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Live, Beautifully

Healthy "Artful Living" Moment #20: Achieving Happiness and a Sense of Wellbeing

Posted on June 08 2018

Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor at Yale University and also the "Master" of Silliman College (one of their "dorms"). In that role she came to understand better than she had as a faculty member that students are under a great deal of pressure, suffer from significant anxiety, and are not very happy. So she created a course based upon positive psychology and behavioral science designed to help students enjoy a greater sense of well being and happiness. That course attracted 1,200 students, which is about one quarter of the entire undergraduate student population at Yale, impressive evidence that her hypothesis was correct. It was the most popular course in the history of Yale and has earned world wide recognition.

I had a chance to attend a seminar given by Dr. Santos during my 50th Reunion at Yale where she shared the ten "Big Insights" about happiness that she built her course around. If you watch the attached video (below) you will recognize many of the suggestions she shares and supports with empirical evidence. It is quite likely that you do a number of these things already. But you owe it to yourself (and perhaps to other friends and members of your family) to consider adopting one or more additional suggestions in order to further enhance your personal sense of happiness and well being.

One final note. I ran out of phone memory before the end of the seminar, so I need to relay for her the final "Big Insight" that I failed to record on my phone. It is to focus more attention on "time affluence" rather than "financial affluence" because having more time for ourselves and for doing what we love will bring more happiness than more money will bring.

To discover the other nine "Big Insights" click on  https://youtu.be/4XR1QfFTlzw. Enjoy

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