why we need happiness thid questionQuestion: Please share a few sentences reflecting on your experience trying the Three Good Things practice. What effects, if any, did you notice it having on your thoughts, feelings, or behavior? Was there anything you didn't like about it?

1. Now I'd like to introduce you to a key component of our course, the

2. science of happiness, and this is what we're calling real practical exercises. These are

3. sort of like homework, if you will, that we're going to be giving to you each week. These

4. practical exercises are drawn from scientific studies, they've been shown to lead to

increases

5. in happiness. I want to stay that some of them might at start sound hokey, but the

reality

6. is that the more authentically that you engage with them, the more genuine effort that

you

7. put into them, the more likely that they'll incurse some sort of benefit for you or boost

8. your happiness in an appreciable way. Most of the research shows that the more regular

9. authentic effort that you invest and put into these kinds of exercises, the bigger the

impact,

10.the most lasting the effects. You can think about it how you would think about physical

11.exercise. You can't just do it once and hope that you'll be really good at it. It takes

12.practice and regularity.

13.The first practice or exercise that we're going to teach you about it is call Three

14.Good Things. This exercise asks you to remember and list three positive things that

have happened

15. in your day so far and think about what caused them and reflect on that. Usually, you

should

16.spend about 10 minutes doing the Three Good Things exercise and we're hoping that

you'll

17.try this 4 pr 5 times over the course of the next 7 days.

18.We're going to give you a chance to try this right now in edX as part of the next unit.

19.So go ahead, scroll down and try Three Good Things.

Three Good ThingsIn the three spaces below, write down three things that went well for you today. For each thing, provide an explanation for why you think it went well. The items can be relatively small in importance (e.g., “my co-worker made the coffee today”) or relatively large (e.g., “I earned a big promotion”). 

As you write, follow these guidelines:

-Give the event a title (e.g., “co-worker complimented my work on a project”). 

-Write down exactly what happened in as much detail as possible, including what you did or said and, if others were involved, what they did or said. 

-Include how this event made you feel at the time and how this event made you feel later (including now, as you remember it).1. 

2.

3. 

To get the most out of this practice, we recommend that you repeat it every night for at least a week. If you want, you could copy the three good things you wrote above into a word document or journal and continue from there. 

Please click Done! on the bottom right when you're finished.