Broadcasting Happiness

Broadcasting Happiness is an encouraging resource that will help you boost your health and happiness in your relationships, work, and community by showing you how to unlock the power of positive words and stories.

Humans have been telling stories since the dawn of time. Our early ancestors’ cave writings are the perfect example. What began as simple drawings has evolved into the mass media that we know today.

Unfortunately, the news usually isn’t great at making you feel optimistic. Just recently their coverage of the Coronavirus outbreak has people hoarding toilet paper and cowering in fear!

But not all bad events need to be shared with such dramatization and negativity. Take CBS’s Happy Week for example. During the 2008 recession, a string of bad news cut viewership in half for the network and they wanted to do something about it.

Getting some help from the great Martin Seligman, the anchors shared the news in a way that focused on solutions. This helped people get through, and CBS had more people watching after this week than in the entire previous year combined!

The power of encouraging stories is so great that it can improve your health.

In a famous study, Dr. Ellen Langer had a bunch of 75-year-olds pretending they were 20 years younger. She encouraged them to share stories, but could only tell of experiences prior to when they were 55.

The differences in results of strength, memory, and intelligence tests before and after the experiment revealed the life-changing effect they’d been through. Every one of their scores went up after only a week, including an improvement in eyesight!

If you’ve ever done a group project at school, you know how wildly different people are when it comes to working. Some are driven and organized while others are sloppy and lazy. It’s hard to get along in these kinds of settings no matter what kind of person you are. That’s why as a team member or manager, you need to use the power of priming. This is when you talk about good experiences or use uplifting words to keep people cooperating. And science shows that it works. In one study, Stanford researchers divided people into two groups. One saw negative words like “impatient” or “rude,” and the other got to see happier words like “calm” and “respectful.” They then took a language test. The first group took on some of the characteristics of the words they saw before, interrupting the researcher more often. But the second group was kinder and more cooperative, just as the scientists had primed them to be! Other research reveals that you’ll do better on an exam if you think the right way before taking it.…