Science of Wellbeing course 1

These are a few notes from a course I am doing online called "The Science of Wellbeing". It is offered by Yale through Coursera.  I've done a couple of Coursera courses before and found them really good. I decided to take this course a while ago, then being in isolation was the perfect time to get started on it. I've put a few notes here although there is a lot more in the course itself. I love the way Coursera lets you take notes, it's easy and it keeps them well organised. Worth doing a course with them I think.

Week 1:
They talk about rewirement in the first week - changing how we think and function which makes sense. There is a handout of a Rewirement workbook which I am working my way through. It's meant to be a week for each section, but some I do already so I'm skipping through those quickly.
We started with doing the PERMA Profiler and Authentic Happiness Inventory I'm not sure what my results mean at this stage, but I think we do this again at the end of the course and see if things have changed. It will be interesting. From PERMA my overall wellbeing score was 6.38 and my Authentic Happiness Inventory score was 3.83 - we'll see if these change!

The next step was to do the VIA character Strengths survey. I did this a long time ago but wa skeen to look again and see where my strengths lie. For those of you that know me, these results will come as no surprise!
Love of Learning - Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one's own or formally; related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.
Perspective - Being able to provide wise counsel to others; having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself/others.
Honesty - Speaking the truth but more broadly presenting oneself in a genuine way and acting in a sincere way; being without pretense; taking responsibility for one's feelings and actions.
Love - Valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing & caring are reciprocated; being close to people.


The first session was about the GI Joe Fallacy which is about our cognitive biases sticking around, even when we know better. This is a good clip to explain how this works. The diagram on the right is an example of this. even though we know they are the same length lines, we still thin k the bottom one is longer. To translate this to our social emotional idea, if we really want to change our behavior, we have to change habits. We can't just learn the stuff. We try to nudge people in the right directions, but does it work?

There were a few extra articles and books to read - here are a couple I found interesting:
Jachimowicz & McNerney (2015). Should Governments Nudge Us to Make Good Choices? Scientific American.
Thaler (2014). The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad. New York Times.
Martin Seligman’s TED Talk - The new era of positive psychology

Week 2:
The topics this week were Savouring, Gratitude and Happiness.
Savouring - take part in a positive experience, then savour that experience.
Gratitude - being grateful for things. Taking time to write these down or take a picture. I have been writing a gratitude journal for many months now and have also seen it work well in our school setting, with an amazing gratitude journal written by a colleague Justine. We have had our group write this every day and it's been interesting to see their thoughts and mindset to doing this. Hopefully we will carry on, during and after isolation!

Things we think will make us happy. This is opposed to things that will actually make us happy. One things that is mentioned it it does depend on whether you live in a poor or wealthy nation. Obviously if you are in a poor nation, as your income goes up, so does your life satisfaction due to getting even basic needs met.
2 books are mentioned:

Sonja Lyubomirsky - The How of Happiness 

David Myers - The American Paradox.

Begs the question "does money really make us happier?"

Answer is maybe a little bit, maybe if you're in the US and you only earn 10k a year, more money would make you happy. 

But for most of us, it's not going to make that much of a difference and it's making way less of a difference than we actually think. which is interesting.

Cars in hip hop culture - does owning a fancy car make us happy?

Does money make us happy?

Does true love make us happy?

Do these changes in beauty we think are going to make us happy, like losing weight, or changing our hair, do they make us happy? 

The answer seems to be no, in fact, these extreme changes in our looks or maybe even having these looks goals at all seems to actually reduce our well being.

Do good grades matter ? Most of the goals we have actually aren't going to make us happy. We put lots of time into them but it's not those things that make us happy. The rest of the course goes through what goals can make us happy.

Why does this happen? People think we are genetically set this way and that life circumstances matter and nothing can change that. In fact both of those are wrong. There is a big slice that is genetic, but 40% of what happens to us can be changed by us.

A few extras that I did enjoy:

YouTube clip on the  power of gratitude by Robert Emmon

GI Joe Fallacy article: Santos & Gendler (2014). Knowing is half the battle?

Interesting study done on why we overestimate the duration of affective reactions to negative events

High Income improves evaluation of life but not emotional wellbeing

I did the assessment for the first two weeks and passed with flying colours - looking forward to the next couple of weeks and will write another blog once I have completed them.