HarVard Happiness Courses

07

optimism

  • take action

  • imagination, visulization success

  • cognitive therapy

action

  • be more discering with praise

  • hard work and coping inevitably leads to success

imagination

  • love, passion about things you are doing

  • our imagination is of no difference than the real thing for our brain

  • imagine the result and the process(journey)

  • be really exceited about things you are doing

  • you have to curtivate emotion to create motion

cognitive therapy

  • thoughts drives emotion

  • Event -> Evaluation (thought) -> Emotion

  • Where do I have distortions in terms of my evaluations, in terms of my thoughts that lead to certain negative emotions that are unnecessary?

  • 3M, 3 mind traps (start from 31:00)

  • maginifying

    • 归纳法很正常。但有时候我们过分进行了归纳

    • All or Nothing (not proper)

    • tunnel vision (only see part of the things, especially bad) -> realize it, and then zoom out

    • give myself permission to be human

    • lets be real

  • Making up or fabricating

    • emotional reasioning

    • emotion is just an emotion. It doesn’t necessarily capture reality.

    • “我不行” –> “我试一下吧,看看能弄成什么样？”

Questions to ask self

  • is my conclusion tied to reality?

  • is it rational? 它是否理性？

  • Am I ignoring something important?

  • what important evidence do I still need to take into consideration?

  • Ok, so I’m feeling down. Big deal (没什么). What can I learn from it? What happened? How can I make myself feel better?

Focus

  • 我们自己做的三明治。

  • change our focus. change our questions. the question create a new reality.

  • fault-finder think 糟糕的现实和自己没有关系, but they did not realize that they create that reality. 他们觉得不论什么工作，boss都很坏；不论什么同事，都会考虑不周，搞砸一切。

  • find the miracle in the common

  • we co-create our reality

  • 危机往往是潜在的成长的机会

  • learn to fail, and fail to learn

  • focus on the most important things

  • “所有的事情都是好事，如果不是好事，说明还没到最后”

  • 最幸福的人也经历了不多不少的痛苦时光。他们恢复快，对痛苦进行了不同的解读，并从中学到知识

  • It’s temperary. It’s gonna go away.

09

Become benifit-finder makes people happy, longlife and so on. What is preventing us to become a benifit-finder?

  • media. magnifying, zooming in, magnifying the negative

  • we think be happy is unmoral. How can we be happy when others are suffering?

Couter negative news in media

  • having good news channels

  • having more inspring art

  • not waiting for bad things to happen for us to be grateful

  • maintain freness tward grateness. various aspect

  • take action

Take a list of things that you are grateful about. It will remind you that there are so many wonderful things in the world.

What am I grateful for? What he or she did for me that has contribute so much to my life, to who I am today?

write a gratitude letter, and visit the people, read in front of them.

even write gratitude letter only will make us happy

Analying vs. Replaying

  • When we anlyze an experience, when we make sense of it, it helps. It actually helps painful experiences and negtive experiences, which is why therapy helps. And what helps in therapy more than anything is “are they empathic?” In other words, are they good listeners?

Just think about happy experience (not analyze), then it contributes to our well-being

It is a priviledge to have the food we have, to have the friends and family we have.

Change

Change is hard, but change is possible.

neuralplasticity 神经可塑性，大脑一直在发育

There is no quick fix. It takes time. It takes time to change.

13 handle stress

自我和谐的益处:

  • 追求所爱，更能享受过程

  • resolve internal conflicts

  • more likelihood of success

Do it better with pleasure

Having a self-concordant goal is like lighting a candle. It will light the whole room. It will light the every other part of your life.

Had choice. They did their own thing.

Values in Action (VIA, 行为价值观) -> VIA online test

性格应该以一种道德的方式来使用。 反例，幽默 -> 嘲笑、挖苦别人

VIA -> 让我们更关注过程，而不是结果

If we have a self-concordant end and a self-concordant journey, there is what happiness is (end -> target, journey -> VIA)

Is this the real me? When does it feel the real me?

