In this episode, you'll hear:
- The elements of happiness and how to be happier
Today, we are doing a podcast swap with Learn From People Who Lived It, hosted by our co-host, Mathew Blades!
Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar joins us from his home in New Jersey, where he recently launched the world's first fully accredited master’s degree program in happiness at Centenary University. Tal is an expert in the field, having received his BA in Philosophy and Psychology and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard. He tells us that, as a young man, his squash training informed his understanding of what it takes to become an expert and excel throughout his life. Tal's dedication to the sport led him to play squash professionally and, eventually, to win the Israeli National Squash Championships. After being injured during his time in the Israeli Army, he left professional sports but was soon recruited to play at the amateur level for Harvard. There, he won the U.S. intercollegiate squash championships and eventually returned to his alma mater to become a lecturer.
Tal first began thinking about the nature of happiness when he found that success in Squash was not bringing him happiness. Years later, the same realization came to him again when he found that success academically and socially in college was not causing him to feel happy either. This situation made Tal do the unthinkable… leave his computer science program and move to philosophy and psychology. He had to figure out, “Why aren't I happy? And how can I become happier?" This move kicked off what would become an incredible career and a lifelong dedication to studying the science of happiness.
Dr. Tal has become an accomplished writer, with his books on positive psychology and leadership being translated into more than thirty languages and appearing on best-seller lists around the world. In addition to what Tal has achieved at Harvard, he has also taught happiness studies at Columbia University, consulted and lectured for companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Google, and given expert interviews on programs like NPR and Armchair Expert.
Throughout his career, one thing Tal has found to be true is that success has nothing to do with happiness. Rather, happiness will lead to success. One way we can see this happening is with the “flow state." When you are in the "flow,” you are having “peak experience” and “peak performance." Flowing can make us feel happy, but before we can know if we are happy, Tal tells us it’s important to define happiness.
Most people equate happiness with pleasure, but it is so much more than that. Pleasure is one element of happiness, but there are others as well: spiritual well-being (meaning and purpose), physical well-being (exercise, nutrition, and rest), intellectual well-being (curiosity and lifelong learning), relational well-being (time spent with others and impact on our community), and emotional well-being. Emotional well-being is the element that encompasses pleasure but also requires being able to deal with painful emotions. Dr. Tal says, “The first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness.”.
Many of us are missing one or more of these elements. There are billions of people worldwide experiencing burnout, and Dr. Tal tells us this is not due to their being more stressed, but rather that there is not enough rest time to take care of all of these aspects. Oftentimes, people just feel like busyness is just a fact of life. Still, by evaluating what we really want in life and understanding that perfection is not realistic but good enough is good enough, you can change your expectations and, in turn, shift your perspective. There is a time for the highs and a time for the lows, but most of the time, we just need to be neutral. Tal calls embracing and accepting that most of life is neutral, with spikes in the highs and dips into the lows, emotional flexibility. He tells us to “surrender to the emotion." Embrace it.
The pandemic is another factor that impacted our happiness. However, one especially alarming trend that Tal has been giving voice to is rising depression rates among teenagers. These recent unprecedented increases are mainly attributed to their widespread use of smartphones. Tal notes that the technology itself isn't the issue, but the lack of boundaries around smartphones is. Technology is radically impacting the self-esteem of men and women, but, to a greater degree, teenage boys and, most radically, teenage girls. Fortunately, Tal has advice on how to do a reality check for our children (and ourselves) when we start comparing our bodies and lives to the ones we see online. Practicing gratitude daily develops an appreciative mindset that will serve us much more than the depreciative mindset so many of us have developed as a result of impossible comparisons. But keep in mind that it's not so much what you say to your children; it's about how you model behavior for them.
This kind of practical and insightful perspective is what Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar’s Happiness Studies Academy is all about. The goal is to help individuals become happier themselves and empower them to help others do the same. With a year-long certificate program and a two-year, fully accredited master's degree program, Tal is giving future leaders in the field a way to learn about happiness from multiple perspectives.
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