Sleep, Exercise, Meditate (SEM) to find my way to sanity

I took The Science of Well-Being class, free on Coursera, from Yale University by Professor Laurie Santos. At first I wanted to write a sort of reflection and ‘book report’ just for me, to further encapsulate what I learned throughout the course. Now sharing it publicly as well, in case it’s useful for anyone thinking about taking the course, re-committing to continuing it, or just interested in strategies they can utilize to feel better.

TL;DR

I think this course is awesome. It’s amazing that it’s free. It was a great use of my time. It came into my life at a time when I was ready to receive it and make the most of it. As a part of the course, you take a pre and post happiness survey. I increased my happiness level by roughly 35% (more on this below).

I think everyone should consider investing time in something like this at some point in their lives. I would say better sooner than later, but I do believe you need to be in a certain place in your life and mentally ready to really get the most ROI. Even the content in the course that was not new for me (spoiler alert: having oodles of money does not make you happier) was extremely useful to hear and read about again in this context, as I found the scientific approach and researched backed studies really resonated with me and drove insights home in a more profound way.

NOTES

Sharing my notes below on what I found the most surprising, useful, and insightful as I was going through the lectures.

Resetting our understanding of happiness

• Knowing is not half the battle (G.I. Joe Fallacy) — it’s not enough to change our behavior
• We have flipped social norms; we think it’s more important to be very well off financially vs developing a meaningful philosophy on life
• According to some research studies, genetics contribute to 50% of our happiness. However life circumstances (winning the lottery or terrible car crash) contributes only 10%. Actions, intentions, habits (i.e. that which is within our control) contributes the remaining 40% to our happiness. (Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research)
• Our minds’ strongest intuitions are often totally wrong. Most of the goals we think are going to make us happy, won’t
• The things that we normally think will make us happy and we tend to focus on to increase our happiness actually don’t significantly increase our subjective well being, beyond a certain base level (good job, lots of money, awesome stuff, true love, the perfect body, the perfect grades)
• Resetting and/or reframing our social comparison points can be powerful (also, just be careful with social media and social comparisons with peers in general)
• Trying to get a job that’s going to give us a higher income, data has shown, will not be half as effective in making us happy as just shutting off social media

What actually makes us happy

• The ‘ideal job’ or what we would consider our calling may not actually be a specific job or profession, it may be a role where we can use multiple of our signature strengths

1. There is research showing that using 4 of our signature strengths can increase positive experiences at work and even turn a job into a calling
2. Signature strengths is a concept covered in the course, but just to give a taste, they are not as they sound… I would say they are more values than strengths, defined as character strengths that are most essential to who we are

• A growth mindset is best, if we work hard, we can get better at whatever it is.

1. Our ability to do something/knowledge of something is not fixed
2. Don’t get obsessed about whether we were right or wrong, get interested in what the right answer was so we can improve and learn

• Acts of kindness for others have great happiness ROI

1. Spending on others makes us happier than spending on ourselves
2. It doesn’t matter if we’re just buying somebody a chai or getting their family crucial medication — small acts are more than enough
3. Some research shows that our brains are wired to see other people’s rewards as our own rewards, so it’s kind of like getting a little click of cocaine every single time we do a nice thing for another person

• There is a disconnect in our beliefs about work vs leisure. We think apathetic leisure activities like watching Netflix are making us happy but in reality if we could have leisure activities that allowed us to gain more skill and challenge us a bit more (leisure activities that gave us a sense of flow), we probably would like that a little bit more
• Social connection makes the richness of life even richer, it’s a compounding effect. We’re happier when we’re around others, even if it’s someone random. They’re also happier. This is even more so for those that we are closest with.

1. Just being around somebody makes good experiences even better
2. Close social ties also make us more resilient — they make it less likely that we’ll fall prey to stressful events
3. In one study, the effect of feeling alone on happiness was seven times bigger than a fourfold increase in income
4. Talk to strangers, it’s free extra happiness for us and they are usually happier about it than we think as well. Most of the time, when we stop and say hi to people, they’re actually much nicer to us back than we think.

