and a half months ago, I started The Science of Well-Being course on Coursera. I’d heard about it on a podcast as a way to increase happiness, and thought it might share some insight for my Changes BIG and small podcast.

The course is self-paced over 10 weeks, organized in weekly modules. Each week, you watch video lectures, read articles and papers, complete quizzes and receive book recommendations. There is also an overarching challenge for the week, called a rewirement. You’re meant to do the activity throughout the week so that you can rewire your brain to be happier. Knowing something doesn’t create change, but action does.

“recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions“
Knowing is half the battle? Edge

Week by Week

Week 1

To start off The Science of Well-Being, each student does a number of assessments to determine their happiness score and their character strengths. Then the challenge is to do actions that make use of your top character strength all week long. Research shows that people who put effort into using their character strengths are generally more satisfied with their life.

Week 2

I found it fascinating to learn about how our minds mislead us in week 2. We often hear that our we should trust our intuitions, but our intuitions are often wrong. As a result, the things that we think will increase happiness (a new job, money, a new car, love) often have no enduring impact. What we can do instead, which is the rewirement challenge for the week, is to practice gratitude and take time savor the good things in life. Both of those actions increase the intensity and duration of the positive emotions of an experience.

Week 3: Why Our Expectations are So Bad

In week 3, we explore the annoying features of the mind. The professor, Laurie Santos, presents many examples of research to help us understand where the misconceptions of happiness come from. From the studies, we can see these annoying features of the mind:

miswanting (being mistaken about the positive impact of something in the future)
when we accomplish something, we judge it by arbitrary reference points or we shift our goals so that we are ever grasping for more
hedonic adaptation – we get used to things over time
we compare ourselves to others to determine our satisfaction/success
impact bias – we get used to things but we think they will have a greater effect on us than they do
immune neglect – we are not aware of our psychological immune system

There are two challenge for this week. The first is to do an act of kindness every day and track it. The second is to create a new social connection each day. By building social connection, we can increase our happiness.

Week 4 – How Can We Overcome Our Biases

This week, we focus on how we can overcome the annoying habits of the mind. There are some concrete practices that help. Are you someone that gifts experiences instead of things. You are on the right track. We can do that for ourselves as well, since we know that stuff doesn’t increase happiness. With experiences, we can maximize the benefit by taking time to savor. We can also work on increasing our reference points by stopping and thinking about what life was like before, and what it is like now. This gives us a chance to practice gratitude and realize how lucky we are. Other strategies are to actively avoid social comparison, increase our variety of experience and break our repetitive cycles. By taking a break and coming back to something we enjoy doing, we can give ourselves an occasional boost of happiness.

The rewirement this week is to focus on 30 minutes of exercise each day and to sleep at least 7 hours for four nights this week. Both of these activities boost our mood and can increase cognition, in addition to having other health benefits.

Week 5 – Stuff that Makes Us Really Happy

Previously, we looked at how the things we think we want don’t make us happy. There is a way to flip this. We can actually increase our job satisfaction. When we find jobs that allow us to be in flow () and to use our character strengths, that increases our happiness. At school, good grades do not increase happiness, but we can use the chance to cultivate a growth mindset. A growth mindset helps with achievement and with overcoming setbacks.

There are several other things that we can do to increase our happiness. We had a head start in practicing some of them in previous weeks. These include performing acts of kindness for others, building social connections, exercise and adequate sleep, mind control for example via meditation, and time affluence (having time to do the things we want to do.

The main rewirement for this week is to meditate at least 10 minutes daily. There is a second task to write a gratitude letter to someone, and then meeting with them to read it out loud to them. Expressing gratitude to someone is associated with a happiness boost.

Week 6 – Putting Strategies Into Practice

This week is a turning point in The Science of Well-Being. The focus is strategies to help us develop new habits. We learn some strategies that we can use to be able to habitually complete the actions that lead to happiness. The focus is on three areas: situation support, goal specificity and planning. If we want to be successful with a goal, we can remove barriers to that goal in our environment and increase helpful cues. We also learn about mental contrasting and implementation intentions and how they come together in the WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) process. Thinking about our goals, barriers to them and then creating a plan to overcome these barriers help us clarify what we have a passion for and what we reasonably accomplish. There is no rewirement this week so that we can experience time affluence.

Week 7 – 10: The Rewirement Challenge

In the last four weeks of The Science of Well-Being, we get to focus on building a new habit. We’ve had a chance to practice several rewirements, and Dr. Santos invites us to choose one to focus on for four weeks. To recap, the options are using our strengths, savoring experiences, keeping a gratitude journal, connecting to others, performing kindness to others, exercising regularly, sleeping more and meditating. Applying our own criteria, we choose one challenge for the month.

Each week, we keep track of our progress with our rewirement, with prompts to help us build the new habit. In week 7, we set an implementation intention. In week 8, we socially commit to our action. Week 8 has a focus on building situational support, and week 10 is about developing our growth mindset.

Does The Course Increase Happiness?

You’ve made it this far! 🙌🏽I found this course interesting and it did help me develop some new habits. I already use my signature strengths but I’m looking out for new ways to do so. This course was an example of this, as my signature strength is my love of learning. As I go for my (almost) daily walk, I find myself looking around more for things of beauty to practice savoring. I’m sharing them with others more often, usually in a text message or on Instagram. I journal some things that I am grateful for (almost) daily. I’m finding to exercise kindness during this pandemic. I’ve been socially connecting but I’m not very comfortable interacting with strangers. In any case, I have few opportunities to do that these days. I exercise regularly, and I meditate almost daily. The area with the biggest room for improvement is sleep.

The thing is that I was already doing or trying to do many of the recommendations. Having the weekly rewirement challenges encouraged me to focus on each activity for a week. For my final challenge, I chose meditation because that’s the one that I most want to be a regular part of my life. I seldom slow down but I do think that it’s beneficial to able to be in the moment. I would like to slow my monkey brain and reconnect with the ability to be present.

So should you take The Science of Well-Being? If you are interested in building any of the habits mentioned, or trying to increase your happiness, go for it. I think that by choosing to take this course, and committing to it, you will get a chance to develop an understanding of your brain. And even better than the knowing, you have a chance to do something to develop it. I think it would be fun to recruit a friend and take the class with them.

I hope that you are safe and happy!

Resources

What to know how happy you are and your strengths? Try these quizzes: