foreign [Music] s and there were lots of reasons why we might feel that our happiness is outside of our control but the good news is that small actions over time can add up to something really significant we're going to hear from positive psychology expert Sean acre whose research shows that we can build positive habits that make life better and can also become part of our daily routine I I think at root I believe and I see it in my own life all the time uh that I followed the wrong formula for happiness and success I
keep thinking if I work hard and Achieve these goals think how happy I'll be if we keep thinking if I get good grades then I'll feel happier you know if I get into the right school I'll feel happier if I get married think how happy I'll be remember that one right or like as soon as I have kids think how happy I'll be I'll be happy forever and then then they have to be healthy and they have to be right School the problem is at root every time the brain has a success your brain changes
the goal post of what success looks like which is why we initially assumed a positive psychology that there might not be a correlation or causation between happiness and success because you see these incredibly successful people who have everything and still don't have happiness but then if you're able to raise their levels of happiness then every single success rate we were no we knew how to test for all of those improved so there was a correlation causation it was just flowing the opposite direction of what what we were expecting so I think that the core message
I think is not that happiness is an incredible advantage or that positive psychology is fantastic to me the the core message is the change is possible people think that they can't change in terms of their happiness because they think that they're it's their genes their environment you ask them why they're not happy they'll tell you something external you know it's so fascinating because if you you know look around this room everyone in this room has jeans for teeth that should rot out by age 15 and a high sugar Society that's what it is to be
human unless you get people to create a daily habit of brushing their teeth every day of their life and then what it is to be human transforms dramatically so that's what we've been looking for what are those very simple habits maybe that take less than two minutes a day that can we can routinize that causes positive changes I'm doing a lot of work with schools as you know working with trying to bring this into low-income areas and I went into one of the hardest hit areas in the United States in Flint Michigan and one of
the grandmothers there in the midst of poverty in the midst of a Water Crisis they've had and all the jobs going away and the massive amounts of crime in the midst of it she keeps a glass jar in her kitchen and when her grandkids would come over to visit her she'd listen for anything that was good going on in their lives at school something going on with their friends and she write it down on a scrap sheet paper crumpled up and put it into this glass jar and then when her grandkids would come back over
she'd force them to sit down she's one of these grandmothers forced them to sit down and she'd read out everything in the jar to them to remind them of all the blessings going on their life in the midst of you know sometimes what seems like a hopeless situation I heard that and I was like we have so much to be grateful for with my family we have to be doing this as well so that's how we start our Virtual School each day we have a glass jar we filled it up twice now and both times
we filled it up with all these things that my son's been grateful for and I've been grateful for when we read back through it eighty percent of the things I had forgotten about I was like oh yeah that was amazing um but 80 of the blessings in my life I lost access to but I could tell you then and now every fire I need to put out in my inbox my brain our brains will naturally scan for threats within this world unless we consciously craft habits to change the way our brains are are devoting those
mental resources what's encouraging to me is that happiness isn't just something that's static it's something we could actually grow and this is something I do within my life this is how we start our virtual school with my son it's what pulled me through some challenges this year is I think of three new things that are I'm grateful for it that have occurred over the past 24 hours we know from previous research that that can take people that were continually testing as pessimists low-level pessimists and move them up to a low level of optimism simply by
a 45 second disrupter similar to brushing your teeth so we fight so hard against the negative and the symptoms in our world and we forget to tell people how simple positive two-minute interventions might have dramatic impacts upon people's lives I think the opposite of Happiness to me isn't unhappiness unhappiness fuels great change right uh when we're unhappy it shows us when we feel alone or unhappiness shows us when the world is unjust or racist unhappiness can fuel positive change I think the opposite what we're fighting against is apathy apathy is the belief that my behavior
doesn't matter coupled with feeling no joy moving towards our potential so if as we're doing those habits we lose that sense of Joy moving forward we're not going to benefit as much from those individual habits as well so what I would say is two twofold one is we never get tired of brushing our teeth no one wakes up and was like well I brush my teeth for a decade I'm out right that was good and I'm gonna go do something else now no it becomes a habit within our life so we don't even think about
it that's what I hope these positive psychology habits become gratitude has become that within my life I believe these small simple habits as mundane as brushing your teeth have huge implications for the long term um uh outcome not only of our lives but of our success rates as well and our ability to Ripple that out to other people when I first heard about the research on gratitude and writing down three things each day I was skeptical I couldn't see how it was relevant but I gave it a go and I'll be honest I found it
life-changing even within just a couple of weeks I could see benefits I was more able to notice the good things I might otherwise have taken for granted I was better at reframing difficult situations I got more sleep but I even brought some of that attitude of gratitude into my relationships and my approach to life and so much so that this has now become a regular habit in my daily life much like cleaning my teeth and I really do believe that when we try these things out and see the benefits for ourselves these happiness habits really
can become part of our daily routine thank you
