This talk is about how to learn to be happy, and about the science of happiness,

From Tal's personal experience, when he was a sophomore in Harvard majored in CS, he was doing great from the outside, he was doing good academically, socially and he was in varsity team (squash), but he was not happy inside. He switched the major to philosophy and psychology and did the graduate study in positive psychology in Harvard a few years after his undergraduate degree. He started teaching one positive psychology class, and the first year it was seminar format with only 8 students enrolled initially and 2 dropped; the second time he taught this course, it had 300+ students; the third year, almost 900 students, become then the biggest class in Harvard, which is bigger than <introduction to economics>. So he got the media attention and received numerous media interviews. He got the same kind of questions after almost all the interviews he did: "Tal, I thought you would be a little different", "how different?", the answers went like "more extrovert", "more cheerful", "more outgoing", "less introvert", the best one is "be taller". Why was this happening? Because those reporters/hosts were looking for the explanation of this phenomenon of such popularity on this Positive Psychology class, naturally they were expecting the person who delivered this extra popular class to be very outgoing, super cheerful and extremely charismatic.  However, they were looking for the answer at a wrong place. Instead of looking at the messenger, they should be look at the message. There are more than 100 organizations around the globe adopt and have the positive psychology class to convey the science of happiness. 

What is positive psychology? On one side of studying the happiness and human's well-being, it's the waves of the self-help movement, there are many interesting books and numeric workshops; however, many of them (not all of them) are lack of substance, they are over-promising and under-delivering. On the other side, in the academia, there are lots of data, analysis, re-analysis -- many great substance and rigorous research; however, they are not very accessible to the general audience. There are some research shows that the average times of a research paper being read is 7, which also including the mother of the author. So the positive psychology is trying to blend the rigor from the academia research and the waves of the self-help movement, bridge the ivory tower and the main street.

Permission to be human

Positive psychology is absolutely not about make people experience constant high. There are only sociopath or dead people who will not feel any painful emotions. Because people process both positive emotions and negative/painful emotions through the exactly same emotional pipeline, so if we block the painful emotions, we block the good ones as well. When we were kids, we were very true to our emotions, as we gradually grow up, we start putting a facade on our face and we ignore or suppress those painful emotions and we pay a high price for it. Instead of ignoring or suppressing them, we need the space and place for our painful emotions in our life, and we need the unconditional acceptance of them. For Tal, he felt that the best advice about life he got was from their first son - David - 's pediatrician, he warned Tal and his wife, they would experience every single emotion to its extreme in the next a few month, frustration, fatigue, love, joy. That was absolute true and there were envy towards David in one moments and 5 minutes later there were intense love towards David. They are very humanly and natural emotions.

There are paradox when we try to suppress the painful emotions, they intensify; as long as we accept them and freely experience them, they subdue more quickly. It's the same for the "pink elephant" phenomenon (when we are told "not to think about the pink elephant in the next 10 seconds", it is all about pink elephant in our mind in the next 10 seconds). Tal also shared about his own teaching experience. He is an extremely introvert person and had very bad stage anxiety when he first started teaching. At the beginning he kept on talking to himself "do not worry, do not be anxious", it became more worrying for him. Then he started saying "it is OK to feel anxious on the stage for me", it's better controlled and less nervous for him and it's actually become some kind of excitement and less debilitating for him.  It is also the same for the reality of the physical world around us, just like the law of gravity. If we refuse accepting the law of gravity, we cannot avoid constant frustration. However, we may still not like it, but we accept it, we even create games around it (like basketball games or any other sports). For painful emotions, people really pay a high price for the rejection of them. However, we do not suggest passive resignation to life as well. We are encouraging the active acceptance. There is nothing wrong to have those painful emotions, but it may not be good for some inappropriate behavior following those strong emotions. We should have some channels to properly divert those painful emotions and make them serve some good purpose for us. What is courage? Courage is not about not having fears, but is about having fears and still get ahead and doing it. It is OK to feel envy or angry. Do we give ourselves and others (family members, friends, colleagues, people around us) the permission to be human? Permission to be human -- this is really the foundation of being happy.

