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Does an overflowing inbox stress you out? You’re not alone – but according to Shawn Achor, author of Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change, some subtle shifts in mindset can dramatically increase your happiness and productivity: “An overflowing email inbox could be a soul-draining activity, but it could be an opportunity to connect with people or a source of leads.”
“Part of what I want people to realize is that the reality you attach to the things going on in your life…changes how your brain responds to it,” he says. “If you see your inbox as stressful, you’re much slower to respond to those emails and your stress rises. It’s inviting people to realize there are multiple realities in the moment and you can choose the most valuable one.” The benefits are clear, he says: “When the human brain is positive, you’re 3x more creative, intelligence rises, and productivity rises by 31%.”
But many people are hamstrung from the outset because they believe their level of happiness is predetermined and immutable. “ Before we can change people’s happiness, success, or habits, we have to change their mental reality ,” he says. “They have to believe change is possible, and we show them using science that genes are not the end of the story.”
Some would argue that of course people can become happier if they achieve great luck or great success. But, says Achor, “If that was true, you wouldn’t see celebrities that are depressed or suicidal…success doesn’t automatically equate to happiness.” And conversely, as Achor’s work with the National MS Society showed, facing serious health problems doesn’t preclude happiness.
“We wanted to see if the positive [happiness-inducing] habits we were talking about in organizations could work even when someone has a chronic neuromuscular disease, low energy, and maybe higher levels of pain, and that’s absolutely the case,” he says, citing research showing that people experiencing chronic pain who journaled about positive experiences could, six months later, cut in half the amount of pain medication they needed to take. “What I really learned from the MS Society is that all these people who were experiencing something we think prohibits happiness – we’re proving that completely wrong…Scientifically, happiness becomes a choice.”
So what are the habits of happiness that can help enhance your level of satisfaction at work, and in general? Achor, who discusses these concepts in an extremely popular TEDx talk, went looking for “positive habits akin to brushing our teeth that…could increase our health and performance.” He found five key activities:
- Writing down three new things you’re grateful for every day;
- Journaling about positive experiences for two minutes;
- 15 minutes of cardiovascular activity, which is “equivalent to taking an antidepressant”;
- 2 minutes of watching your breath go in and out; and
- “The most powerful one is we have people write a two-minute, positive email praising or thanking someone they know for 21 days in a row,” says Achor. “Not only do you see happiness significantly improve, but you see stress levels drop and social support increasing. Social connection is as predictive of how long you live as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking, so it’s pretty incredible.”
Conventional wisdom says that you succeed, and as a result, you become happy. But according to Achor, that’s backwards : happiness is a choice, and with these simple activities, we can all work toward it.
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.
