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Let’s start with some bad news.

Teachers have more demands on their time than ever before—and less control over what, when, and how to teach. The above list is a way to fight back. It will ease the time pressure and allow you to slow down—which is a beautiful thing. “When we are happy – when our mindset and mood are positive – we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.” Sonja Lyubomirsky, another leading happiness scientist and author of several books including The Myths of Happiness and The How of Happiness, sums up the.

The happiness model we’re taught from a young age is actually completely backward. We think we work hard in order to achieve big success and then we’re happy. That’s how I grew up! That’s what my parents taught me.

We think the scribble goes like this:

Study hard! → Straight A’s! → Be happy!

Interview lots! → Great job! → Be happy!

Work overtime! → Get promoted! → Be happy!

But it doesn’t work like that in real life. That model is broken.

We do great work, have a big success, but instead of being happy, we just set new goals. Now we study for the next job, the next degree, the next promotion. Why stop at a college degree when you can get a master’s? Why stop at Director when you can be VP? Why stop at one house when you can have two? We never get to happiness. We just always push it further and further away.

Now what happens when we snap “Be happy” off the end of this scribble and stick it on the beginning? Then these important six words look like this:

Now everything changes. Everything changes. If we start with being happy, then we feel great. We look great. We exercise. We connect. What happens? We end up doing great work because we feel great doing it. What does great work lead to? Big success. Massive feelings of accomplishment and the resulting degrees, promotions, and phone calls from your mom telling you she’s proud of you. Poetry portfoliocoach mcdonalds health class website.

Harvard Business Review reported the results of a famous positive psychology study that shows happy people are 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales, and are three times more creative than their counterparts.

So what’s the first thing you must do before you can be happy?

Be happy.

Be happy first.

Being happy opens up your learning centers. Your brain will light up like Manhattan skyscrapers at dusk, sparkle like diamonds under jewelry store lights, glow like stars in the black sky above a farmer’s field.

American philosopher William James says, “The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

The Happiness Advantage author Shawn Achor says, “It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.”

William Shakespeare says, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Now, it’s one thing to say “Be happy, everybody!” and leave it there.

But we all know it’s not that easy.

Why not? Because our brains get focused on negative things. We can’t stop! I do this all the time. And you want to know what? Everybody does. Every single person gets stuck focusing on the negative sometimes. I’ve spoken on stages with the best-known motivational speakers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and political leaders from around the world. Do you know what they’re all doing backstage? Freaking out. Sweating. Thinking something might go wrong.

The problem isn’t that we get stuck focused on the negative sometimes.

The problem is that we think we shouldn’t.

And that prevents us from taking action.

Action? That’s right. I’m talking about intentional activities. Studies show these happiness hits work like little happiness hacks that slowly shift our brain to becoming positive focused.

I’ve spent years sifting through hundreds of positive psychology studies to find what I call The Big Seven ways to train your brain to be happy. Let’s break it down:

Three Walks

Penn State researchers reported in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology that the more physically active people are, the greater their general feelings of excitement and enthusiasm. How much? Just half an hour of brisk walking three times a week. The American Psychosomatic Society published a study showing how Michael Babyak and a team of doctors found that three thirty-minute brisk walks or jogs even improve recovery from clinical depression. Yes, clinical depression. Results were stronger than studies using medication or studies using exercise and medication combined.

The 20-Minute Replay

Writing for twenty minutes about a positive experience dramatically improves happiness. Why? Because you actually relive the experience as you’re writing it and then relive it every time you read it. Your brain sends you back. In a University of Texas study called “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words,” researchers Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker had one member of a couple write about their relationship for twenty minutes three times a day. Compared to the test group, the couple was more likely to engage in intimate dialogue afterward and the relationship was more likely to last. What does the 20-Minute Replay do? It helps us remember things we like about people and experiences in our lives.

Random Acts of Kindness

Carrying out five random acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness. We don’t naturally think about paying for someone’s coffee, mowing our neighbor’s lawn, or writing a thank-you note to our apartment building security guard at Christmas. But Sonja Lyubomirsky did a study asking Stanford students to perform five random acts of kindness over a week. Not surprisingly, they reported much higher happiness levels than the test group. Why? They felt good about themselves! People appreciated them.

