Rooted in scientific data, social connection is a sure-fire way to actively and intentionally change the trajectory of our happiness toward a more fulfilled and well-rounded life.

Transcript:

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and yesterday we talked about a bunch of things that won’t make us as happy as we predict they will.  What happens is that our brains, our intuition, overestimates how happy we think these things, or these goals will make us.  

What we know from the data is that we can work hard to be happier, but it seems as though we are working toward the wrong things because we are trusting our intuition too much, and it’s leading us astray. 

Today and over the next few days, we are going to talk about one specific goal we should be setting that will increase our happiness.  And that is increasing or being mindful of our social connection. 

Now you might be asking yourself, how is that a goal.  I invite you to think about this as a characteristic, a way of being.  If we can increase our social connection, the science indicates we can increase our happiness.  

And before you roll your eyes, the science that we’ll be going into indicates that people are mispredicting their own happiness when engaging in social connection.   So, you might be thinking, a random social connection at the coffee shop won’t make you happier, but your intuition is just wrong about that most of the time.  And this can be a smile, exchanging pleasantries, it doesn’t have to be this big thing.    

But even more interesting, is that your intuition is wrong if you think it doesn’t increase the effect of the other person’s happiness too.  We think we’re annoying or the person will think I’m a weirdo for chatting them up in line, but the science indicates that’s just another way our brains, our intuition is just playing tricks on us and getting it wrong.  

So today, I invite you to make a new social connection, whether it’s a smile at a stranger, exchanging pleasantries in a line somewhere or even engaging in a conversation - and take note of how that makes you feel. 

Of course, I’d love to hear how this is going for you, so please reach out to us on social media and let us know.    

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