Dealing with stress

Stress is one thing which seems hard to avoid in our modern day life. Stress issue is also pervasive in the US college campus. There are surveys/research done by professors in Harvard university that 55% of college students were depressed to the level that they were not functioning at some point of time in college; and 80% of them claimed that they were overwhelmed. When Tal was in Harvard during his graduate study, he was also serving as a tutor in one student hall. Part of his job was to look at resumes and give some job-seeking advice. He was amazed by the resumes that he read year over year: they become more and more impressive, with more achievement, more activities, smaller fonts and narrower margins on the page. But the students pay a price for this to happen, they are aiming at doing more things in less time, and easily overwhelmed by all kinds of activities and opportunities presented to them. Too much to do leads to stress, and lots of stress for an extended period causes depression. At the societal level, we pay a high price on this as well. The study shows that the average onset age of depression in 1960s was 29 years old, while it is 14 years old nowadays. Depression and stress incurs high psychological cost for us (we cannot enjoy the life as much as we should have), high physical cost (depression weakens human's immune system and makes people more vulnerable to bacteria infections, and it is not uncommon that people would fall into sick after some extended stress period at work, or in a relationship). Depression and stress also reduce the productivity and creativity as research described in professor Barbara Fredickson's book <Positivity>.  

The solution to this is to SIMPLIFY our life, do less than more. There is an interesting study/experiment conducted by professor Daniel Kahneman from Princeton (he is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics at 2002), about women's emotional state. And there is a surprising founding that these women were not specifically enjoying spending time with their children, even kids are what they care the most in their life. The reason is that even they are physically there with the kids, but they are NOT there since they are doing other things at the same time, talking over the phone, checking online messages, thinking about tasks from work etc. Those things we would enjoy them separately, but we cannot enjoy them together. The best analogy is to think about two songs we love the most. The best song for Tal is Whitney Houston's <I will always love you>, get a rating for 10; the second best is Beethoven's Symphony 9, get a rating for 9.5. So what would happen if we play these two wonderful pieces of music at the same time? Get a 19.5? No, it's not even 9, not even 5, they are noise! But this is the modern life to us. Quantity affects the quality, we need to simplify our life by doing less. Each day after we step into home after work, can we switch off the cell phone for a few hours? to wholeheartedly enjoy the time that we spend with our family? Do you usually keep the email on when you work on the computer? There is one study from University of London on concentration. This study shows that the effect of keeping emails on is equivalent of losing 10 IQ points from our brain. If we did not sleep for 36 hours, we lose 10 IQ points; if we took moderate amount of marijuana, we lose 4 IQ points. Tal joked about "I do not know about you, but I myself definitely do not have 10 IQ points to spare". One Harvard business school research shows that 1.5 hours focus time a day, it is not only make people happier, but also more productive. 

There are study about the relationship between money and happiness. As long as we are not in the extreme poverty condition, such as the basic need for shelter, food, education are all met, the one single most important factor which affect our level of happiness is the "time affluence" -- whether or not we have enough time to savor, to enjoy and to appreciate the time with our family and friends. The No. 1 source of happiness, which we call it the "ultimate currency", is the time we spend with people we love, care about and who love and care us. When we spend time with them, we get the support from them, we are inspired and motivated by them. They are the most important resources that we rely on to help us go through difficult times and make us more resilient in hard phases in life; they are the biggest factor in our happiness. 

How to overcome stress? Actually stress is NOT the problem, certain level of stress is good for us, which helps us become tougher, stronger, and more resilient to get back from the ebb. It is like the weight-lifting to our muscle at the physical level, stress is the "weight-lifting" training to our mind at the psychological level. However, the problem comes if we do not have recovery time. The lack of recovery is the issue, which makes us get injured physically and psychologically. The way to overcome stress is to ritualize the recovery process, into our everyday life, and throughout our life time. What we need is to introduce the strategic recovery into our life, at three different levels. On the micro level, we can arrange 15 minutes break every 1 to 2 hours, which is the mini-recovery, such as 10-15 mins meditation, a short walk outside, turn off the cell phone to enjoy a quiet lunch by yourself to savor the food. On the mezzo level, a good night sleep is the best investment to recover, taking one day off in a week, even God needs one day off in a week :-). On the macro level, arranging some longer vacations in a year, with work email off, to completely enjoy and savor the time. The famous banker J.P. Morgan once said: "I can do a year's work in 9 months, but not in 12 months". It may not be realistic for everyone to afford 3 months off every year, however, the deliberately and strategically pre-planned realistic-length vacation indeed relieves the stress, enhances our moral and improves our productivity. 

