You Don't Find Happiness, You Create It | Katarina Blom | TEDxGöteborg

[Music] hello everyone I would like us to begin with a short exercise so can everybody place their hands like this reach out your hands thank you and I will count to three and when I say three I want you to clap your hands okay one two three so I did this to show you that we don't always do as other people tell us to do we rather do as other people do and this is important when it comes to creating well-being in ourselves and in others I'm a psychologist and I train organizations teams and individuals

in creating happiness and well-being and a couple of years back I co-authored a book on the science of happiness but when the book was published I was actually in the middle of a life crisis I've just broken up with the person who I thought I'd spend my life with I had no place to live and no job and I think this is a very common human experience we all face problems we end up in crisis sometimes and we struggle but at the same time I think most of us we long for that other kind of

life that entails meaning and connection and happiness but it's kind of difficult to live this life to always be there in this happy place and today I want to show you why your brain is not always on your side when it comes to creating happiness but also what we can do to counter this and it's not going to be by just positive thinking this takes positive action because happiness is a skill we all can train and work on I want this to start here how it's not just about positive thinking so let's begin with this

have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're really worried about something and you kept worrying even though you knew that worrying won't change the situation or help the situation in any way and nevertheless you just kept on worrying hands up right we're all doing this and if we could have total mind power and just switched over to these happy thoughts we just have done that and get on with our lives but that doesn't really happen does it and did you know that about half of the time that you've been listening to this speech

your mind has probably been wandering off thinking about other things according to a study by Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth our minds wander forty-six point nine percent of the time we spend awake so our thoughts are automatic they have a life of their own and to create happiness by just control positive thinking I think it's hard it's not even possible impossible and I think it's time that we start talking more about this how can we take positive action actually making the change in our lives because if I would ask you to keep your focus on

your breath don't think about anything else for five minutes I doubt that anyone in this room would be able to do that but if I would ask you to please raise your hand like this for five minutes I think we all would be better able to achieve this so it's really difficult to control our thoughts and we have a better chance at controlling our actions our behavior therefore well-being is better built by positive action and not positive thinking also we tend to look at ourselves as if we're these objects rational beings and that perceived situations

in this objective manner and we process information almost like a computer I just take information in but in reality very far from objective and that's actually a good thing because if we would truly be able to process and perceive reality in all its nuanced complexity we would be rather lost it would be an overwhelming experience so therefore our brain have evolved several cognitive biases that helps us categorize and prioritize and sort information making it more easy for us to navigate but these cognitive biases this sorting and prioritizing is really affecting how we perceive life how

we perceive different situations and I'd like us to explore this further in a little thought experiments so I invite you all to think back at the last time that you had a evaluated conversation with your boss or manager and I'm quite sure that you got to hear a lot of good things things like how you contribute to the workplace but I'm also quite sure that you got to hear something that you can improve with yourself with your performance and once you leave this conversation what do you think that your brain thinks is the most prioritized

information all the things that you do really good or the one thing that you should be improving well if you're somewhat like me it would definitely be the latter and this doesn't really have anything to do with how my brain works this is actually a pattern that's been shown among people for example serious are marbella is a professor at Harvard Business School she did a diary study where she got to read people's Diaries to explore how they experience everyday life and she saw a pattern that the negative effect of a setback was more than twice

as strong as the positive effects of a success and the same thing goes with money that we feel way worse about losing an amount of money than we feel happy about gaining the same amount and if you would receive a compliment from a co-worker and then a complaint from another co-worker these two comments don't neutralize each other the complaint would definitely leave a stronger emotional mark so now we need to ask ourselves why why do we carry this emotional asymmetry why do we have this preparedness to experience unpleasant and negative emotions and to understand that

we need to understand the context the environment where our brain has been evolving for so many years today several studies say that we have evolved a negativity bias which helps our attention to be drawn to unpleasant or possibly threatening information and this was really good back then and there when we were at the Savannah fighting for survival every day but today here and now this definitely affects how we perceive our life how we perceive our relations our workplace our own performance and ourselves so to simplify this a bit one could almost say that your brain

is concerned that you survive throughout this day it's less concerned that you're a happy survivor so by now we can understand that it's not strange that all of us sometimes feel anxious or tense are we worried in one sense we were built for this but most of us we long for this other kind of life with the meaning and the connection and the happiness and I'm not sure that we can have one thing without the other but there are definitely things and ways how we can cultivate happiness and build well-being but this comes with good

news and bad the good news is that happiness it's not something you find outside of yourself and it's not something you have or don't have it's a skill that we all can work on but the problem is that we just don't do it and this definitely applies for myself this is the worst part of having written a book on happiness because whenever I'm having a bad day there's always someone who can do like having to read your own book Katerina you should know better so I've learned that not even experts on happiness and knows how

to turn knowledge into action and this is one of the reasons why me and a friend have we started a psychological gym where organizations and the teams and individuals could come and train these skills in order to create more happiness and well-being because we want to make psychological training as common as physical training because today we know so many things about how to eat properly and how to exercise to sustain a physical health but what would be the psychological version of a green smoothie or of doing 50 situps is there really such a thing and

I would say yes definitely there's a lot of different exercises and things we can do building healthy habits for ourselves and I would like to present an example of this so once you finish listening to this pitch when you're leaving this room later tonight I'd like you to bring out your smartphone and takes a kind appreciative gratitude text to someone that you care for and maybe you can just notice how that fits and this is a good example of an exercise that I often do with leaders and teams and just a couple of weeks back

I did this at a two-day leader conference and later I found out that one of the participants had texted his wife writing I love you very very very much which made the wife think what are you doing at that Leadership Conference and it just tests texting one person at one time it won't change the world in any way but turning this into a healthy habit over time can have a large impact and to dedicate this habit to caring for your relationships might be one of the most powerful actions that you can take when it comes

to happiness so this might be the green smoothie that you've all been waiting for according to several studies having functioning relationships is as important if not even more important as exercising well and having a good diet and this can even help us live longer in a study from Harvard University which began already back in 1938 researchers followed over 700 people to understand what it is that makes us flourish as people so they followed these participants for decades and in 2012 the results came the researchers found that happiness doesn't come from wealth it doesn't come from

fame or working hard it comes from relationships and it's not about the number of friends that you have or whether or not you're in a committed relationship with a partner they found that it's the quality of the relationship that counts being able to be vulnerable listening and sharing what's close to your heart that's what matters and by now we know that forming good healthy habits when it comes to physical training or having a good diet it takes dedication it takes commitment and I think we should approach psychological habits in the same way and especially when

it comes to relationships so by now we know that the brain has this tendency to highlight the negative and that this is really tricky to revoke just by positive thinking it takes positive action but some actions are more powerful than others when it comes to happiness and investing your time and heart into the relationships around you no matter if it's at work or with neighbors or with family or friends this might be one of the most powerful things that you can do for yourself and I'd like us to do this one more time so can

everyone reach out their hands and I'm gonna count to three and when I say three I want you to clap your hands okay one two three yay great so we learn by watching others behavior you've just seen me do this two times and already so many people change their behavior so the more you can turn this talk into action by being more understanding and caring not just towards others but also towards yourself I think that others will follow your example and do as you do and the people outside of this building they won't know what

just happened they won't know what changed but we know that it was here in this talk that everything started thank you you