Five Simple Steps to a Happier Life
_Featured_, Happiness Sunday, October 21st, 2012
Shawn Achor
Shawn Achor, the Harvard positive psychology guru, offers five steps for you to have a happier life.
Question: What are five things that people can do to be happier?
Shawn Achor: We discovered about five things so far that we know create a positive “Tetris Effect,” this pattern in which the brain diverts resources to actually scan the world to not only make us happier, but actually to raise our levels of performance as well. One of those is writing down three things you’re grateful for every morning. Another one of those is journaling for five minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past 24 hours. Writing down ever detail you can. When individuals do that, the amazing thing is, our brains have a very difficult time in telling the difference what we are visualizing and what we’re actually experiencing.
In fact, if I put my hand in front of my face and look at it, area 17 in my visual cortex lights up. Now if I close my eyes and think about my hand in front of my face, that same part of my brain actually lights up, area 17 in my visual cortex. Which means, my brain actually can’t tell the difference between visualization and experience. So when I journal for just five minutes a day, I’m actually doubling the amount of positive experience that I have. And then over a period of 21 days when you do this, is what we did for the experiment, when you do this for a period of 21 days, your brain connects the dots between these meaningful moments creating a trajectory of meaning that pulls you through each day instead of having your pattern be, “I got through these lists of tasks and now I’m done.”
We’ve also found that meditation, for example, creates a positive Tetris Effect in the brain because it trains your brain to do a single thing at one time. For example, I’m working with Adobe right now trying to take their hands off their keyboards once a day for two minutes at a time. And when they do that, to just watch their breath go in and out; it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, all we’re trying to get them to do is to do one activity at a time.
What this helped us to undo is the negative effects of multi-tasking during the day. It creates a Tetris Effect of us taking those resources we have in our brain and shining it down like a laser on our tasks. Raising our levels of engagement of happiness and decreasing our levels of stress.
We also know that if an individual does a random act of kindness over the course of the day…
Also see:
The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance
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