Notes on the science of well being

The following points are notes from the popular course “The science of well being” provided by Yale university.

Annoying Feature

1. Our minds’ strongest intuition are often totally wrong (Stop thinking our feeling must be right, people operate this way are under others indulgence)
2. Our minds don’t think in terms of absolute
3. Our minds are built to get used to stuff
4. We don’t relize that our minds are built to get used to stuff e.g. shopaholic
5. The tendency to overestimate emotional impact of a future event both in terms of intensity and duration

To better predict how we are going to feel:

1. Focalism: just think the event individually
2. Psychological immure system: bad events hurts, but it doesn’t acturally hurt that much that long, you will get over it with friends and family.

Action we can take:

1. Set strategies to getting over getting used to stuff, e.g. don’t invest in stuff in the first place, for material life is the easiest to get used to. Instead, invest in experience, e.g. vication, art gallery, concert, especially those that can be share and benifit others. (Hence altruism)

Action thwart hedonic adaptation:

1. Savoring Things that enhance savoring
   • experience vs material: experience can be share and furder enhance savoring
   • Feeling pround of yourself
   • Feeling lucky
   • Laugh
   • Better relationship
   • Thought only on the present (No in the default network) Things that hurt savoring
   • Focus on the future
   • Reminding yourself it would be over soon
   • Tell yourself it wasn’t as good as it hoped
   • Feel it will never be this good again
   • how it could be better
   • didn’t deserve this good thing (Come to think about it: INTJ is really bad at this.)
2. Nagative visualization
   • It can be a lot wrost
3. Make this day your last
4. Gratitude

Action to reset your reference point:

1. Concretly re-experience
2. concretly observe
3. Avoid scial comparisions
4. Interupt your consumpsion
5. Increase your variety

Strategies for better habits:

Knowing isn’t half the battle, so action is all that matters.

1. Find sitruation support
   • As will power is always overated, success by design is much more important
   • Change the visibility of things that we do want to do
   • promote health situation support (i.e. friends and family)
2. Goal setting
   • Goal specificity: be quantitative when setting goal
   • Goal visulization: mental contrasting good and bad outcome