Positive Psicology: Happiness Advantage

(Excerpt from TED Talk - Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work)

Broken Formula of Success: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier.

It's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like.  The real problem is our brains work in the opposite order.

If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed.

Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present,then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.

We've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. 

• Write down three new things that you're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, your brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.

• Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it.

• Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand.

• Random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social support network.

11:54And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.
Check the TED talk for more details: