Name: 【TED】Matt Killingsworth: Want to be happier? Stay in the moment !
Uploaded: 2014-11-11T15:41:40.000Z
Duration: 10 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So, people want a lot of things out of life,

but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness.

Past simple

Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end

According to this view, the reason we want a big house

isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable.

Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten

a lot of the things that we want. We're richer.

We live longer. We have access to technology

that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.

The paradox of happiness is that even though the

objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically,

Maybe because these conventional notions of progress

haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness,

there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself.

People have been debating the causes of happiness

for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years,

but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved.

Well, as with many other domains in life, I think

the scientific method has the potential to answer this question.

In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion

in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot

about its demographics, how things like income

and education, gender and marriage relate to it.

But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that

factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect.

Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less,

or to graduate from college instead of dropping out,

but the differences in happiness tend to be small.

Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness?

I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet,

but I think something that has the potential to be an answer

is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with

the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences.

It certainly seems that we're going about our lives,

that what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about,

have a big influence on our happiness, and yet

these are the very factors that have been very difficult,

in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study.

A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people's happiness

moment to moment as they're going about their daily lives

on a massive scale all over the world, something we'd never

been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org,

it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time.

How does this work? Basically, I send people signals

at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them

a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience

The idea is that, if we can watch how people's happiness

goes up and down over the course of the day,

and try to understand how what people are doing,

who they're with, what they're thinking about, and all

the other factors that describe our day, how those might

relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able

to discover some of the things that really have

We've been fortunate with this project to collect

quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think

And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group,

people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s,

a wide range of incomes, education levels,

people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc.

86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.

What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today

is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been

investigating, and that's mind-wandering.

As human beings, we have this unique ability

to have our minds stray away from the present.

This guy is sitting here working on his computer,

wondering what he's going to have for dinner.

Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter)

This ability to focus our attention on something other

than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn

and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can.

And yet it's not clear what the relationship is

between our use of this ability and our happiness.

You've probably heard people suggest that you should

stay focused on the present. "Be here now,"

Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely

immersed and focused on our experience in the moment.

Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering

On the other hand, when our minds wander,

they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality

in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds.

Since we know people want to be happy, maybe

when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place

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【TED】Matt Killingsworth: Want to be happier? Stay in the moment !

people

unhappiness

happy

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