Dear readers of Psychology of Wellbeing: Thank you for being a reader of my blog over the years. This blog has been an amazing place for me to process things that I have learned (or wrestled with) in understanding the science of human wellbeing. But those of you who have been with me for a while will have noticed that the articles have been less and less frequent and I think it is time to close this chapter. I will be removing the blog from the internet.  This is for a couple of reasons: My energies have been more focused on other areas. My writing interests have turned from broadly cove ..read more

  The Hills are Alive . . . with the Sound of Wellness I am just arriving to Cesena Italy for this year’s Global Wellness Summit and I find myself reminiscing about the summit from two years ago in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Kitzbuhel, a small town in the Austrian countryside, was the perfect setting for a wellness conference because the whole area oozes wellness. Every hotel is a “wellness” hotel, the “aufguss” sauna culture is everywhere, and the entire countryside is a giant playground for outdoor sports. This was the year that I launched the Digital Wellness initiative for Mandarin Oriental ..read more

Today’s guest post is by Michael Kaplan, a video essayist with a YouTube channel called OneHandClap dedicated to original ideas on interesting topics. In an ironic turn, the recent controversy surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica eclipsed another controversy brewing months before. As 2017 came to close, the million-dollar question surrounding the company was, Does Facebook make us depressed? Back in December, even Facebook itself posted an article on its official blog, titled, Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad For Us? The post cites a number of studie ..read more

Warning: this post is at least twice as long as the typical articles on this blog. I hope you find it is worth your time . . . As a father of two boys, now 6 and 7 years old, I’m thinking a lot about what it means to be raising digital natives in the modern age. We are the first generation to be raising kids who are born into the age of mobile technology, and we are completely underqualified, having had no personal experience of what it is like to grow up with technology. What do the experts say? There are no experts . . . this is a new frontier and we are all trying to figure out how to navi ..read more

Jocelyn Brewer, a psychologist who specializes in issues with technology, recently published a provocative article suggesting that “digital detoxing is the tech equivalent of a juice cleanse—and neither of them work.” I happen to be a long-time fan of Jocelyn’s (I’m taking the liberty of using her first name as I feel I know her—she participated in a Twitter Chat we hosted a while back and I’ve been following her on Twitter for a couple of years now.) What I like about her work is she takes a nuanced approach that acknowledges the complexity of life with technology. She uses a “digital n ..read more

Do you remember the Sneetches? In one of Dr. Seuss’s most popular books, he told about a society with Star-Belly Sneetches who had “bellies with stars” and Plain-Belly Sneetches who had “none upon thars.” The Star-Belly Sneetches were the privileged elite and the Plain-Belly Sneetches were discriminated against, not being invited to “frankfurter roasts, or picnics, or parties or marshmallow toasts.” Quite a predicament for the Plain-Belly Sneetches. But then a stranger comes into town, Sylvester McMonkey McBean with a contraption to put stars on the bellies of the Plain-Belly Sneetches. Proble ..read more

  The internet seems to be pointing its moral outrage this week at a woman on a plane who was captured on video doing yoga <<gasp!>> in the aisle on a plane. Another passenger took a video of the “incident” and it has gone viral, raising a discussion about what kind of behavior is appropriate on an airplane. The internet “mob” handled this the way they handle most important issues in modern society: they quickly divided into two extreme camps with opposing views: those who felt this was completely acceptable, and those who felt the woman was way out of line. Internet comments ..read more

They say that people fear public speaking more than they fear death, and I can kind of see why. Perhaps one of the most stressful, panic-inducing experiences of my life was agreeing to emcee my company’s holiday party shortly after I had joined the group. Being a somewhat experienced public speaker, I wasn’t all that nervous when they asked me if I would volunteer. I was new to the company and wanted to make a good impression, so I agreed to go along. The planning committee for the event determined that the theme would be “Magic” and so I began to develop a script and a character.  I wou ..read more

I fell in love with my wife while I was studying Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. It may be that these two events occurring simultaneously were a coincidence, but I actually think they are related in a deep way. I was studying things like the importance of positive relationships to health and happiness, the positivity resonance that love inspires, and how to recognize and appreciate strengths in other people. And I found myself recognizing and appreciating the strengths in my girlfriend, and enjoying the positivity resonance that we shared together, and appreciat ..read more

A friend I hadn’t talked to in a few years called me out of the blue the other day. “So,” she asked, “is your life as good as it seems on Facebook?” I smiled, because my life does look pretty good on Facebook. I have a beautiful family, I travel to exotic locations, I’m active and stay in good shape, etc. It all photographs very well. But I answered her honestly, “no one’s life is as good as it seems on Facebook.” On Facebook (or Instagram), I only post the best moments. I share the best pictures of myself and my family. I post the most amazing experiences that I have in my travels. I share my ..read more