An Online Course for Teens on Happiness

 from Marshall Memo: An Online Course for Teens on Happiness

            In this Washington Post article, Lindsey Bever reports on how the most popular course at Yale – Psychology and the Good Life – has been retooled into a free, online, six-week course for teenagers. It uses TikTok-length videos to highlight common misconceptions about happiness and teach about the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts that produce mental well-being. 

            There’s an urgent need for this kind of intervention, say mental health professionals, because U.S. adolescents are in a mental health crisis. It was in full swing before the pandemic; in 2019, 44 percent of high-school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, with nearly 20 percent saying they had considered suicide, and 9 percent attempting to end their lives. Covid-19 made things worse, with elevated levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-injury, and suicidal ideation. “The rites of passage for teenage-hood were disrupted,” says psychologist/author Mary Alvord. Young people missed out on parties, homecoming dances, graduation ceremonies, and everyday interactions with their peers. 

“We’re not taking care of our young people today if we’re not giving them strategies to navigate all the complex societal pressures that they face,” says Laurie Santos, the Yale psychology professor who taught the original happiness course. “We need to know the appropriate ways to listen to them and to react to them, so that we can understand the message that things like sadness or anxiety or anger might be sending and then channel them in an appropriate direction.” 

Santos filmed the lectures for the updated version of her Yale course before a group of high-school students and asked for their reactions and questions. Here are some of the key concepts in the teen course she and her colleagues created:

• Rethink what happiness means. Many teens believe they’ll be happy when they have 

the right partner, perfect grades, admission to the right college, popularity on social media, and money. “A lot of teenagers are trying to be happy,” says Santos, “but sometimes they’re going about it the wrong way or putting effort into the wrong things.” 

• Get out of yourself. The course focuses on the true sources of happiness for teens, which include making social connections, having a sense of free time (“time affluence”), being less self-centered and more other-oriented, volunteering their time, giving money to worthwhile causes, and doing random acts of kindness like opening a door for another person. 

• Learn self-compassion. Teens need to be taught how to tune out their inner critic – the thoughts that make them feel inferior and lead to self-sabotaging behaviors like procrastination – and think of themselves in more self-compassionate ways.

• Slow down the anxious voices in your head. The course provides tools to regulate emotions, such as intentionally engaging the senses. Santos asks, “What are five things you can see right now? What are four things you can hear right now? What are three things you can feel right now?”

The response to the course has been enthusiastic, with hundreds of thousands of teens clicking on the link and mental health professionals giving a thumbs-up. “If we can teach children and teens and adults to try to make changes to things they can control,” says Alvord, “they feel more empowered. If they feel more empowered, they feel more in control of their life. And if they feel more in control of their life, they’re not feeling helpless. Then they don’t tend to be depressed.” 

 

“Yale’s Hugely Popular Happiness Course Is Revamped for Teens” by Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post, January 29, 2023