Lessons learnt:- Credit : The Science of Well-Being – Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor, Yale University.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being
Putting Strategies into Practice
How can we intentionally put these strategies into practice and build healthier habits?
Part-1 Situation Support
https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being/lecture/59tJc/part-1-situation-support
5 Habits that promote happiness are
1) Kindness
2) Social Connection
3) Time Affluence
4) Mind control
5) Healthy Practices - Sleep and Exercise.
- And the point of putting these up there is not to say that we never want these things, but how often are we prioritizing all those other things that we started with at the expense of this stuff.
- if you see one of you guys on phone and just typing and your urge to go on social media and check your own forum would jump up, right? The fact that if we have the cookies out there, makes your urge to eat a cookie and eat less healthily there just because they're present. But the point is just the presence of the situation causes these behaviors.
- Simply making these tempting bad behaviors go far away and these kind of good behaviors that we want to encourage at the forefront can change the way we interact, and can increase our good habits.
- He runs Cornell's Food Lab, and he has this awesome new book called Slim By Design where he makes a strong case that willpower is completely overrated. Merely changing your situation can affect the extent to which you eat. And his claim is that merely affecting the situation can change the extent to which we engage in all kinds of habits not just eating.
-And the question is, is the proximity of the candy going to affect them
- Secretaries consume about 48 percent more candies when the thing is on their desk than when it's just a few feet away.
-And what you find is that even though it's easy to reach for the candy here as it is to reach in the drawer, what you find is that secretaries consumed 25 percent less candies when they're in the drawer.
- And the claim is that both the visibility and the convenience with which you can engage in your habits actually matters.
- And what is now a famous study on kitchen counters where he looked at just what's on your kitchen counter and does that affect things like your healthiness and your weight.
- So cookies, chips, crackers, cereal, soda. If those are visible on your kitchen counter, you have in general across all these categories about a 10 kilogram increase in your weight right now. Merely by having those things visible. So this is controlling for whether they're around your house, just having them out.
- In contrast, if you do the positive things. If you put positive things and you make those visible, what you find is that that can have the opposite effect. So visible fruits and vegetables can actually decrease your weight by again like five to ten kilos on average. And so the point I'm telling you about the stuff in the food context wasn't necessarily to focus on food.
- You can fix your bad environments. Get rid of the stuff that is tempting you.
- If you had the goal of getting off social media after all negative comments about social media, you can delete it from your phone. You can put your phone away when you're trying to work. You can do these kinds of things. You can make phone free lunches so that you have more social connection. You can force yourself to keep your phone in a deep pocket that you had to zip so it's not visible. All those things you can do to increase this stuff.
- You can shape your environment to have less of the bad cues that are causing you to value the wrong stuff.
- What does the kitchen counter studies show? It just shows that just by having good things that promote these habits visible that they're there that you're going to do them more often. Right. What about having on your desk your gratitude journal so that when you wake up in the morning it's just sitting there? Right. These kinds of notes and reminders, these simple things sound really dumb, but they capture our attention just like the candy bar on the counter and can make us do positive things.
- The other thing you can do is your social context because one of the most powerful environments that we have is the other social agents around us. So fill your lives with people who are trying to do this stuff too like recruit your suite mates to have a sleep fest.
- Like try to get people to help with you and to engage in all these healthy behaviors like start a sweet meditation group and so on.
- The point is that having others around you who are doing this stuff does two things. One is it promotes the positive habits, but also increases kindness, social connection, all this other stuff that we think matters a lot.
- Harness the situation to get some support.
