Name: How to be happy
Uploaded: 2018-11-02T19:04:36.000Z
Duration: 8 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You've probably already heard of the most popular class in Yale University, within its 317 year old history

1 out of 4 Yale students have attended this class called "Psychology and the Good Life"

Sounds like something I would sign up for

And if I could make it into Yale in the first place

Psychology and the good life is taught by professor Laurie Santos

She actually lives on campus with the students

so that she has a good picture of what campus life is about these days

But what she found she wasn't happy about

They have all these abundant resources, opportunities

Their future is literally shining bright like a diamond

They're just too stressed out to even enjoy life on campus

all schools, all organizations, all workplaces, all ages

So today let's talk about how to be happy with a good life

Now this is a whole semester's course at Yale University with all sorts of practices

You can also get it free on the internet, which is a free condensed version of it

I viewed the crash course, which is a one-hour lecture on YouTube

So this video is like a crash course of a crash course

Anyways, the course is based on two domains of psychology

The first is "positive psychology", which is basically research on what happy people do to become happy

Now that you know the theories of becoming happy

you have to actually alter your behavior in order to make a change in your daily life

The course puts it down into ten insights

The first four points are these psychological theories and the rest are the actual practices

Today we'll talk about half of these insights

starting with the theories, and we'll give you a heads up on the actual practices starting from point 5

As for the rest, we'll leave it to the next video

cuz we don't want to make this video too long, right?

#1 We can control a lot more happiness than we think

But according to research, 50% of our happiness lies within the genes

In other words, we get it from our parents

Wow, like 50% of that! That is quite a lot!

I'm pretty happy that my parents seem like to be quite happy people

we actually get control over the other 50%

It's kind of like seeing the glass half-full or half-empty

And that 50% is the area where we can work on

#2 The things we think matter a lot about our well-being are usually overestimated

Now we've got 50% of space to work on now, right?

We're thinking of getting rid of the bad things in life

But research shows that either in good or bad circumstances

The positive or negative effect only lasts for a short amount of time

Say for example, people who've won the lottery, they go bonkers on the day they've won

But that sort of happiness only lasts for an average of six months

After that, their happiness level is indistinguishable from controls

material, money, a promotion, college admission,  a boy or girlfriend

These might have a certain degree of influence over your happiness

But the influence is way smaller in proportion than we think

So what are the crucial factors to happiness then?

#3 Becoming happier takes a lot of effort. 
It takes a lot of daily work.

Just by watching this video alone won't make you a happier person

Imagine yourself going to a class on exercise

You want to get fit. You want to build those muscles

You don't grow muscles just by attending class alone

learning the basics, the knowledge, the know-how on how to get your body fit

Not just once, but repeatedly every single day

First, well we gotta sit down cuz I'm getting a little bit tired

First, you gotta learn the basics, the know-how, the positive psychology

And then you got to put it into practice in your daily life

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to be happy

literally

crucial

privilege

introvert