Well, it's just the simple act of stepping out of your experience, to review it, and really appreciate it while it's happening. Well, it turns out savoring can boost our mood in at least three ways. As we've seen, tracking can help turn savoring in one moment into a habit.

Well as we saw in lecture, the simple act of experiencing gratitude has a host of positive benefits. Experiencing gratitude can increase your mood and lower your stress levels. Experiencing gratitude also can make you feel a stronger social connection, which itself has this whole host of positive benefits.

And I'll again pause, in case anybody who wants to hold on to their false intuitions and leave here, so you keep working on your grades. The more interesting thing comes when people thought that the decision wasn't fair, but was unfair. So, Sonja Lyubomirsky, in her wonderful book, The How of Happiness, we'll see this book coming up a few more times, actually reported data about how much people really think is the salary they need and they looked depending on the salary you actually have.

So, getting access to the stuff that, if all of a sudden your dorm rooms didn't have hot water or you had to take walk outside to outhouse to go to the bathroom in the morning, you would be annoyed and you would think that would reduce your happiness, but actually doesn't for people who are used to it back in the day. to say, we're living in this paradox which he nicely articulates, he said "Compared with their grandparents, today's young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and in fact a much greater risk of depression and all kinds of social pathology." The final data I'll give you on this connection between income and life satisfaction comes from a recent and very famous science paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton, both of whom are psychologists and economists who won the Nobel Prize in economics.

One of my favorite ones is, if you look at references in hip-hop songs to awesome cars, this website nexshark.com actually quantified this, which I love because I'm a data nerd. These folks in the 1940s didnt have half the awesome stuff that you guys probably buy to make your lives happier, like a new iPhone or a new laptop or a new kind of clothes. Well, luckily, there are data on this, Livia and colleagues actually did a big survey, thousands of students in the UC system.

And so, to that, I will introduce you to the first of many things you're going to hear in this course, which I'm going to call annoying features of the mind that actually lead us astray. The key is that sometimes, even outside of vision, we're getting these intuitions that our mind is delivering to us with full force, like that's the right answer, that's what's going to make us happy, but it is just wrong. You're going to get an incredibly strong intuition that you would hate it if you left this room, and got immediately hit by a car, and were paraplegic for the rest of your time at Yale.

And this might pave a way you're just saying that social media but I was going to ask some of the data you showed were driving kind of this narrative over the past X number of years, Americans have gotten- A.) So I think part of it is reporting and that might be a good thing that people are able to see, able to admit this stuff and seek out care and it's not as shameful as it was maybe many decades ago and so on. So when discussing like attaining this happiness with regards to these misconceptions is there something in general that people seek with regards to like reduced levels of stress or a feeling of elation or a combination of the two.