Showing posts with label Matt Killingsworth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Killingsworth. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Ted Tuesday: Matt Killingsworth Want To Be Happier? Stay In The Moment.

'People want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness."


Good Morning Folk,

Today I’ve decided to share a TED that is relevant to what I want this blog to be, and my role in life as the Chief Happiness Officer. This talk hasn't broken the Internet, nor has the popularity of the Grump Cat, but with over 3 million views in its own right, its worth a look.

Everyone on this planet deserves to be happy, nobody deserves sadness. You and you alone have the power to change your thoughts, feelings, actions and everything else about yourself that you want to change. If you want to be happy, the only thing stopping you is you.

I watched an amazing TED Talk a while ago titled Want to be happier? Stay in the moment by a guy called Matt Killingsworth. According to Matt:
"It’s an important question but one that science has yet to fully answer. Yes, people are generally happier if they make more money rather than less, or are married instead of single, but the differences are quite modest." 
My research is driven by the idea that happiness may have more to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences than with the major conditions of our lives. I
A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people’s moment-to-moment happiness in daily life on a massive scale, all over the world, something we’d never been able to do before. This took the form of trackyourhappiness.org, which uses iPhones to monitor people’s happiness in real time. 
My results suggest that happiness is indeed highly sensitive to the contents of our moment-to-moment experience. And one of the most powerful predictors of happiness is something we often do without even realizing it: mind-wandering. 
Among the surprising results: We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment. And the flip side: The more our mind wanders, the less happy we can be. 
Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier 
As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It's amazing.

So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play.
 
My hope is that over time, by tracking people's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness, and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that's not only richer and healthier, but happier as well."
The lesson here isn’t that we should stop mind-wandering entirely—after all, our capacity to revisit the past and imagine the future is immensely useful, and some degree of mind-wandering is probably unavoidable. But these results do suggest that mind-wandering less often could substantially improve the quality of our lives. If we learn to fully engage in the present, we may be able to cope more effectively with the bad moments and draw even more enjoyment from the good ones.

So.... stop worrying about your future, what will happen will happen and you have little control over it until the moment arrives. Stop dwelling on the past, the past is the past and it’s now over. There is no need to dwell on it because you cannot change it now. Live in the present moment. You won’t regret it.

I want fanatical happiness to be way that YOU can make yourself happier. 

Have a GREAT Day,



Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer
  


Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  




About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the third consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.


Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Ted Tuesday: Matt Killingsworth's "Are We Happier When We Stay In The Moment?" TEDTalk and "Happiness" App

"When are humans most happy? To answer this question, researcher Matt Killingsworth built an app, Track Your Happiness, that let people report their feelings in real time. Among the results: We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment."








Good Morning Folks,

As your Chief Happiness Officer, over the past months, I've chosen TED talks to share here about the path to happiness and self-fulfillment that will enlighten and inspire you in unexpected ways. 

These short lectures explore why we’re often unhappy, why we feel happy when we do, and how we can overcome the many opposites of happiness so that we can live every day of our lives in a positive, enriched, and deeply fulfilling way. 

What is it that makes us happy? We’re told that money that doesn’t buy it, or success, or even love. Can happiness be created, or must it be discovered? Does the path to a happy life require certain ingredients—self-discovery, confidence, a loving group of family and friends, spiritual guidance, the opportunity to fulfill one’s dreams—or can anyone be truly “happy?” 

We spend our entire lives on the pursuit of this elusive state, which we so often think we recognize in others, and which we constantly struggle to find for ourselves. Thousands of years of philosophy, psychology, and sociology have studied what it means to be happy, but what if it could be a whole lot simpler than that? 

In today's talk, seen by almost 3 million on You Tube and Ted sites, by Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate at Harvard who studies the nature of human happiness, is “Want to be Happier? Stay in the Moment.” Though the title might recall the clichéd “live in the moment” philosophy, Killingsworth is actually referring to the fascinating research he has done on studying the moment-to-moment happiness of research subjects to help him and other scientists learn what makes us happy and unhappy. 

Through his website trackyourhappiness.org, Killingsworth has made a research tool that allows him to track people’s responses to questions such as: “How do you feel?” “What are you doing?” “Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” 

His research has shown that 47 percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they’re doing in that moment, and that there is a direct correlation between people’s “mind wandering” and their feelings of unhappiness. In other words, no matter what we’re doing, we’re substantially happier when we’re aware of and engaged in the moment than if we’re cluttering our minds with other thoughts. In this short, concise lecture, Killingsworth shows us how his statistics have the power to reveal when we’re the happiest, and how maybe being happy is a lot easier than we think. - 

When are humans most happy? To gather data on this question, Matt Killingsworth built an app, Track Your Happiness, that let people report their feelings in real time. Among the surprising results: We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment. And the flip side: The more our mind wanders, the less happy we can be. (Filmed at TEDxCambridge.)



Thanks to NPR and SpiritualityHealth.com and, most of all to you for “caring” (and sharing!).

Have a GREAT Day,



Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer
  


Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  


About Matt Killingsworth

Researcher Matt Killingsworth designs studies that gather data on happiness. While doing his Ph.D. research at Harvard, Killingsworth invented the Track Your Happiness app.


He's now a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar examining such topics as the relationship between happiness and the content of everyday experiences, the percentage of everyday experiences that are intrinsically valuable, and the degree of congruence between the causes of momentary happiness and of one's overall satisfaction with life.

track your influence!




About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the third consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.


About the Author:
Welcome to the fastest growing onsite outsourcing company in the nation! Led by Mitch Weiner, co-founder and industry pioneer, FSO is "the" award winning enterprise-wide outsourcing and people solutions firm servicing a multitude of clients across North America.

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