So, I thought I’d start with the apps, instead. Both Yale’s Laurie Santos (who leads the university’s Science of Well-Being course and hosts The Happiness Lab podcast) and Harvard’s Robert Waldinger (who recently published a book on happiness, The Good Life) hammer home the importance of seeking out and maintaining a healthy social network. The overwhelming advice when it comes to feeling happier is to strengthen your interpersonal relationships. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Experiment #1 – Satisfaction, Gamified So, over the course of a month, I practised as many of these scientifically backed strategies as I could to see what would stick. What’s more, I really wanted to find a way to make my day- to-day a bit nicer. Well, good news! As a father of two currently riding the downwards slope of the U-curve while working in a dying industry during a gruelling cost of living crisis, I’m ideally placed to be your guinea pig. (Should you get up at 5am to meditate? Start a gratitude journal? Wouldn’t an extra hour in bed make you more grateful?) What you really need is someone to test them all, and report back. (More time outdoors fewer hours zombified in front of a laptop.) Others are questionable. Some happiness hacks are pretty much agreed upon, if not always easy. We might all want to be happier, but knowing how is the hard bit. Maybe you’re battling with the pressures of work, or money, or kids, or health, or your elderly parents, or all of these at the same time. But until then, on average, every year of your life will be a little less happy than the one before it. True, it does then begin to tick back upwards. From the mid-teens to the late forties or early fifties, the chart plots a steady descent. This chart, which tracks human satisfaction by age, does not make for especially cheerful reading. If you’ve ever seen something called the happiness U-curve, you’ll have every right to feel a bit despondent.
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