• Happiness isn’t a permanent condition, it’s a mood in the moment

“Happiness is like a leaky tire. You just have to keep pumping air into it to keep it inflated” — Nicholas Epley

• Those who value time are overall happier than those who value money; time > money, especially if we use it to do fun things & interact with others

1. Thinking about free time results in us prioritizing our time for fun things we enjoy
2. Thinking about money, results in us working more (overworking probably in my case)
3. Being able to have time to experience things we enjoy is called time affluence, it makes us happier

• Meditation can lead to happiness

1. Mind-wandering leads to unhappiness and meditation leads to less mind-wandering, which studies seem to point to
2. We’re one of the only species that can think from other perspectives or think about our future and think about our past
3. The “default network” is a network of interacting brain regions known to activate “by default” when a person is not involved in a task (aka mind-wandering)
4. These regions can activate within a fraction of a second when you stop doing a task, causing you to “mind wander”
5. These regions help us get out of the here & now (focuses on the past, future, other people)
6. We seem to be mind wandering during lots of different events we are supposed to be focused (47% of our waking hours & 30% in almost all activities except sex 😏)

“The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost. A wandering mind, in some sense, is an unhappy mind.” — Dan Gilbert

7. The act of meditating can change the normal default pattern of the way the brain fires i.e stop/limit mind-wandering. Meditating shuts off the default network to actually focus on the present moment.

8. Meditation seems to build brain tissue and strengthen our brains over time (according to study findings)

9. There was a study that even found that as people did more meditation, they boosted their GRE test performance (control was people trying to improve nutrition vs meditating)

10. If we had to pick one effortful practice to add into our daily life, meditation is a pretty good thing to do

11. Admittedly, I’d like to still learn more about this. For example, why did we evolve to have such a strong and efficient ‘default network’? How did/does it help us, despite some of the unhappiness drawbacks?

• Simple increases in physical activity and sleep can have huge psychological benefits, even bigger than the huge salary we think we want

1. Exercising three times a week, for 30 minutes a day may give us as much happiness as taking an SSRI or taking something like Zoloft
2. Study showed older adults who maintain physical fitness, had better cognitive function
3. Sleep can help academic and cognitive performance
4. Sleeping more and sleeping about seven or eight hours a night can make us happier
5. Sometimes we think there are bad things going on in our life, but really it’s just that we’re not sleeping enough

Strategies to put things into practice

• Notes and reminders, sound really simple but they capture our attention just like the candy bar on the counter and can make us do positive things
• Be mindful of our social context because one of the most powerful environments that we have is the other social agents around us
• Having others around us who are also working on these positive habits does two things: (1) it promotes the positive habits, (2) increases kindness and social connection
• Utilize goal setting methods like visualization, take a few minutes a day to visualize the goal, think about our wish, we think about what our goal is and make it as specific as possible, walk ourselves through the steps we’ll take in order to complete it

WOOP = scientifically based goal planning technique

1. Think about your WISH (as specific as possible)
2. The best OUTCOME
3. Potential OBSTACLES
4. Your if/then PLAN

• Start small and add on incrementally
• DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP, BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Reflections on assignments

As part of the course, we did weekly assignments (“rewirements”). The final capstone was a 4 week rewirement challenge. Below are my reflections that I was prompted to respond to at the end of the course, which are then evaluated by peers also completing the course.

State the rewirement you chose to practice and why why you picked it — perhaps it was something you were meaning to try for a while or perhaps the scientific research discussed in lecture was particularly compelling. Explain why you thought the behavior would fit into your life.

At first I chose sleep. Over the course of the initial 6 weeks when trying out the different requirements, I noticed sleep has a significant impact on setting me up to be my best self during the following day and follow through with other positive habits (rewirements) I’m trying to work on. I noticed that when I was not able to get good sleep, the other habits fell away really quickly and I was not able to follow through in a sustainable manner. I began thinking that, for me, it all starts with good sleep habits.

However, my old habits of trying to do all the things right away and being over-ambitious quickly snuck in and I ended up making the goal of doing a combination of three rewirements for the four-week period.

S — sleep early for least for 8 hours, at least 4 times a week

E — exercise for at least 30 minutes, at least 4 times a week

M — meditate for at least 10 minutes, daily

Describe how you socially committed to your chosen rewirement. Who did you talk to about your 4 week challenge? Were you specific about what you planned to accomplish?

For the first week, I did not socially commit. This first week, I also did not meet my rewirement goals. I was able to meditate daily but fell short of the sleep and exercise goals. Sleep was actually the one I was furthest away on, even though it was initially supposed to be my main goal.

I then took Professor Santos’s advice before going into the second week, to socially commit. I messaged a few close friends, explaining to them that I was taking this course and working on these positive habits. I also took the additional step with one of the friends to set up an accountability relationship. She chose her own habit to set a daily goal for and we agreed to update each other every night on our progress. My friend and I kept up the daily (or near daily) accountability check-ins for week 2 but fell off after the week was over.

I actually went on to achieve all of my rewirement goals for week 2. Week 2 was the only week where I fully met my rewirement goals.

Elaborate on any strategies you implemented for building habits. Did you rely on situation support to design a better environment? Did you set effective goals combining implementation intention and mental contrasting (via the WOOP framework).

