"more than 200 studies that show the positive effect of writing on mental health... but researchers don’t completely agree on why or how".One idea: "safe, confidential way to disclose emotions that were previously bottled up". But "recent studies show an increase in self-awareness ... could be the key". Turn your att…

New research... definitively shows ... experiences such as travel, entertainment, outdoor activities, and restaurants will improve your happiness much more than any new gadget or outfit...happy memories endure while our perceived value of material items plummets... experiencers to be much happier than those purchasing ... [and] those not consuming…

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility... To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something... tend to assume that utility is good... But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?...People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy... peop…

2017 study ... showed that voters in Britain highly satisfied with their lives were 1.6% more likely to support the party in power... a 10% rise in family income was associated with a mere 0.18% increase ... happiness seems more important to the outcome of elections than money... in 15 European elections ... Life satisfaction... twice as important…

“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.

non-stop activity isn’t the apotheosis of productivity. It is its adversary.... the work we produce at the end of a 14-hour day is of worse quality than when we’re fresh... undermines our creativity and our cognition... make us feel physically sick... For people over 40, research found that a 25-hour work week may be optimal for cognition... elite…

Riches do not satisfy. They only bring desire for more riches.... Winning a lottery typically allows someone to live the life of his dreams. It turns out, though, that after an initial period of exhilaration, lottery winners end up about as happy as they previously were...victims of accidents, despite permanent injury, were soon as happy as they w…

researchers found that the more people use Facebook, the less healthy they are and the less satisfied with their lives... monitored the mental health and social lives of 5,208 adults over two years... Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health... each statistical jump ... in “liking” other people’s p…

All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed ... if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster... if you are among the growing ranks of t…

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

I’ve been thinking about the kinds of mistakes we make when pursuing happiness. I’ve been wondering whether the biggest mistake might be seeing happiness as something we should be aiming for at all. - Everything you think you know about happiness is wrong - Quartz

"Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are the world's happiest countries, according to the 2015 World Happiness Report, ... Bringing countries together in a big bloc such as the EU doesn't help increase social capital. And when some countries in such a union do worse than others, their social fabric rips in a dramatic way, trust erodes and th…