The No. 1 thing you can do to be happier

Yale happiness expert: The No. 1 thing you can do to be happier—businesses can also use it to excel

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released a statement to highlight the alarming levels of loneliness and isolation in the United States. Post-pandemic, one of the most important questions people are asking is “How can I feel happier?”

For individuals who are seeking happiness, the answer is pretty simple and may also be of some use to businesses as well.

Laurie Santos teaches “The Science of Well-Being,” the most popular class on Yale’s campus, and hosts “The Happiness Lab,” a podcast that dives into the science of what makes people happier.

When asked about the No. 1 thing people can do to feel happier, Santos says “it would be engaging in social connection.”

“Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social, they spend more time physically around other people, and they invest time in their friends and family members,” Santos tells CNBC Make It.

To maintain the social connections in your life, Santos recommends doing three things:

• Intentionally make time to develop the relationships in your life
• Be open to connecting with strangers: “We kind of assume that connecting with a stranger will feel awkward or vulnerable or weird. But the data really suggests that reaching out to people that we don’t know, and starting new connections will feel better than we expect.”
• Aim to ask deeper questions during conversations to learn other people’s values and truly connect

And companies are learning how to build upon this realization within their business models.

Maryellis Bunn, the founder and co-CEO of the Museum of Ice Cream, says the concept to create the immersive experience a decade ago came to mind when she was searching for something to do in NYC that didn’t involve alcohol or sitting down at a restaurant.

“The question I was trying to answer was ‘How do I spend my afternoon?’” Bunn says. “And my earliest love was ice cream. And it still is.”

This prompted Bunn to think about how she could “use ice cream as a tool to bring people together” with a heightened focus on fostering “connection and imagination.”

“And I was like, ‘Well, why don’t these worlds actually exist?’ And then there was a moment of saying, ‘Well, they can exist. Let’s build them.’”

Nearly 10 years and four locations later, Bunn is now looking to increase the feeling of connectedness among her customers when they visit the Museum of Ice Cream. In an attempt to do this, she’s tapped into Santos’ expertise to see just how she can help people connect more, especially for those who visit the locations by themselves and want to meet new people.

So how can businesses similar to the Museum of Ice Cream tap into the happiness booster that is social connection?

“Where can we give opportunities, particular for strangers, to share something? For us, the thing is food,” Bunn says.

“Food has been a centralizing factor of connection, we sit down around a table and break bread,” she adds, which is something that kids do in school all the time. Creating immersive experiences around food, Bunn says, can be one way to “build more opportunities for people later in their life to have these shared moments.”

Renée Onque                Mon, Feb 12 2024

source: www.cnbc.com