A Complete Unplug

“The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal,” say Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement. And a Kansas State University study found that complete downtime after work helps us recharge for the next day. Turning your phone off after dinner. Not using the Internet on vacation. There’s a lot more to this, and I go deep on this one in Secret #6 The Secret To Never Being Too Busy Again in The Happiness Equation.

Hit Flow

Get into a groove. Be in the zone. Find your flow. However you characterize it, when you’re completely absorbed with what you’re doing, it means you’re being challenged and demonstrating skill at the same time. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this moment as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Do you get that from playing drums? Lifting weights? Taking pictures? In his fantastic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he describes it using an image I’ve redrawn here:

2 Minute Meditations

A research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at brain scans of people before and after they participated in a course on mindfulness meditation and published the results in Psychiatry Research. What happened? After the course, parts of the brain associated with compassion and self-awareness grew while parts associated with stress shrank. Studies report that meditation can “permanently rewire” your brain to raise levels of happiness. Too new age for you? That’s what I thought. Then I downloaded the Headspace app – which I have no affiliation with — and it was the perfect meditation gateway drug. Now I’m hooked. And it helps me prioritize and simplify my day.

Five Gratitudes

Remember this: If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy. Find a book or a journal, or start a website, and write down three to five things you’re grateful for from the past week. The key is actually writing them down! I wrote five a week on my blog 1000 Awesome Things. Some people write in a notebook by their bedside. Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, hassles, or events over the past week for ten weeks. Guess what happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier. Charles Dickens puts this well: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

So those are the Big 7.

More Changesteach To Be Happy Book

You know it’s important to be happy first, and these are the seven ways to get there.

Remember: Just like driving a car, throwing a football, or doing a headstand—you can learn to be happier.

Happy people don’t have the best of everything.

They make the best of everything.

Be happy first.

—

Neil Pasricha is Director of The Institute for Global Happiness and New York Times bestselling-author of the The Happiness Equation, a 300-page letter he wrote to his unborn son, which shares the nine step-by-step secrets to happiness.

mic Listen to the podcast:

The pursuit of happiness is so intrinsic to the American psyche that the phrase was written into the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But new research suggests that just like ice cream and chocolate cake, too much happiness can be detrimental to our well-being. Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, found that abundantly happy people are perceived as innocent and unsophisticated, which makes them more vulnerable to deception. Schweitzer recently spoke about his research and explained why extremely happy people may want to dial it down on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM’s Channel 111.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

More Changesteach To Be Happy Quotes

Knowledge@Wharton: What got you to look at this topic?

Maurice Schweitzer: Happiness is something that we tend to think is always good. There’s a positive psychology field that says we should be positive, upbeat, we should strive for happiness. The pursuit of happiness is deeply embedded in our national thinking. Yet sometimes people who are very happy are exactly the kinds of people who are exploited. That’s what we document in our research, where we look at people who are very happy. If they seem more happy than baseline happiness — people who are very happy, always chipper, always upbeat — they strike us as naive. We found that link consistently. One of the most robust findings in our research is that people see very happy individuals as naive, and in our last couple of studies we found that people are more likely to exploit those individuals.

Knowledge@Wharton: Unfortunately, there are people out there who will take advantage of a situation. When they see others with characteristics of this happiness, do they figure that is someone they can take advantage of?

Schweitzer: It’s as if we’re making this reverse inference. We know the expression that “ignorance is bliss.” We think people who are just shielding themselves from all of this negative information out there are the people that might be truly and deeply happy. But we seem to have sort of flipped that, and this reverse inference is that we see people who are very happy and assume they must be ignorant. We assume they are not looking deeply into the national headlines; they’re not looking deeply at the world around them. We assume that if they’re happy, it’s because they’re not thinking carefully or investigating things around them.

Knowledge@Wharton: Being happy a lot of the time shouldn’t be a negative, but do happy people have to have a little level of cynicism or angst in their life to balance things out?

