7 tips from a Harvard lecturer on how to become a happier student

Tal Ben-Shahar taught one of the most popular courses at Harvard, with thousands of students enrolled each year. The title of his course was “Introduction to the Science of Happiness”. Ben-Shahar gave simple advice on how to make happiness come true. We have selected the best ones for you. We think they will help you become a little more productive, more efficient and happier, both in your studying and in other areas of life.

Fighting procrastination

Procrastination is, of course, a strange thing. Senseless and merciless. But the more meaningless the phenomenon, the more difficult it is to deal with it. Students often procrastinate with their home assignments and getting geometry homework help.

Ben-Shahar suggests doing the following thing: when there is no energy to do an important thing, you need to arrange a five-minute time frame. It means saying to yourself:

Okay, Google, you and I will only work for five minutes and then we will finish right away.

In general, in this deceptive way, you draw your brain into the necessary activity. As a rule, five minutes is enough to focus on a particular case. And then it’s a matter of action — we take and feed, and feed ourselves with “five-minute periods”.

Getting rid of stress

American doctor Andrew Weil expressed an interesting thought: “If I had to choose one single piece of advice on how to lead a healthier lifestyle, it would be the advice to learn how to breathe properly.”

Thomas Cram, in his book “Three Deep Breaths”, also talks about the wonders that proper breathing can do. To fully relax and focus on your current goals, you need to take three deep breaths. The first breath is taken with the stomach. We need to do this slowly and deeply, focusing on the fact that we are here and now. On the second breath, the same thing, but we focus on our current goal. But the third breath can be called the breath of gratitude because during it we should feel grateful for what we live.

This practice should be repeated several times a day. And it is desirable not only in those moments when we are experiencing stress.

Becoming more generous

It has long been noticed that a simple technique — helping another person helps well with any whining. Psychologist Sonia Lubomirski conducted an experiment: she asked people to do five unusual good deeds for them in a day. These were different things: to treat a neighbor to cookies, to give someone movie tickets, to drop off a free vote by the roadside, to donate money to charity, and so on.

After that, Lubomirski discovered that no matter what a good deed was, it significantly changed the quality of life of the person who did it. And not only at the moment when it was done, but also later. So instead of whining and searching for the meaning of life, it is better to go and buy food for my grandmother.

Getting luckier

There is a very simple way to become more successful — to increase the number of your failures. Babe Ruth — one of the most successful baseball players in history led the list of players in the number of outs five times. Thomas Edison, who patented 1,093 inventions in the United States, failed his experiments tens of thousands of times. Frankly speaking, for several failures, there is one luck.

So make more and more mistakes. And remember that with each new mistake, you get luckier.

Creating a good mood

To quickly acquire a good mood, you can use a technique called “Meditation of loving-kindness”.

If something makes you mad, just close your eyes for about three minutes and imagine the person you love. At the same time, it is advisable to choose some kind song that will quickly introduce you to a state of love and kindness. You can put, for example, I Will Always Love You Whitney Houston.

Relieve the tension

Try to feel your body right now. Most likely, very often you have a desire to stretch, sign up for a massage or arrange a running marathon.

It is clear where the roots of our tightness come from. Very often, we restrain our emotions, and this directly affects our bodies. For example, clenched jaws are a common sign of pent-up anger that you may not even know about.

To relieve the physical tension, you need to focus on a specific part of the body and loosen the clamp. You can repeat the word “let go” to yourself.

Yoga teacher Patricia Walden says the most important part of the practice is the Shavasana, or corpse pose. To do Shavasana, you need to lie on your back, put your hands along your body, stretch your legs and relax.

Take a break from thoughts

Man is like a plant: to develop, we need free space. One way to create such a space is to create a silence around yourself. At least for a while.

Think about how much time you spent in complete silence in the last few days? No music, no conversation, no outside noise. And without noise in your head, too.

Try to arrange for yourself three hours of silence and calmness. Turn off your phone and take a walk while listening to the birds, grasshoppers, and sounds of the city. You will view the world completely differently.