The Science of Well-Being is a free online class taught by DR Laurie Santos and available on Coursera.org, an online learning platform that offers massive open online courses. More than 2.5 million people all around the world have registered for her class. I’m one of them. Why did I join? Because of the teacher.
Laurie Santos is a Professor of Psychology, the Director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory, and the Head of Silliman College, all of this at Yale University. But perhaps what she is most famous for, at least in the eye of the public, is the class that she started in 2018: Psychology and the Good Life. In a nutshell: the science of Happiness. 25% of the students signed up for that class, making it the most popular course in the school’s more than 300-year history. So, when I heard that a free online version of her class was available, I had to look into it.
This is how Coursera presents the course.
“In this course you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and build more productive habits. As preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos reveals 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.”
Using science to increase my happiness? I’m in! So, for the next few weeks I spent few hours a day, watching her videos and learning a lot about what really makes us happy and what we can do to increase our level of happiness. I loved it so much that I could not wait to finish my day at work to watch new videos. I must have finished the course in 5 weeks or so, instead of the usual 10 weeks. I learned a lot about the science of well-being. Concepts like miswanting*, hedonic adaptation**, social comparison***, and much more. You also have what she calls the rewirement challenge where you get to put the strategies you’ve learned into practice. Of course, not everything was new. Some of the solutions to get happier are well known. Meditation, physical activities, gratitude… If you’re interested in personal development, chances are that you’ve heard about those before. But the difference here is that the benefits of those activities are backed by science. Laurie mentions the studies and their authors. That’s for example how I’ve heard of Sonja Lyubomirsky and her book, The How of Happiness where she explains that 50% of our happiness comes from our genes, 10% from our circumstances and the last 40% from our actions. Again, this is backed by science. A very interesting book that I will most likely talk about in another post or podcast.
This course really changed my life. It gave me new tools to work on my happiness and introduced me to some authors and studies I was not aware of. I also listen to Laurie’s podcast, The Happiness Lab.
So if you want to be happier, I would strongly recommend to enroll in this course. And if you know other books, studies or courses you want to recommend, please share them via our comment section.
*Miswanting: the act of being mistaken about what and how much you will like something in the future
**Hedonic Adaptation: the process of becoming accustomed to a positive or negative stimulus such that the emotional effects of that stimulus are attenuated over time
***Social comparison: the act of evaluating oneself relative to other people
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