“Sometimes people who are very happy are exactly the kinds of people who are exploited.”

Schweitzer: Yes. It’s almost as if we’re looking around for people who are happy. The baseline is some happiness, but when people go above that, when they’re expressing it on their faces, the reaction they get is totally different from just sort of regular happiness or the normal ups and down that we have during the day. The very and consistently happy people are just perceived to be naive, like they’re just not paying attention.

Knowledge@Wharton: I’ve kind of seen that situation happen with me at times. Not that I’m the happy guy all the time, but it’s almost an annoyance to other people.

Schweitzer: We looked at how annoying people found it, and we were expecting to find that people found it more annoying than they did. We found some mixed evidence, but people don’t automatically or axiomatically hate that really happy person, though you could imagine that person being annoying. But what we consistently found was that we have these beliefs that somebody who’s that happy must not being pay close attention. And if you’re going to pull one over on someone or you want an easy negotiation partner or you want someone you might exploit, it’s that super-happy person that’s the target. That’s the person you’re looking to exploit. That’s the person who gets bad information.

Knowledge@Wharton: Does this play into the “good cop, bad cop” scenario?

Schweitzer: What’s interesting about the contrast effect is that you might have that bad cop that makes even the moderately happy person seem extremely happy and very reasonable. So, that contrast could be a very useful tool. The reality is the studies that we did were mostly in North America with very small samples from abroad. It’s worth being cautious about how we extend this because in the United States people are pretty happy. I think if we were to go abroad to Germany or northern European countries, we might find even more extreme results because people who are very happy might seem particularly naive in those contexts. Maybe American-level happiness might strike others as very naive.

Knowledge@Wharton: Explain why these are also people that tend to shelter themselves from negative information. Are they doing it because they want to build a wall around their world of happiness?

Schweitzer: So that’s the mechanism that we found. That is, when you see somebody who is very happy, you assume that they’re not paying close attention. They’re not going out and finding out negative information around them; they’re not listening to your show; they’re not reading the newspaper. We assume that they’re sheltering themselves from negative information. As a result, we assume that they’re naive and subject to exploitation.

What’s interesting is that when we showed people really happy people and told them that they actually do go out and search information — they are consumers of the news and world around them — it muted that effect. They believe that the very happy person is just not paying close attention to the world around them. But if you signal that, “Yeah, I am extremely happy. I’m also aware of everything that’s happening around me,” then the effect goes away.

Knowledge@Wharton: Some of this data has to be interesting from a business perspective. It probably can have an economic impact on the success of a business.

Schweitzer: Part of the way I think about it is there are some people who are very upbeat, very happy, who believe that happiness is going to be motivating and inspiring and attractive. Some of that is true, but as leaders we need to also be quite mindful of the fact that when we exude a great deal of happiness, we may also need to address concerns about how wise we are about the world.

Knowledge@Wharton: This really has an effect for managers of a company or those moving up the ladder to the C-suite.

Schweitzer: I think that’s exactly right. Think about managers as they get promoted and evaluated, how wise or how naive they are, and also as we think about sales force. We often prescribe to people that you have to be happy, you have to demonstrate this happiness, [yet in doing so] we might be signaling something about our company or about our employees that they’re not the smartest or wisest people out there if they are constantly happy all the time.

Knowledge@Wharton: Does it signal anything about our culture as it is right now? Go back a decade in the United States, and it was not a happy time for a lot of people because of the recession.

“Maybe American-level happiness might strike others as very naive.”

Schweitzer: What I would say is that there are always things in the news, even when our economy is going well, that might bring us down. Yet Americans as a whole are relatively optimistic. As I mentioned before, this idea of the pursuit of happiness is deeply embedded in our thinking. Americans tend to be upbeat, optimistic and happy. That baseline is what we’re comparing our results to — that ordinary happiness is fine and what’s expected. When you see somebody who just has neutral affect, they look down and depressed.

Knowledge@Wharton: Maybe they don’t realize it, but from the research that you did are happy people at a disadvantage right now?

