The Happiness Advantage We Can All Benefit From Knowing

Shawn Achor’s TEDx talk is listed as one of the top 25 most popular. If you want to work better and ultimately feel better then maybe the answer for you can lie within Shawn Achor’s positive psychology that explains what he calls the happiness advantage.

Happiness and Productivity

It is a common perspective that work needs to leave us feeling drained or tired in order for it to eventually equate to happiness. It is like we pay for our happiness through hard work and dedication. Which can be true, but where are you placing this hard work and what are you are dedicating yourself to?

You can find our complete guide to positive thinking here.

He looked at the way humans have related productivity to happiness and how often times we never allow yourselves to celebrate the success we starve ourselves for because we don’t allow ourselves to feel success. What does that mean?

It means that when we reach what we desired we simply move the scale of success higher. When we get good grades the goal then becomes to get better grades. When we reach one goal then we lead ourselves to strive to do better and bigger with it.

This leads us on a hungry chase with success always being slightly out of reach. This constant starvation does just that to our intelligence. It dehydrates our brilliance on the quest for success that is always out of reach.

Productivity can become tunnel-visioned and we forget to live in and enjoy the present moment. Sometimes this forgetting is because we don’t feel like it is productive or important, but actually happiness has an advantage.

How Does The Happiness Advantage Work?

This is where we can place our hard work and dedication to actually benefit us. When we work to focus on the positives, be grateful, and celebrate success then we create what is called the happiness advantage.

This is where instead of delaying happiness to be on the other side of productivity, which is always expanding as productivity should, we bring happiness into the present moment and out from behind the eclipsing sun of productivity.

Now, there are a couple of ways to do that and it is done best within the 21-day happiness challenge which you can learn about here.

In the 21-day happiness challenge you pick one out of the five researched habits that you can use to train your brain to be happier. These habits are listing 3 things you are grateful for, journaling one positive experience, exercising, meditating, and lastly random acts of kindness.

You may enjoy working with these gratitude exercises in order to manifest with the law of attraction and even creating the happiness advantage.

Shawn says, “Your brain at positive performs significantly better (31% better) than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, and your energy levels rise”. This is what he calls the happiness advantage and it is quite an advantage.

Isn’t it shocking the brain performs significantly better in an optimistic attitude even more than a neutral one? The power of your mindset can literally create a better reality for you.