The mind-body connection

Physical Exercise  

For the past a couple of decades, there are explosion of research regarding what's happened "neck down". (It was first raised to broad awareness by the father of Positive Psychology - Professor Martin Seligman from UPenn, that our psychological research focused too much on "neck up" and we forgot about "neck down".) There is one lab experiment that studied the effect of physical exercise in overcoming clinical depression.  They have 156 participants who were clinically diagnosed to have major depression, and they were randomly divided into three groups with different intervention methods: the first group was only doing exercise, 30-45 minutes for at least 4-5 days a week; the second group was only taking some psychiatric medicine; and the third group was both doing exercise and taking the medicine. After 4 months, the result was measured, there is no statistical significant difference among these three groups, all three groups have more than 60% people who were better in many measured and self-reported aspects. The experiment did not stop here, they stopped the intervention (exercise and medicine) and waited for another 6 months to call them in to measure the relapse rate. The result is startling, the medicine only group has 38% relapse rate (among the 60+% who were felt much better, 38% of them relapsed); the medicine plus exercise group has 31% relapse rate; and the exercise only group only has 9% relapse rate! So we would most likely get the conclusion that "exercising is like to take anti-depressant". However, it would be more appropriate to state it in the other way around, "not exercising is like to take depressant". Why? Because as human, we are not evolved to be sedentary and our ancestor were keeping on moving, either run after an antelope for lunch, or run away from a lion to avoid becoming lunch. If we all have some God-given or gene-given level of well-being, not exercising drags down that baseline level of well-being; only we start exercising regularly as our ancestors did, we regain our baseline level of well-being and fitness. As Francis Bacon said: "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." In John Ratey's 2008 book <Spark>, he mentioned the "exercise revolution". For US schools which introduced regular exercise time into the students schedule, they observed significant changes on many aspects: the kid obesity rate reduced from 30% to 3%; their school academic performance improved, for both below-average schools and for top schools; the bully and violence in schools were reduced. The physical exercise changes the function of our brain for all ages. The study also shows that 30-40 minutes exercise for 3-5 days a week can push the cognitive decline among senior people 10-15 years later and reduce the chance of Alzheimer 50%. Sometimes exercise is called the "psychiatrist dream treatment", which does not have any side-effects, and it generates "feel-good" chemicals in the brain just exactly the same way as the psychiatric medicine (such as Prozac) works. 

Mindfulness meditation

There are many types of meditation: yoga, sitting meditation, mantra meditation, Tai Chi etc. Across all types and forms of meditation, there are three common components are shared: 1. one-pointness, only focusing on one thing; 2. deep breathing; 3. there is no good or bad meditation: this is also about giving us permission to be human in practice, if we lose focus and our mind wanders, just gently bring it back to the focus. The effect and benefits of meditation has also been studied in the lab controlled environment. MIT professor Jon Kabat-Zinn brought the Himalaya Buddhist monks who closely work with Dalai Lama for decades to his lab to measure the left-to-right ratio of activities in their pre-frontal cortex (Note, it's well-known for a long time that more activities in left pre-frontal cortex make people feel happier, while more activities in the right side make people more moody and depressed). The ratio for the general population is fitted into a bell-curve, and these monk's ratio fell way off-chart towards the high ends, which implies that they possess extremely high acceptance to happiness and high resilience to negative events and emotions. They were also set into the startle response experiment. (People would naturally flinch when they hear the gun goes off, even for the military people who are trained and often hear the gun-shooting, they still flinch slightly.) It is very astonishing and remarkable that these monk did not flinch as the gun went off when they were asked to focus. It was the first time in the human history that we found this. There are more details about discussion on this in Daniel Goleman's <Disruptive Emotions> - the dialog with Dalai Lama. 

