Let’s Get Happy Together!
At the tender age of 19, I decided to major in Psychology. I had considered other equally vague and low paying majors, including communications, criminology, and philosophy. But in the end I followed my heart, hunkered down, and committed to dedicating the rest of my life trying to figure out why the hell people do the things they do—the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
What most people don’t understand is that Psychology isn’t just a fluff field reserved for people who suck at math. Ok fine, it is that, but it is also so much more.
The working definition of Psychology is “the study of mind and behavior in humans and non-humans (Wikipedia).” However, a tremendous amount of resources within the field have been allocated to better understanding the principles of learning. From the moment we are born, we learn patterns of thinking and behavior that cause us to DO the things we do. We are exposed to a stimulus and we respond in a particular way. Over time, the response becomes learned, which allows us to consistently demonstrate the same behavior over and over again without ever really thinking about WHY we are doing it. Instead, we just do it.
In recent years, the discipline of Psychology has found itself obsessed with theories on motivation and happiness and how they relate to productivity and our overral sense of well-being. In fact, Yale’s beloved course The Psychology of Happiness is one of the most popular classes the university has ever offered.
With this in mind, it raises the interesting question: Is happiness something that can be objectively measured and calculated? Is it possible to determine in a real sense if one person is truly happier than another? And if so, are there habits of happy people that can be imitated or learned so that we all have access to quantifiable happiness?
This topic has been heavily investigated and it turns out that, in fact, there are several traits associated with happiness. Here’s a quick list:
Gratitiude
Mindfullness
Acceptance
Resiliance
Altruism
Optimism
Balance
Authenticity
Do you agree? Are there others you might add? Are there one or two traits on the list that resonate with you in particular and, if so, why?
At any rate, we might get a temporary burst of dopamine from reading this list of happy sounding words, but how do we actually put these attributes into practice? Do you need to be born with these traits or can they be learned and put into practice in our everyday lives?
While there are multiple theories of learning within the field of Psychology, operant conditioning involves the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement. In positive reinforcement, a person receives a reward after performing a particular behavior, making the behavior more likely to happen again. An example of positive reinforcement is giving a child ice cream after they successfully clean their room. On the contrary, negative reinforcement entails removing something valued (think teddy bear) when the child is being naughty, making the bad behavior less likely to happen again. It is important to understand that negative reinforcement is not meant to be punitive, yet rather another method of learning that aims to change or eliminate an unpleasant behavior. Psycholgists have been successfully employing these methods of learning since the 1930s, demonstrating that it is possible to learn and maintain new behaviors over long periods of time.
Enter the Happiness Initiatives, the cornerstone of the Let’s Get Happy Together platform. The happiness initiatives are a set of predetermined behaviors that we will engage in for a two week period of time; long enough to potentially see results but brief enough so that we don’t lose interest. Examples of happiness initiatives include:
Having more sex
Increasing levels of exercise
Reconnecting with friends or family
Giving 5 compliments a day to others
Putting more effort into tidying up your living environment
Journaling
Meditation
Spending more time outdoors
Taking more risks
Taking 5 minute stretch breaks throughout the day
Additionally, we can explore topics that may lead to a reduced sense of happiness, such as toxic relationships, substance abuse disorders, perfectionism, unhealthy relationships with food, excessive spending habits, and regretting the past, just to name a few.
My hope is that once we have completed our two week long Happiness Initiative, we will come together to discuss our experiences. For example, were we able to stick to the initiative? What were some of the roadblocks we experienced along the way? Did we feel supported by friends and family? And ultimately, did we feel better at the end of the two week period than we did at the beginning? If the answer is no, why not?
The ultimate goal of Let’s Get Happy Togther is to explore various ways of finding more meaning, joy and satisfaction in our lives. If we have previously learned behaviors that have been unproductive or even harmful, there is no reason why we can’t learn new behaviors that allow us to better nourish our brains, bodies, and souls.
So now that we know how it all began, why waste another minute? Stay tuned for next week’s post which will include the first ever Happiness Initiative! I, for one, cannot wait to get started!
