The Upside of Being Under Pressure Together Success Magazine, Shawn Achor September 8, 2015 As part of an ROTC scholarship, I spent a summer during college in naval training. It taught me a lot about dealing with adversity. Every night of boot camp, we would go to bed fully clothed for a 4 a.m. wakeup. We were…
SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor January 2015 If you saw me on Super Soul Sunday with Oprah Winfrey, you’ll know that Oprah and I discussed the age-old question: Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Even the positive-minded media mogul admitted to wrestling with the question. “I beat myself up because sometimes I look at it and I…
SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor December 2014 Negative noise is everywhere in our society, but it’s also inside our heads. Worry is the loudest internal noise, and as a new parent, I understand how easy it is to let it creep in. I need to remember that worry is not love, and that in fact giving…
Live Happy, Shawn Achor & Michelle Gielan December 2014 Tips for smart, meaningful giving and receiving this holiday season. Before you go racing out to the mall to pick up a new oversized reindeer sweater for Aunt Sally and a set of drums for your 4-year-old nephew (fun for him, not so much for your…
Do you feel like life comes at you too quickly to respond in the way you want? Your ability to respond to an ever-changing world is predicted by how big a paddle you think you have. Let me explain. Pong, one of the oldest video games, is a primitive game of virtual pingpong—you control a…
National Public Radio | April 14, 2014 KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: It’s MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I’m Kelly McEvers. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And I’m David Greene. Today, in Your Health we’re looking at food labels. At the grocery store you might glance over the labels on items on the shelves, checking the amount…
Why redefining happiness is the key to sustaining it If you want to live happy, you first need to define happiness. Over the past few years, we have traveled to more than 50 countries researching and speaking on positive psychology, and after spending time with farmers who lost their lands in Zimbabwe, Swiss bankers in the middle of a banking crisis, owners of…
I thought it was simple: Vacations are fun. After all, taking time off work and time away gives us the opportunity to make memories, share experiences with our family and friends and see the world. Right? But research doesn’t hold that line of thinking up. Not every vacation is equal. And theory – the idea…
I thought it was simple: Vacations are fun, Americans are stressed, and happiness raises productivity and sales. Therefore, people should take more vacations, right? But research doesn’t hold that line of thinking up. Not every vacation is equal. According to a 2013 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the U.S. is the only developed…
Holiday Cheer: Small steps can bring a little more joy to the world. Shawn Achor History offers some dramatic examples of how the human brain is designed for emotional contagion. Perhaps the craziest on record is the Dancing Plague of 1518. It reportedly began when a woman, Frau Troffea, started dancing in the streets of Strasbourg,…