The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success
Emma Seppala
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0062344005
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A leading expert on health psychology, well-being, and resilience argues that happiness is the key to fast tracking our professional and personal success.
Everyone wants to be happy and successful. And yet the pursuit of both has never been more elusive. As work and personal demands rise, we try to keep up by juggling everything better, moving faster, and doing more. While we might succeed in the short term, it comes at a cost to our well-being, relationships, and, paradoxically, our productivity. In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppala, the science director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, explains that our inability to achieve sustainable fulfillment is tied to common but outdated notions about success. We are taught that getting ahead means doing everything that’s thrown at us (and then some) with razor-sharp focus and iron discipline; that success depends on our drive and talents; and that achievement cannot happen without stress.
The Happiness Track demolishes these counter-productive theories. Drawing on the latest findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience—research on happiness, resilience, willpower, compassion, positive stress, creativity, mindfulness—Seppala shows that finding happiness and fulfillment may, in fact, be the most productive thing we can do to thrive professionally. Filled with practical advice on how to apply these scientific findings to our daily lives, The Happiness Track is a life-changing guide to fast tracking our success and creating the anxiety-free life we want.
shallow. Soon enough, thanks to this practice, you will begin to notice that your breathing shifts with your feelings and emotions during the day. For example, you will naturally take a deep breath during challenging times or find that your breath quickens with anxiety or anger. As you become more aware of your breath, you’ll also start to gain more control over it and your feelings in the moment. Thanks to that awareness, when you feel fear coming on, for example, you may notice your breath
influences mental and emotional well-being. We don’t realize that the way we treat our bodies influences our stress levels and determines whether we are able to tap into our natural resilience. As anyone who has started a healthy diet or exercise regimen knows, when we start to take care of the body, we naturally feel better, and with a positive state of mind, our whole outlook on life changes. • Engage in slow-paced activities. If running is your way to relieve stress—as healthy as that
with enthusiasm and laughter. When I asked for feedback at the end of the game, students mentioned “feeling happy,” “forgetting worries,” and “being completely in the moment.” One student, giddy with joy from the game, said, “I thought we weren’t supposed to play anymore.” She was seventeen. At Stanford, many students have academic goals that make them feel like a hamster on a wheel—always on the go and hustling for success. As a consequence, playful activities fall by the wayside. As adults,
enamored with themselves. It’s either overt—they boast about their accomplishments and seek the limelight—or more subtle, as they manipulate situations to get the credit for other people’s work. This is an all-too-common scenario in academia, for example, where some scientists and professors routinely take the recognition for work that is actually conducted by graduate students and postdoctoral scientists. Chances are we won’t enjoy spending time with that person, nor—most important—do we trust
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