The Science of Happiness (or JOY!)
I’ve been writing for a few days about the importance of joy in the church. The ideas were based solely on experience.
Today, I sat down in front of the TV, grabbed the remote and flipped through some channels. Saturday afternoon. Blah TV. Sports. Ancient reruns. Try PBS. Great! Fundraiser time! But wait a minute. This guy is talking about happiness. I’ve been writing about joy!
I stumbled across a presentation by Harvard researcher, Shawn Achor, who has studied the science behind the human emotion, happiness. It makes me happy to know that there is science behind what 2×2 has been advising! Joy!
I listened to the last half of his talk and when it came time for the ten-minute pitch, I went online to find out more. Here is a 12-minute video from his talk at a TED conference. Watch it and pay attention to his list of five action steps near the end.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXy__kBVq1M&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]He has some interesting ideas.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at ways to apply some his thinking and research to Church life.
Shawn Achor is the author of The Happiness Advantage.
