Laurie Santos (Yale) has shared a free course on Coursera called “The Science of Well-being”. It’s a great introduction to many ideas, theories and models relating to human happiness. Summary by The World of Work Project
The Science of Wellbeing
This free course (available on Coursera) is excellent. It includes some self assessment tools, as well asgreate theoretical insight into the science of subjective well-being and practical actions you can take to improve your own levels of wellbeing.
Course Overview
Laurie’s course is made up of pre-recorded lectures (recored pre-Covid) and indepent work. It’s a self-led learning programme and you can start it any time, and complete it at your own pace. The course has six content based modules, followed by a further four modules that are designed to help you make behavioural changes to improve your subjective wellbeing. The six core modules are:
- Introduction,
- Misconceptions about happiness,
- Why our expectations are so bad,
- How we can overcome our biases,
- Stuff that really makes us happy, and
- Putting strategies into practice
The guide time for the modules varies between roughly one and three hours, depending on the number of videos included in the module and the amount of independent work recommended. In addition to the theory and behaviour change activities in the course, there is also the opportunity to use some self-assessment tools to gain a sense of your own levels of subjective wellbeing, and your improvement as you progress through your change journey.
The World of Work Project View
Perhaps, like Laurie, we’re so drawn to this subject because it hasn’t always come easily to us. Happiness is a funny thing. It’s clear that we spend a whole lot of time doing and pursuing things that don’t actually increase our subjective wellbeing. However, just knowing the real drivers of happiness really isn’t enough. We also clearly need to make changes to how we live our lives and the choices and actions we make, if we are to improve our subjective wellbeing. Overall, we think this is a very helpful course that introduces a lot of useful concepts and language in this area. For those interested, there’s a podcast we did on happiness below. It’s not at all like Laurie’s course:
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Sources and Feedback
This is all from Laurie’s course, as linked to above.
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