What we learned from teaching a course on the science of happiness

When you deliver a university course that makes students happier, everybody desires to know what the key is. What are your suggestions? What are your top ten recommendations? These are probably the most asked questions, as if there may be some quick, surefire path to happiness.

The problem is that there aren’t any life-transforming discoveries, because most of what works has already been talked about. Social connection, mindfulness, gratitude letters, acts of kindness, going for a walk in nature, sleep hygiene, limiting social media use. These are among the 80 or so psychological interventions which have been shown to work to enhance our wellbeing (to a lesser or greater extent).

But if we already know a lot about what works, then why are we still fielding requests for top happiness suggestions?

The data tells us that students and young people today are increasingly unhappy, with national surveys finding wellbeing is lowest among the many young within the UK and the US in comparison with other age groups.

It was for that reason we began teaching the science of happiness course on the University of Bristol in 2019 – to counter some worrying downward trends. During the course, we teach lessons from positive psychology and create opportunities for college students to place these lessons into practice.

Learning the science of happiness

We award credit based on engagement — a very important component of not only education, but in addition getting probably the most out of life — moderately than graded assessments. It can be ironic to speak in regards to the problems of performance anxiety and student perfectionism only to then give our students a graded exam.

Course credit without examination? That should be a breeze you may say. However, for a lot of students, turning up on time to over 80% of lectures and tutorials, completing journal entries on a weekly basis and submitting a final group project turned out to be more of a challenge than they predicted.

Around 5% of scholars fail to satisfy the course demands every year, and have to finish a reassessment in the summertime. Creating consistent positive habits within the face of all of life’s other demands isn’t a trivial request.

Nevertheless, the science of happiness course is awfully popular. It also appears to be effective. Every yr we discover increases of around 10-15% on measures of scholars’ mental wellbeing at the top of the course, in comparison with a waiting-list control group.

However, we recently published the findings from a study that followed up with students one to 2 years after they’d taken the science of happiness course, before they graduated. When we checked out the general trends, students’ initially elevated scores of happiness had largely returned to their original levels.

We weren’t dejected, though. One of the mechanisms we teach on the course is hedonic adaptation: we get used to each good and bad things. Since humans have a brain wired to pay extra attention to problemsit comes as no surprise that the initial wellbeing boost we created within the course disappeared as students returned to specializing in life’s hassles.

However, we observed that not all students followed this pattern. Approximately half the cohort reported that they continued to usually practice among the things they’d learnt, corresponding to gratitude or mindfulness, many months or years after completing the course.

Although the scholars who not practised the activities returned to their happiness baselines, on average, those that did sustain with at the very least among the really useful activities showed no such drop. They maintained their elevated levels of wellbeing as much as two years later.

In some ways, mental health is not any different from physical health. Few people expect to see long-lasting muscle gains after one trip to the gym. For probably the most part, we’re begrudgingly aware that there aren’t any shortcuts if you desire to remain fit and healthy. You should follow this system.

New habits

The same applies to our happiness. Unless we keep working at it, the improvements are temporary. Indeed, if we did should give attention to only one top tip it is perhaps to learn learn how to harness lessons from psychology to construct the higher habits we want for lasting change. For example, aiming for small incremental changes moderately than an unsustainable overhaul of your whole life.

One thing we query is whether or not the self-care industry could also be sending out the unsuitable message by telling people happiness is all about making yourself feel higher. One of us, Bruce Hood, writes in his recent bookthat becoming a happier person in the long run is less to do with specializing in ourselves, and rather more to do with specializing in others.

Self-care may bring some short term advantages, but enriching the lives of others can offer wellbeing effects which can be less liable to adaptation over time.

Ultimately, whatever methods or activities we decide to enhance our wellbeing, we’d do well to do not forget that happiness is all the time a piece in progress.