How to be happier — according to science!

Chiara Decaroli
7 min readJul 4, 2020

A review of “The science of wellbeing”, a course taught by Laurie Santos at Yale University.

A couple of months ago one of my favourite thinkers and humans, Sam Harris, had a conversation on his podcast with a professor of Psychology at Yale University: Dr. Laurie Santos. She focuses on what we can learn from science about our happiness. The conversation, titled “The Science of Happiness” is linked below:

Needless to say, the conversation was very engaging and I found myself really looking for more after the podcast. I was in luck, Laurie, a professor at Yale University, had been delivering a course on the same subject: our wellbeing. The course, titled “The science of wellbeing” is ranked number one course for undergraduates at Yale since the first year it has been on the curriculum. When I heard that an undergraduate university was offering a course on how to be happier, I thought: “wow, this is really incredible! Shouldn’t all schools include this kind of knowledge taught at all levels, over and over again?”. I certainly wish my schools did! The entire course is available for free on coursera, isn’t that awesome? Yes, right! Go check it out right now: https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being/home.

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Chiara Decaroli
Chiara Decaroli

Written by Chiara Decaroli

Quantum physics researcher, Yoga teacher and occasional illustrator based in Zurich.

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