Schweitzer: Absolutely. We found that the people who exude this sort of great happiness may be highly motivated, they may be very happy themselves, and they may be successful, but they’re also more likely to be targets of exploitation. Other people sort of scanning the environment will look at these people and, if they have a conflict of interest, they’re more likely to exploit this very happy person. If they’re looking for a negotiation partner that they might deceive, they want the very happy person. They see this very happy person as more gullible, and they actually act on it and give that person worse information.

Knowledge@Wharton: Does the happy person [tend to] realize the deception in the end, and is there more conflict because of it?

Schweitzer: That’s a great question. In our studies, we really just looked at the first pathway. What we haven’t done is look very systematically at how these people operate and react…. What we haven’t looked at are these downstream consequences [regarding whether] this creates conflict? Does this end up dampening the very happy people when they figure out, “Hey, being very happy has some down sides that I want to sort of ease off.”

Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like happy people are not able to recognize when this potential trouble is coming their way.

Schweitzer: We didn’t anticipate this effect being so robust, and we don’t have any evidence that the people anticipate this, that people understand that there’s a cost to being very happy. The broader literature hasn’t identified many disadvantages to being very happy. In general, happiness is good. In fact, happiness is often the goal, but expressing very high levels of happiness can have some down sides. And I think that’s very important to note.

Knowledge@Wharton: Did your research look at people who are in a significantly large corporate environment, compared with a smaller business setting where there are more familial relationships in the office?

Schweitzer: You’re raising something really important: The assumptions we make about other people based on the emotions they’re expressing are particularly important for people we don’t know well. The first impressions that you make, or people that you interact with just casually in an organization — those could still be important relationships. But they’re very different from the more intimate, deeper ties with people we see all the time. There, the inferences we’re going to make are not going to be based on as many superficial cues as they are how well we actually know someone. You see your sibling or parent and they’re extremely happy, but you still have an enormous amount of experience to draw on that’s going to inform what you really think that they’re doing. What we found is that once you know somebody, that overwhelms the quick inferences you’re making based upon how they look.

Earn to dieget big games. “As leaders, we need to … be quite mindful of the fact that when we exude a great deal of happiness, we may also need to address concerns about how wise we are about the world.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Could this research have an impact on team-building ideas and philosophies that a lot of C-suites are looking for now?

More Changesteach To Be Happy Song

Schweitzer: Yes, there are huge advantages once you have small teams. If you can build small teams, you’re likely to deepen trust, you’re going to have better collaboration, and you’re going to be inoculated to some of the vagaries of things just like this — that is, the sort of quick inferences we’re going to make based upon how somebody’s expressing their feelings. You’re going to have a much more robust system so that when bumps come along and somebody gets promoted and somebody else doesn’t get promoted, when you have an unequal distribution of the workload, what you’re going to find is that in smaller teams that have deep ties and deep trust, they’re going to be able to weather these storms better than people that have much looser ties and know each other less well.

Knowledge@Wharton: For the people who are happy and are taken advantage of once or twice, they will end up being more adaptable. Do you see that some of that happiness is taken away from them over time?

Schweitzer: Being happy makes us more robust. That is, we can actually weather some adverse events, bad news, bad outcomes. And being happy is very functional. What I’m suggesting is that degree matters. Some happiness is very good. Extreme happiness has some downsides the ways people perceive us. Another key idea in our work is that a lot of scholars have been relatively insensitive to the magnitude of different emotions. We intuitively know that ecstasy is different from bliss, different from happiness. But we haven’t carefully looked at that. In our research, we were able to very carefully measure different levels of happiness and found that there’s a curvilinear relationship here.

There are many cases where we do want to dial down happiness. For example, when delivering bad news, or when in a negotiation somebody makes you an offer, you don’t want to be too happy in your reaction to that. They are cases where expressing less happiness can be beneficial, and I think it’s worth understanding that some of us with high emotional intelligence will be more adaptable and send off the right signals, [whereas] some others of us might be just wearing our hearts on our sleeves. The outcomes we get and the way we’re treated by other people may not be as good.