There’s an awesome podcast I listen to often called The Happiness Lab by Dr Laurie Santos. She is a professor at Yale University and conducts a most-wanted course there on… you guessed it, happiness. We discussed this briefly before here at this link.
Despite teaching a course on happiness, she found herself slipping – often caught in the rigour of her day, barely getting time to take a break, or even a breath, as it would seem. “Is that what happiness looks like?”, she kept asking herself. So she decided to have a fun-intervention, aka a fun-tervention.
But she had to figure out what Fun meant first. And she enlisted the help of a Research Expert in… Fun (nice job, no?).
Long story short, there are 3 aspects to fun:
1. Playfulness, i.e. you do something well but without caring for the outcome, you enjoy it
2. Connection, i.e. you are drawn to what you do, you are connected to it, and
3. Flow, i.e. you are in a state where it ‘flows’, and time seems to have stood still
In the things we do daily, are we having fun? Apparently we can train ourselves for it – even if it means looking for fun in the more mundane things in life. And maybe this last part is the real secret.