Commentary: What we learned from teaching a university course on the science of happiness

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When you deliver a university course that makes students happier, everybody wants to know what the secret is.

New: You can now listen to articles.The authors have been teaching a science of happiness course since 2019 where they create opportunities for students to put lessons from positive psychology into practice. What are the outcomes and what have the authors themselves learned?What are your tips? What are your top ten recommendations? These are the most asked questions, as if there is some quick, surefire path to happiness.

But if we already know so much about what works, then why are we still fielding requests for top happiness tips? It would be ironic to talk about the problems of performance anxiety and student perfectionism only to then give our students a graded exam.However, for many students, turning up on time to over 80 per cent of lectures and tutorials, completing journal entries on a weekly basis and submitting a final group project turned out to be more of a challenge than they predicted.

However, we recently published the findings from a study that followed up with students one to two years after they had taken the science of happiness course, before they graduated. Indeed, if we did have to focus on just one top tip it might be to learn how to harness lessons from psychology to build the better habits we need for lasting change.

 

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