Gawdat notes that, in the brain’s evolution, emotions once played a pivotal role in making necessary split-second decisions. Let’s talk about bringing happiness into the workplace, since after all, we spend a lot of hours at work, and that’s where a lot of unhappiness occurs.

Even though most of our decisions are ideally driven by logic, in reality they’re driven by emotions. Again my summarization of all the logic and math is quite limited, Mo wraps all this up in a wonderful story regarding the design of an iPhone.

And since we’re not even considering those, why would we think of events that have a much more subtle impact on our lives? Mo describes a very simple exercise that makes people really think about what makes them happy, something he says we don’t do enough of.

To answer this question, Mo dives into the classic engineering/entrepreneurial approach: defining the problem statement. This is one of the most fascinating things to me: everything that we now perceive as bad was once the thing keeping us alive.In fact when you ask those that won the Nobel Prize they say they felt happier when they achieved the breakthrough that lead to the Nobel prize,” he says. In dealing with the horrible loss, Mo found his mission: he would pull off the type of “moonshot” goal that he and his colleagues were always aiming for—he would share his equation with the world and help as many people as possible become happier. Your brain will exaggerate the likelihood of an incident where you believe the risk to be confirmed. The Happiness Equation is actually a simple survival mechanism that our brains use all the time to compare events to expectations to make sure that we're safe, we're in the safe zone. Because the fears implemented by our safe model are wide-reaching, Gawdat argues that they negatively shape our expectations, causing us to expect harm at every turn.

And another shoutout to the summer velocity crew as well as Pranav and Aatik for helping me strive to understand some of these concepts. We’re constantly comparing events to expectations to find out if we should be happy or unhappy about the situation, and advertising has the single task of making us feel unhappy about everything we have and how we are missing everything that we don’t have. After his so died and feeling he needed to ‘debug the code in his head’ he set out on a mission to try to understand what causes unhappiness, to discover “What bugs where in my code” he says. So let's apply this to your Happy List and find the common pattern among the different instances of happiness on it. Through pre-recorded lessons and detailed course notes, anyone can learn a wide range of disciplines and follow in the footsteps of experts respected all over the world.

You might assume that it’s necessary for the team to work extra hard to make the next quarter, and you’ll assume that your boss will do everything she can to make you succeed. Moreover, I found that when you go even higher, wealth starts to work against you – people start to treat you differently; you start to feel a constant disappointment. In the Middle East and Latin America, events generally have a rough start time and continue for as long as it seems necessary/worthwhile. An extrapolation of this may be hedonism — optimizing for pleasure and minimizing suffering in your life.

Have you ever had a time when you thought you had everything all figured out, but then something went horribly wrong? Gawdat argues that memories color our perceptions by distorting the lens through which we perceive reality. Against this misconception, Gawdat argues that fear is useless because it leaves us paralyzed and doesn’t lead us to actions needed for happiness. DISCLAIMER: Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Not only does it put a smile on my face, but it helps me cultivate something that psychologists say contributes to happiness over the long haul: an attitude of gratitude, which happens when you acknowledge the truth about our modern lives and the fact that there is plenty to be happy about after all. Mo also discovered that every moment in your lives we have ever felt unhappywasn’t because of what was happening in our lives but because of a comparison between your life and how you want your life to be.