The Happiness Secret You’ve Been Missing | Shige Oishi

Welcome to Behavioral Grooves, the podcast that explores the science behind why we do what we do. I'm Kurt Nelson. And I'm Tim Houlihan. On today's episode, we have the privilege of speaking with one of the world's leading researchers on the topic of a life well-lived, Professor Shige Oishi. He's the author of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on subjective well-being and he's

Continuing the investigation on what makes for a happy life. His research for the past few decades is taking our understanding of a happy life to a new level. And we should point out that modern research on happiness really didn't take off until about 40 years ago or so. So early definitions of a good life were developed by Shige's mentor, Ed Deaner, at the University of Illinois, and they were based on how a person feels about their life, a very me-centric idea.

And at the time, that was the most important indicator of whether somebody is leading what we would call a good life. Yeah, so then came along Carol Riff from the University of Wisconsin, and she challenged the idea that I could live a good life by simply saying, hey, I'm feeling pretty good about my life. Like, what if you were totally cruel to the people around you, but you actually liked it? Like, would that really be a good life? So she proposed a second leg of the stool for by focusing on things that lead to finding meaning and making a positive contribution to the world around you.

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