Paige Fowler | Fitness Magazine, November 2014 The secret to productivity isn’t doing more. It’s simplifying—clearing away obstacles to make the most of every day. “Becoming more efficient frees you up to do what makes you happy,” says Michelle Gielan, the founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research in San Antonio. Amen to that!…
Orion Jones | Big Think, November 2014 We all want to be happy. Some have even said that achieving happiness is the goal of life. But we wouldn’t look to a technology company for such wisdom, would we? It seems unlikely, and yet Google has made a real contribution to happiness studies thanks to one of…
Elizabeth Garone, BBC Capital November 2014 Over the course of a year, people spend a lot of time on the job but, that doesn’t necessarily mean they like their work. The French spend an average of 1,480 hours at work annually, Americans, 1,700 hours, and Singaporeans a whopping 2,400 hours, according to the Federal Reserve…
Mark C. Crowley, Fast Company November 2014 By the late 1990s, the number of people diagnosed with depression in the U.S. had increased by nearly 1,000% in just a half-century according to the World Health Organization. Believing that psychological research had been too narrowly focused on finding new treatments for human despair—and not on a…
Michelle McQuaid, Huffington Post September 8, 2014 Like most people, I grew up believing that if I worked hard, then I’d be successful and then I’d be happy. It was only after spending more than a decade of my career chasing the next goal, earning the next promotion, and convincing my boss I was worthy…
ERIC BARKER | TIME Magazine October 15, 2014 We all want to be more successful. But everything you read probably sounds like a lot of work. Isn’t there a scientifically proven method that’s a little more… fun? There is. Shawn Achor is the bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage and for years at Harvard he studied exactly that: happiness. He gave an…
Poonam R. Das, Anjum F. Shah This study examined how a person felt about themselves and others and what that meant for their overall social adjustment. 150 participants (ages 16-20) took part in the survey, with the group split evenly between girls and boys. Using the Social Adjustment Inventory (Roma Pal) and The Self-Other Questionnaire (Dr. E.L. Phillips), the study…
Elizabeth Scott, M.S. The Value of All Types of Social Support Every time you reach for the phone when you’ve had a bad day, accept help when you’re overwhelmed, or even search online to get information from someone on how to handle a stressor, you’re demonstrating that you know what research has repeatedly shown: that…
Derrick Carpenter, MAPP Certain people have a remarkable talent for translating science into practical wisdom. Chris Peterson, a positive psychology researcher who passed away in 2012, was one of these people. If asked to take the mass of research on well-being and boil it down to the most significant finding, he would say, “Other people…
Thai Nguyen, Huffington Post September 2014 I got pick-pocketed in Cusco recently. That’s one way to make a grown man cry. The pain of robbery always goes beyond the loss of material possessions. It’s that sense of violation. When our joy, peace and happiness is yanked away and replaced with a profound bitterness. My intuition…