Now, the question is, do we need to spend more than 30 years in Himalaya to meditate to benefit us? We do not. Jon Kabat-Zinn has designed an experiment to demonstrate that we can benefit from as little as 15 minutes meditation a day , to generate positive effects on us. In his experiments, he has two randomly divided groups of people, one group to take some instructions on how to meditate and spend 45 minutes a day for meditation, while the other control group did nothing and wait for the up-coming meditation training course. For a period of 8 weeks, compared with the control group, the meditation group are reported to have (1) decrease level of anxiety, (2). mood changes (generally happier and more delighted) (3). the brain scan shows that there are some transformation on their brain and the left-to-right ratio in their pre-frontal cortex activities has increased! It was also the first time to observe the people's brain actually changed, which contradicts to the conventional belief that our brain stops changing after we reached three-years old.  (4). the immune response has changed. Both group were injected some bacteria and the meditation group were less likely to get sick.  The meditation brings more resilience into people's regular life, both physically and psychologically. 

If you are not quite comfortable or ready to start a new meditation regimen, there are another much easier thing that we can do, to breath. The deep breath, into our belly, like how baby breathes. When we are under stress or anxious, our breathe is shallow, which makes us more stressful and anxious, and it generates a downward spiral and would trigger our fight-or-flight response. We can reverse this into a relaxation response, by starting deep breathing, which will bring calm and well-being to us, then it can be easier for deep breathing, leading to a upward spiral. This simple intervention usually can take effect as little as 3 deep breathes. So it is recommended to introduce this three-deep-breath regimen: when we wake-up in the morning, take 3 deep breathes; before we walk into the office, take 3 deep breathes; before we get into the home after work, take 3 deep breathes; when we are stopped by a red-light, especially that we have just missed the green light, or cut by another car on the road, take 3 deep breathes. These are also very effective mini-recovery in our day to day life. 

Focusing on the positive

One of the central pillar of positive psychology, is to focus on the positive. There are two levels of meaning on appreciate the positive: on the first level, it is to say "thank you" to somebody, feel gratitude towards something or someone; on the second level, it is about increasing the value. If we do not appreciate the good, the good would depreciate. Cicero said "gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others". Do we need to wait until something external or extraordinary happened to us to deprive us from the things we have taken them for granted for long time, only until then we start appreciation? No, we should start cultivating the ritual of gratitude in our daily life. There is the one research about the effect of gratitude. In the setup, there are four randomly divided groups of people, they were told to write down 3-5 things happened on that day before bed every day, first group to write things they feel grateful; the second group to write things they feel that they did great or superior about themselves; the third group is to write anything come to their mind (control group); and the last group to write hassles they experienced for that day. The result? In terms of the physical health, benevolence, goal-achieving, psychological health, the worst group is the one who wrote the hassles, and then the control group; the best group is the one who wrote gratitude, second is the superior things. There are also studies to show that the effect would be better if writing down gratitude at the end of the day, versus writing down at the beginning of the day. We can also start sharing/talking about the grateful things with our family over dinner time, and do not take the good things for granted. Only if we appreciate the good, the good appreciates. The key of doing the gratitude notes/exercise is to keep the freshness, if we took such exercise for granted, then it defeats the purpose by itself. If we mentioned a wonderful meal, it would be great that we can really experience or re-experience those moments, just as professor Barbara Fredrickson mentioned in her book, the heart-felt positivity. Other forms of gratitude exercise include, but not limited to, activities like writing gratitude letter to someone we always feel grateful to, savoring the positive moments, etc.

What we have discussed so far, lots of them seem quite "common sense" to most of us, however, just as Voltaire said, "common sense is not that common", especially when it comes to applying them into our daily life. Professor Peter Drucker, considered as "the founder of modern management", in his late years, instead of visiting different places to give lectures and teachings, he invited the CEOs, presidents, prime ministers from all around the globe to his home and spent the weekend with him, so that he could provide coaching and consulting to them. On every Friday night, he always started with his clients like this: "On next Monday, I do not want to hear you say how wonderful this (weekend) was, I want to hear what you are doing differently". Real change only comes through real actions. Could we introduce these ideas into our life now? to start savor and appreciate all the treasures and gems around us and within us?