我们可以培养性格优势。 但我们利用自己已有的内在倾向的性格优势会更好。

每天抽一个小时培养自己的优势性格（比如学习新知识），精力、状态就会回来。

就算我很忙，我也会坚持做这些事情，因为我知道它们对于幸福至关重要。

对工作的理解

  • Job

    • motivation: paycheck

    • attitude: “I have to do” “I have no choice”

    • expectation: nothing much. TGIF or holiday, break, the end of semester

  • Career

    • motivation: money, advancement

    • attitude: “It’s a race, a race to the top” rat race

    • expectation: more prestige, more power, more money

  • Calling (使命)

    • motivation: the thing in itself

    • attitude: mission “It’s what they are meant to be done” “我愿意做，比其他任何事情都愿意做”

    • expectation: more work. so that thay can be all they can be.

将工作视为使命，着眼大局

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want a happier world, begin with yourself.

What we can’t live without? What can’t you live without? What are you about?

setting goals method

  • write them down. it is make a commitment.

  • set lifelies. it will motivate you.

  • make them specific.

The most important thing about goals is not achieving those goals, it’s not that is what makes us happy or sad if we do or don’t achieve them. The key is to energize us, to motivate us, to liberate us, to contribute as a mean toward the end, the end being the journey.

“Beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies” “信念是自我实现的预言”

We paied very high price for “TBD” (too busy disordered)

Stress is fine, is good, it’s exciting at times if we also have recovery

take break.

The problem is lacking of recovery.

change our perception of our day from being marathon runners to being sprinters, from going on and on and on to sprinting, recovering, sprinting, recoverying.

Have 60 to 120 minutes, so around 90 minutes of sprint, work, concentrate, focus hard, go for it, and then after that, after you sprint with as little distraction as possible, have (at least) 15 minutes or so of recovery.

每周划出10个90分钟的工作时间段，保持灵活性。

attain multi-level recovery

  • First recovery, the micro level, 15 minutes mediation, one-hour of gym

  • Middle, the midst level recovery, good night sleep, a day off during the week

  • Finally, those vacations

“Recreation lead to creation”

19 love

Ask yourself how many hours a day is it good for me, enjoyable for me to spend with other people?

OLA (Level of Arousal) is diferent between the introversion and extroversion

Introversion people have a higher OLA, higher innate of arousal.

People tend to reach the base level

Alcohol decrease OLA, and coffee increase OLA

introvers need recovery, sometimes on their own, sometime one on one

restorative niche. according to your first nature

关系的消退: Love, and especially lust and passion, wears over time. Because we know that novelty produces higher levels of arousal. The exotic is erotic. If it is new, it’s more interesting, it’s more fasnating.

人本性如此（喜新厌旧），所以我们应该如何应对？

Is this a bad news? Not necessarily. Well, it is not bad or good, it is.

How do we obey nature so we can command it?

the first step before accepting reality is understanding what true love really means.

Does TRUE LOVE really exist? IT DOES.

There is no perfect love. Expecting this will set us for failure.

Perfect love does not exist, but true love exists. True love exists between imperfect humans.

Quiet desperation

True love is not a straight line from A to B. But a quzhequzhequzhe path connecting them. Just like pursuing excellece vs pursuing perfect.

First, our relationship is about hard working. (invest) Second, that the bes relationship are ones that create high levels of intimacy, that get to no one in other into a deeper level, and these are the relationship that thrive, and these are the relationships that also maintain passion and enhance passion, 5, 10, 50 years hence. Third, the best relationship are not relationships devoid of conflict. Finally, focus on the positive and appreciate it and let it grows.

Wrong expectations of relationships or of what it to have a happy relationship

Finding mindset (fixed) —VS.—— Cultivating mindset. like “you are so smart” – VS. – “you worked so hard.”

finding mindset: finding the most suitable partener. <–> not go through the pain, the difficulties. Because thiking that “This means this guy is not the right one”

cultivating mindset: it is related to effort. go though the difficulties and work on it to dissolve it.

cultivation. It’s by virtue of working together, of being together, of spending time together, of dedicating one another.

