Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post. A few years back, while crunching stats for my dissertation, I spent many nights in the student computer lab in the basement of the psychology department at Yale. On one particularly “dark” night, Bret Logan, head of IT in the psychology department who had come in…
By Shawn Achor, as told to Joan Raymond | New York Times September 4, 2013I GIVE about 100 lectures a year, which translates to about 300 flights. I try to stay positive about everything, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering I’m a researcher, author and educator in the field of positive psychology. I do have…
Numerous studies have shown that stress can be unhealthy—the American Institute of Stress has linked it to the six leading causes of death. Unfortunately, knowing how bad it is makes us fear stress even more. But this is only half the story. The human brain actually works best in the presence of this tension. Stress can…
I had gone to bed at midnight. It was now two in the morning. I was still awake, stressed thinking about my book, which — ironically — is about happiness. Trying to unwind, I opened my laptop and started watching clips from The Daily Show. An ad for a popular sleep aid came on that I…