A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
1. Surround yourself with happy people Or surround yourself with people who surround themselves with happy people. A longitudinal investigationconducted over 20 years in collaboration with the Framingham Heart Study revealed that shifts in individual happiness can cascade through social networks like an emotional contagion (The researchers don't mean Facebook, btw, but physical, old-school networks — like live-in [...]
All this year I’ve focused on student wellbeing. But for the next 5-6 weeks it’s all about you. Make sure you take the time to recharge your battery over the summer by doing these 5 things. Connect with your family and friends. Take time to nurture your relationships, as often those closest to you [...]
Want to be happy? Eat more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. That’s what a study of the eating habits of 80,000 Britons appears to show. University of Warwick and Dartmouth College scientists used seven measures of well-being: life satisfaction, self-reported health, happiness, nervousness and feeling low, mental well-being and mental disorders in an [...]
David Cameron rates the idea of measuring happiness, and from the Office for National Statistics we learn that, when asked the question, Indians and those of Indian descent in the UK emerge the happiest. They number about 1.4 million – our largest visible minority – and on average, they rate life satisfaction as 7.5 out [...]
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” — Eric Hoffer As soon as an American baby is born, its parents enter into an implicit contractual obligation to answer any question about their hopes for their tiny offspring’s future with the words: “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy” (the [...]
Today, many more people are living much richer, longer lives than ever before. So is all well and good? Not exactly. There is growing evidence that quality of life is not the same as standard of living, and that how well we live is not just a matter of how long we live, especially in [...]
FRIENDS are the key to kids' happiness, trumping families and toys as a source of joy, new research reveals. Girls are more cheerful than boys - but happiness starts to dive from the age of nine, when children become as miserable as the elderly and sick. Unhappiness among tweenagers has become so acute that schools [...]
An obsession with happiness is having an adverse effect for those who seek it, experts say. Over the last 30 years, the pursuit of happiness has come to define the ultimate modern goal. Yet a new study shows levels of expectation about happiness are unreasonable and set young people up for failure. Researchers at Yale [...]
As positive psychology reaches its zenith, now comes the backlash. The cheeriest movement that ever there was is being blamed for everything from teen suicide to the global financial crisis. Social researcher Hugh Mackay, who has become an unlikely fixture on the happiness conference circuit (given his scepticism about the pursuit of happiness), has noticed [...]
What would it take to persuade you to exercise? A desire to lose weight or improve your figure? To keep heart disease, cancer or diabetes at bay? To lower blood pressure or cholesterol? To protect your bones? To live to a healthy old age? You'd think any of those reasons would be sufficient to [...]
