One of Yale’s massively popular courses is called ‘Happiness’, and is now available online. The course is free for anyone interested and is supposed to help people find joy in these troubling times. During the previous month, more than half-a-million people signed up to watch and listen to “The Science of Well Being,” which was originally a course that professor of psychology Laurie Santos was teaching on campus. Now, the course is available online and for free.
The happiness course, as it is also known, shows details of research that looked into the misconceptions about the things that make humans happy. It also reveals the concrete steps that people can take to live a happier and more fulfilling life.
The Happiness Course Has Had Some Amazing Turnout
From March 2018 to March 2019, the total enrollment for the class was some 539,000 people. This made the online course the most popular in Yale’s history, and by the end of March 2020, the numbers went as high as 1,153,744. Notably, 631,980 people enrolled in March alone, which is contributed to the stay-at-home policies around the globe. More than ten million people have visited Yale’s website recently, showing unprecedented interest that professor Santos called “a bit surreal.”
Professor of psychology Laurie Santos believes that people are just as focused on evidenced-based methods for staying physically healthy as they are on ways to improve their mental health, which should explain the major interest in her course.
The Course Offers Wellness Activities for a Better Life
The course aims to engage viewers in a series of challenging activities that are designed to help them build more productive habits and increase their happiness levels. Professor Santos also reveals some misconceptions about happiness to prepare the audience for these tasks. She shows that the mind has some annoying features that lead people to think in a certain way which can be unproductive and could lead to a bad mood. The research shows ways that can help people succeed in changing their behavior and incorporating specific wellness activities into their lives.