“Psychology and the Good Life” Notes and Insights

Insight #1: We can improve our well-being

The first insight that I took away from the video was controlling our well-being. I never knew how much control over our well-being we actually had. In a study talked about in the video, she states that around 50% of our well-being is determined by our genes. This means that people have the chance to control their well-being around half the time and affect their lives in a positive way

Insight #2: Stop worrying about the little things in life

Another insight I had while watching the video was how life circumstances don’t really affect our lives as much as we think. She talks about how these short instances in our life may affect our happiness present time when it happens but later on it takes zero control on our well-being. What we usually think will make us happy doesn’t make us as happy as we would think.

Insight #3: The importance of being with other people

In the video she mentions how happy people spend their time. It is discovered that happy people tend to spend their time around other while more unhappy people would rather spend their time alone and away from others and social interaction. She mentions a study where people that were put into a situation where they had to connect with strangers for a long period of time and they measured that their overall well being was more positive than the people that were stuck in solitary.

Insight #4: The importance of good deeds and helping other

Happy people tend to spend their time to help others. She mentions how treating and helping others has a greater affect on a persons well-being than it would if a person were to treat themselves. She mentions a study where people were given money to either help themselves or help other and the study shows that the people that helped others were significantly more happy in the end than the people that helps themselves.

Insight #5: Be present in the moment

In the video she talks about realizing what you are doing and focusing is important for you well-being. It also means taking time to realize you gratitude and what it really means to be where you are presently in that moment.

Gratitude List

  • Parents
  • Friends
  • Family
  • Community
  • Teammates
  • Coaches
  • Teachers

Goals

  • Work on my well-being and mentality everyday
  • Get enough sleep
  • Being healthy
  • Be kind to others
  • Spread love

Own Self Study

After we watched the video we decided to take our only little survey to see how school can affect students well-being here at Del Norte.

Below are some of the questions we asked and results that we recieved

Stress Levels

As you can see by the data received from the students there is an incredibly high peak at the higher stress levels. Students are stressed out due to many factors that should be addressed.

Anxiety Levels

We can see that there is a bell shaped curve residing around a level 4 anxiety. This may indicate that students aren’t too stressed out to have high anxiety but stressed out enough to relatively still have high anxiety.

Effect of homework

As we can see by this pie chart a majority of students are overwhelmed by their homework whether it be the amount of homework or the difficulty of it.

Loneliness

We can see that around two thirds of students that answered this survey responded yes to being lonely. This may suggest unhappy students to to social interactions and connections being important to a persons happiness.

Takeaway

From this little study we conducted as a team we were able to conclude that school does take a toll on the students mental health. But it is more about how the student handles it. The student may be able to handle everything and not be overwhelmed by work but did they answer yes on feeling lonely if that was the case. This survey gave us the chance to analyze students well-being while relating it to the video of the Psychology of a Good Life.