By Richard
Months of school behind screens have sent instances of mental health conditions [on a steep rise](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/teens-mental-health-claims-skyrocket-pandemic#:~:text=The study found that mental health claims for,though November 2020%2C but to a lesser degree.). As many regions of the world continue to face the challenges of distance learning, some have turned to an unlikely savior.
Image by Jeswin Thomas. Online learning has brought a spike in mental health conditions in teenagers.
The online iteration of Yale’s all-time most popular course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” has amassed over four million learners globally and has been praised by news outlets and scientific evidence alike for its remarkable positive impact on learners’ well-being.
But what makes it so unique? What secret gospel does it preach that other psychology courses don’t?
“The Science of Well-Being” is offered online on Coursera, a well-known platform for open-access courses and specializations offered by renowned universities and companies across the globe. It lasts ten weeks, taking around 19 hours to complete in total. The course’s content consists mainly of video lectures and interactive activities, with supplemental sources and recordings of Q&A sessions also available.
The video lectures are undoubtedly a highlight of the course: Professor Laurie Santos’ casual yet engaging lecture style is friendly for understanding and makes the videos a delight to watch. Unlike many professors, her explanations of scientific bases behind the advice she gives are concise and to the point. Professor Santos also frequently engages her Yale student audience through questions and occasional humor.
In the first week of her lectures, Professor Santos stresses the “GI Joe Fallacy”, demonstrating that the line “just knowing is half the battle” is fundamentally insufficient. Instead, she argues, we should take solid steps to integrate knowledge from the course into our daily lives, including tracking and scheduling with apps or on paper. She accomplishes this in the Coursera course through weekly “rewirements”, aka. positive actions, that require learners to actively perform and track daily the happiness-boosting activities she assigns.
Though a portion of her advice is typical and perhaps cliché (e.g. meditating and getting more sleep), she introduces many intriguing tricks and actions that have a solid scientific basis for enhancing well-being (no spoilers here). Nevertheless, even for things that aren’t completely unique to the course, Professor Santos always provides a compelling and detailed scientific explanation for how, why, and in which cases these activities can have a positive impact on our lives.
The last four weeks of the course are made up of a “Final Rewirement Challenge”, where course participants are encouraged to complete and record their progress on one specific “rewirement” that they had not tried previously.
Throughout the course, my subjective well-being score improved from 5.38 (out of 10) before the course and 7.4 after. Having completed the course, I would totally recommend it to all people of all ages in pursuit of living a more fulfilling and organized life.
Dr. Laurie Santos’ Science of Well-Being is available free of charge on Coursera.