The Science of Well-being – Laurie Santos free course on Coursera

The Science of Wellbeing

This free course (available on Coursera) is excellent. It includes self-assessment tools, as well as good theoretical insight into the science of subjective wellbeing and practical actions you can take to improve your own levels of wellbeing.

The central argument: we are bad at predicting what will make us happy

The idea the course keeps returning to is miswanting — a term from Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson describing our tendency to want things that will not deliver the satisfaction we expect from them.

We are reliably wrong in a particular direction. We overestimate how much a pay rise, a promotion, a bigger house or a better job title will improve our day-to-day experience, and we underestimate how quickly we will adjust to all of them. We also underestimate the things that do work, largely because they are unglamorous and freely available.

Two mechanisms explain most of this:

• Hedonic adaptation. We adjust to new circumstances remarkably fast, good and bad. The new salary becomes the normal salary. The thing that was going to change everything becomes the baseline you barely notice.
• Reference points. We judge our situation by comparison rather than in absolute terms. This is why a decent salary can feel inadequate as soon as you learn what a colleague earns, and why social media is such an efficient machine for making people feel worse about lives that have not changed.

There is a further layer: our intuitions about our own minds are often simply wrong. We think we know what we will enjoy, what we will regret, and how long feelings will last. The evidence says we are poor forecasters of all three.

What the evidence suggests actually helps

The course is clear that the reliable interventions are not surprising. They are, however, consistently neglected — partly because they are ordinary, and partly because they take effort while offering nothing to show for it.

• Social connection. The most robust finding in the whole literature. Time spent with other people, including brief interactions with strangers, reliably raises mood — and people consistently predict they will enjoy it less than they do.
• Kindness towards others. Spending money or time on other people raises wellbeing more dependably than spending it on yourself.
• Gratitude. Deliberately noticing and recording what is going well. Simple, faintly embarrassing, and well supported.
• Sleep and exercise. Both have substantial effects on mood and both are among the first things to be cut when work gets busy.
• Time affluence. Having unstructured time matters more than having more money, past a fairly modest threshold. Most of us trade the former for the latter without really deciding to.
• Savouring and presence. Attending to an experience while it is happening rather than documenting it or thinking about the next one.

Why this matters at work

Most of this is framed as personal, but it has obvious implications for how teams operate.

If social connection is the strongest single lever, then the quiet erosion of informal contact — fewer unstructured conversations, back-to-back calls, remote work without deliberate connection — is a wellbeing issue and not just a culture one. If time affluence matters more than income, then protecting people’s uninterrupted time is a more meaningful act than most recognition schemes. And if we adapt quickly to improvements in our circumstances, then organisations betting entirely on pay and perks to make people happier are betting on the mechanism with the shortest half-life.

It also suggests some humility about wellbeing initiatives. A great deal of what gets provided under that heading targets the things people say they want, which is precisely where miswanting operates.

Course Overview

Laurie’s course is made up of pre-recorded lectures (recorded pre-Covid) and independent work. It’s a self-led learning programme and you can start it any time, and complete it at your own pace. The course has six content-based modules, followed by a further four modules that are designed to help you make behavioural changes to improve your subjective wellbeing. The six core modules are:

1. Introduction,
2. Misconceptions about happiness,
3. Why our expectations are so bad,
4. How we can overcome our biases,
5. Stuff that really makes us happy, and
6. Putting strategies into practice

The guide time for the modules varies between roughly one and three hours, depending on the number of videos included in the module and the amount of independent work recommended. In addition to the theory and behaviour change activities in the course, there is also the opportunity to use some self-assessment tools to gain a sense of your own levels of subjective wellbeing, and your improvement as you progress through your change journey.

The catch, which the course is honest about

The structure of the course makes a point that is easy to miss: six modules explain the science, and then four more are devoted to actually changing something. That ratio is deliberate.

Understanding hedonic adaptation does not stop you adapting. Knowing that social connection matters more than a promotion does not, by itself, change how you spend Tuesday evening. The gap between knowing and doing is the whole problem, which is why the course ends with rewirement exercises rather than a summary — and why we would say much the same thing about management development.

The World of Work Project View

Perhaps, like Laurie, we’re so drawn to this subject because it hasn’t always come easily to us. Happiness is a funny thing. It’s clear that we spend a whole lot of time doing and pursuing things that don’t actually increase our subjective wellbeing. However, just knowing the real drivers of happiness really isn’t enough. We also clearly need to make changes to how we live our lives and the choices and actions we make, if we are to improve our subjective wellbeing. Overall, we think this is a very helpful course that introduces a lot of useful concepts and language in this area.