High Marks In Happiness

A course in improving personal well-being has become an Ivy League university’s most popular class of all time—and it’s free. Madeleine Ross decided to put it to the test

A few years ago, the concept of an Ivy League university offering a course in contentment would have been laughable; finding happiness has long been perceived as the pursuit of hippies and hedonists rather than the stuff of scientific enquiry. But in January last year, Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, established just that, and her groundbreaking course—the Science of Well-Being—is now the most popular class in Yale’s history.

“Undergraduate students are way more unhappy, stressed out and worried about the future than people often realise,” says Santos. “Particularly at Yale, I think undergrads are really anxious about their own life choices and interested in finding answers to the big questions: what sort of choices will make me happy? What sort of job should I get? How can I lead a fulfilling life? What does it mean to be successful? What does it mean to be a good person? I think that the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and how to go about living a life that’s much happier.”

In her 10-week course, Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, unpacks some “annoying features” of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and presents a set of scientifically validated strategies for living a more satisfying life.

But you don’t have to be a Yale student to take Santos’s class. In an altruistic twist, Yale has made the course accessible to anyone, anywhere, for free via a website called Coursera.