Situation support was difficult for me due to not having a stable or consistent physical environment during the 4 week challenge. My biggest attempt to design a better environment, utilizing situation support, was to set up a bedtime ritual where I would have a sleepytime tea and lay down in bed to read 30 minutes to an hour before I wanted to ideally fall asleep. I also created a recurring daily event on my Google calendar that would also send me a phone alert to remind me when it was time to meditate, exercise, and get ready for bedtime.

I did not get around to using the WOOP framework. Interestingly, it wasn’t as ingrained in my mind as the other strategies and rewirements, I think because it was featured in a later lecture and we did not have weekly rewirements to reinforce and practice it like we did the others.

List how many times you completed the activity in the past 4 weeks and compare that to how many times you planned on completing the behavior? State the tools you used to monitor your progress — did you use an app, a notebook, a calendar, or something else?

S (sleep) — completed: 11 times; expected 16 times = 69%

E (exercise) — completed: 13 times; expected 16 times = 81%

M (meditate) — completed: 26 times; expected 28 times = 93%

I used the rewirement workbook provided by the course to monitor progress.

Looking at the results above, I find it interesting that the habit I found the most important to work on (sleep), I was able to complete the least times and I found the hardest to do. I’m also proud of my meditation progress. It used to be just as challenging for me as sleep, but it has now gotten easier to be consistent with it. One approach/adjustment that I think helped in my being able to be more consistent with my meditation habit is lowering my expectation for how to actually meet the goal, i.e. I used to expect myself to do at least 30 minutes of meditation daily which would result in me not even attempting to some days because that amount of time felt daunting. Using the advice in the course and of a good friend who pointed this out to me, I chose to lower the threshold to at least 10 minutes of daily meditation. This allowed me to first focus on getting used to going through the motions. Perhaps this is one approach I can try to replicate with sleep. I lowered my sleep goal expectation from daily to 4 times a week, but perhaps I can try to make it just to sleep at least 8 hours and remove the sleeping early requirement… or start with even less days a week at first.

Calculating the numbers this way was also beneficial for me, I felt a sense of pride for what I was able to accomplish. Before looking at the calculation this way, I was looking at the results more so a week at a time so to me, it looked as if I failed at 3 out of the 4 weeks to complete my goals. This was a good and more objective reality check that actually built up my confidence.

Compare your happiness scores. Did your score change at all? Did your score go up, down, or stay the same?

My happiness scores increased. If all three approaches of measuring happiness are averaged out, my happiness score increased by 36%. It was a full 3 months later.

PERMA — initial: 4.88; final: 7.6 = 56% increase

Authentic happiness — initial: 2.5; final: 3.29 = 32% increase

How happy scale — initial: 2.5; final: 3 = 20% increase

Describe the experience of trying to build a new habit. What were some triumphs? Some setbacks? How did you feel during the process and how do you feel now?

The experience of trying to build a new habit was up and down. I set completing this course as a top priority, I told myself that going fully through the course was of the utmost importance to gain the most benefits and insights. This meant doing all of the rewirements and assignments properly and to my best ability.

I felt encouraged in the beginning of the course. I felt that the rewirements were easy to complete, didn’t require too much commitment from me and I did not find myself struggling or negotiating with myself to complete them. This quickly came to an end towards the middle of the course once the rewirements became more substantial like meditation, exercise, and sleep. I quickly became discouraged when I missed days and was not able to complete each goal of the new habit or stay as consistent as I would have liked. I had to learn to pick myself back up and start each day fresh. At a point, I actually decided to take a week off and then re-start at the most challenging part with a fresh frame of mind. I think this helped me to let go of the past failure and wipe the slate clean.

It has now been a few weeks since I’ve completed the 4 week challenge. I’ve coined ‘SEM’ as a habit concept to focus on for myself. I continue to aim to do these 3 habits regularly and consistently, above all else. I believe they are not only easier for me to do now, although of course I still struggle and fall short of my ambitions concerning them all the time, but it is also easier for me to restart and pick up where I left off without being too hard on myself.

I believe I’m now in it for the long game.

Final thoughts

To get the most out of this class, it’s important to actually do all of the assignments (“rewirements” as they’re called in the course). Some were easier to commit to than others, however I found even the most challenging ones or the ones I didn’t think were necessary or would make much impact, were pleasantly and positively surprising. Full disclosure: I was not working full time while going through this course so I believe I was able to prioritize it higher and commit more time to it. That said, there were tens of thousands of people who took this course at the same time and I doubt all were in the same position.

If you’ve been on the fence, the next time you think about starting a new series on Netflix… think about starting this course instead. If not the class, hopefully reading this has put some new thoughts and ideas into your subconscious about some life changes you may undertake at some point.