What We Get Wrong About Happiness, According To A Real Happiness Professor

What We Get Wrong About Happiness, According To A Real Happiness Professor

via the HuffPost by Stephanie Barnes

It’s commonly said that happiness can’t be bought. But it can, apparently, be learned through an online course.

Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, began by teaching college students everything they needed to know about the pursuit of joy. The original class, titled “Psychology and the Good Life,” was launched during the 2018 spring semester to help students deal with stress, anxiety, depression and loneliness.

The class quickly became the most popular offering in Yale’s history, attracting thousands of students eager to enroll. After overwhelmingly positive feedback, it was restructured as a free online course to reach a much wider audience.

The online course, titled “The Science of Well-Being,” is also led by Santos. During the 10-week program, participants are taught about happiness from a psychological perspective, including common misconceptions about being happy.

“The purpose of the course is to not only learn what psychological research says about what makes us happy but also to put those strategies into practice,” one course description reads.

Santos, who also hosts the podcast The Happiness Lab, told HuffPost that people often come into the class without truly understanding the meaning of happiness ― at least the meaning that experts use in research. Social scientists have a particular definition of what they call subjective well-being.

“They typically think of [happiness] as having two parts: a cognitive component — whether you’re satisfied with your life — and an emotional component — whether you have lots of positive and not so many negative emotions, which is sort of whether you are satisfied in your life,” Santos said.

Now that we have a better understanding of what happiness is, here are a few things it isn’t, according to Santos and research…

…keep reading the full and original article HERE