How To Be Truly Happy With Your Life
e path to happiness and the path to being an expert overlap. Here's the problem though: research shows that you don’t usually do what really brings you joy or makes you an expert -- you do what is easy. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: Studies have found that American teenagers are two and a half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when…
5 minutes
The 3 Steps To Becoming Stress-Proof
Know What Really Works Most of the things you instinctively do to relieve stress don't work. Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It: The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps…
4 minutes
Can one personality trait determine your future?
search is pointing to conscientiousness as the one-trait-to-rule-them-all in terms of future success, both career-wise and personal. Via How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character: "It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness," Roberts told me. "But at this point it's emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how people do." What is it? Basically,…
3 minutes
Are hope and despair both self-fulfilling prophecies?
ldiers faced a difficult "final exam" of a march across the desert in full gear. "The study manipulated the soldiers' hopes - and fears - about the difficulty of the march. The goal was to determine what, if any, impact their psychological state had on their physical performance." Via Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom: ...I developed the idea of manipulating hope to understand how optimism and pessimism affect the brain. The result was a large-scale study that…
3 minutes
Flow: The #1 Secret To Enjoying Your Work
u want to be experiencing "flow." It's when you're so wrapped up in what you're doing that the world fades away: Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity... The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described... as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even…
3 minutes
Why do life-threatening situations make some people more calm?
e heart rates of the best bomb disposal experts actually drop when they're in the danger zone. Why? Confidence. Via The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success: Back in the 1980s, Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman found something similar with bomb-disposal operatives. What, Rachman wanted to know, separated the men from the boys in this high-risk, high-wire profession? All bomb-disposal operatives are good. Otherwise they’d be dead. But what did the stars have that the…
2 minutes
Why do we play?
y do we play? We play in order to learn: Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul: Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents. How does this work? When something is fun, it commands our full attention and provides an emotional reward, two things that are key to strengthening memory:…
4 minutes
How can you make your weekends more awesome?
at's the research have to say about making Friday through Sunday that much better...? Don't Trust Your Instincts Ever eat or drink too much, feel awful, then do it again... and feel awful again? As counterintuitive as it may sound, we're actually pretty bad about remembering what really makes us happy. Reading Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert's bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness my main takeaway was this: Much of our unhappiness springs from the fact that we're terrible at accurately…
4 minutes