It takes time. It is not and end. It is a process.

Contact is not enough. Relationships always have conflict, especially serious conflict. The important thing in resolving conflicts is having a super orinate goal what the couple need are mutually meaningful goals. Doing things together.

In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just ‘get along’, they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their loives together. That doesn’t mean they need to do everything together. It is OK for one to have his or her own meaningful goals at work where they don’t work together. That’s perfectly fine. But in addition, there have to be things taht are done together.

Active love.

care about myself. care about someone.

IMPORTANT: We may experience the love automatically at the beginning. It could be the lve at the first sight. However, if we don’t sustain the active love, over time, because of self-perception theory, over time that will go away.

Make it a ritual. Do it no matter what.

Making that shift from the desire to be validated to the desire to be known.

好的关系不止在于给对方留下好印象，也在于表达自我。

active to 了解对方

to be known

IMPORTANT:

  1. it is so stressful, enervating to think constantly I have to impress.

  2. the second thing about trying to impress constantly is that we put on a facade, and act, and then, I tried, if I want to be validated constantly, to seem perfect, so that they really like me, and approve of me.　But then what I’m doing is I’m hurting them as well. because if I’m good at it, if I’m good at putting up the facade and depicting this perfect people. I’m being a terrible role models, which in the long term, will only hurt other people, because that thing does not exist. And if anyone aspires to this perfection, it inevitably is a prescription for perfectionism, hence for failure, hence for unhappiness.

  3. allow for conflict existance.

normal conflict ratio: 5:1. beyong this is not good. to lower than this is also not good.

Love is in the detail.

A relationship is made extraordinary by focusing the these details, on these day to day activities and how we do that? We demonstrate interest by asking so:

  • “How was your day sweetheart?”

  • “tell me more about what you have just done?”

  • “what you have being thinking?”

  • “you look a little bit down, anything I can do”

Demonstrate interest, create love maps, get to knw the other person. What they like, what they don’t like, and how they like it. Again the little things such as touching, such as smiling, such as flowers, such as remembering the important dates. Pay compliments to your partner.

Don’t wait to be asked to give compliments, give it now.

共鸣

Do I really listen to my partner? Do I really look at my partner? Do I demonstrate genuine interest in what my partner is doing, feeling and how they are? Do I realy want to get to konw them?

Sex(Love) made concrete. It’s a comcretization of that emotion of that abstract of that notion. 它使得抽象的感情具体化

not every conflict is good. there is two kinds of conflict: cognitive conflict(postive)(healthy), affective conflict(negative)

cognitive conflict is about focusing on the person’s behaviour or thought and ideas and challenging those. unhealth conflict is focusing on ther person on their emotions, on who they are.

“You are such a slob. You promised to throw away the garbage. I can’t trust you.” <-> that is an attack on the person. “It upset me to return to a dirty home after we agreed that you throw away the garbage”

私下处理，避免公开吵架

Women are much more comfortable, even on the physiologyical level, they are much more comfortable handling and dealing with these disease or discomfort of an argument.

男生要理解这一点，从而更理智的去面对而不是逃避 （男生面对相同冲突，更加不适) 女生要有同理心（empathy) and understand their partner’s experience is not the same as their experience.

do not do onto those close to you which you would not have done onto others who are not so close to you.

“Why treat others better than we treat the people we love the most?” There is no justification. There can be conflict, and there will be conflict, and it’s important. Question is how do you keep it on the cognitive behaviour level, rather than the affective, emotional, contempt level. And that can make all the difference.

partner <-> benifit finder

positive illusion. They think of their partners more than other people think of them. Having an illusory glow about them, seen them better. Supposing than they really are. illusion <-> self-fulfilling prophecy.

benifit-creating rather than only benifit-finding.