A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Lets face it, watching the evening news bulletin rarely makes for cheery viewing, but in the last few months it seems to have been particularly harrowing. Plane crashes, war zones, suicides and urban shootings have seemingly dominated the headlines. As an adult I’ve found it hard to watch. As an educator I’ve found it harder [...]
THE life of a man who lived for smiles and laughter will be remembered. On Saturday, Australia's best-known clown doctor and Bowral general practitioner Dr Peter Spitzer, was farewelled as he lost his battle with cancer. Dr Spitzer was fondly known as Dr Fruit-Loop and was the co-founder and medical director of The Humour Foundation. [...]
Countries are gradually giving up the goal of high GDP and trying to find a better measure of human well-being. Science will help us to do that. I reckon that over the next few decades we will see biomarker measures come to be used in a systematic way, and genetic markers are in that spirit." [...]
What makes you happy? Reflect on what you’ve done today. What do your behaviors say about your approach to happiness? These are the question I usually ask students on the first day of my psychology courses. Often, their responses sound something like this: food, shopping, a new car, a better job, money, sex, an honest spouse, [...]
To seek happiness as a permanent state derives from two primitive evolutionary impulses: avoiding pain (which we associate with danger and the risk of death) and seeking gratification (which helps ensure that our genes get passed on). But it also turns out that pain and discomfort are critical to growth, and that achieving excellence depends [...]
Over the past few weeks I’ve been speaking at the Generation Next seminars lamenting the fact that in today’s society, it seems every kid needs to get a prize! Indeed I’ve heard of teachers being berated by over-zealous parents because their child didn’t receive a fifth place ribbon. Why do we feel the need to [...]
Every day, it seems, we are bombarded with advertisements, memes and well-meaning emails telling us how to “be happy.” Despite this, a new study led by Stanford University reveals that chasing happiness may actually make us less happy. The new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, does, however, point to effective ways [...]
Nearly half the time we're awake, our thoughts drift to topics unrelated to whatever we're doing. We think about the fight we had with our spouse when we're driving or replay events from a friend's wild party while brushing our teeth in the morning. We text incessantly while watching TV and phone mom during laundry-folding [...]
People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives. The research, by psychologists Matthew [...]
Yet again, Australia tops the list of happiest countries. I smile wistfully at the news that the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has determined—yet again—that Australia is the happiest country in the developed world. - Roff Smith via First Person: Happiness Is … Being an Aussie.
