It's very fitting in a class on the science of happiness that we end with a discussion
on narrative, which will really be our last substantive theme in this class. Narratives
are really symbolic structures that we use to make sense of the events of our lives,
to give them purpose and to give them beauty and aesthetic design. When you think about
this concept of narrative, it really applies to a lot of different things that we do on
a daily basis. We read fiction and we read poetry and we keep diaries and listen
to music as forms of representation that help us understand, sort of give a higher purpose
of what's happening in our lives. That's one of the motivating forces for a lot of the
different practices that you've engaged in this class from the gratitude journal to the
self-compassion letter to the three good things exercise, really all of those practices are
ways of engaging the narrative mind to kind of find meaning, purpose, and enhance your
happiness. So we like to think about narrative in two different ways. One is what you might
call the micro-narrative of life, which is how do we make sense of the stresses and the tribulations
and the frustrations of life that as you've learned put a dent in your happiness, can
increase stress, and all the problems associated with chronic stress? Thankfully, we can cite
the work of James Pennebaker, Jamie Pennebaker, at the University of Texas as really exemplary
work revealing the happiness and health benefits of writing narratives of narrating your stresses
and difficulties in life. Jamie really started with an interesting question, which is it
seems that we have this compulsion to kind of talk about life's difficulties
even to confess, to disclose our traumas to other people. Maybe there is some powerful
action that takes place in that narrating act. So Jamie has done this really inspiring
work. What he does is he finds people who are going through really the great traumas
and struggles of life and these are people who have lost spouses in the context of bereavement,
they're going through divorces, they're college students facing really traumatic sort of stressful
exams, these are people who have survived genocides and holocausts, people who lost
relatives in the 9/11 terrorists attacks. He finds people going through really stressful
traumas and he does a very simple thing: in one condition, in what he calls his expressive
writing paradigm, he has people write about the most intense feelings of that stressful
time or trauma. They narrate the experience. In the other condition, usually a control
condition, he has them think about the events, think about the temporal unfolding of that
experience. What Pennebaker finds time and time and time again is that narrating
difficulties, frustration, stresses in the simple writing expressive paradigm leads to
increased happiness, reduced stress, reduced visits to health centers, reduced depression,
even sort of better profiles of your immune system as you're handling disease. Narrating
stress is a good thing for happiness. We could think about narratives really in a second
way, this is really the groundbreaking work of Dan McAdams, which is yourself,
your identity, and who you think you are is really a story that you tell from the first
moments that we speak language until our last moments here on Earth. The self is really
a narrative. So from this perspective, what McAdams argues is that the self becomes this
really complex novel-like story that we tell about our lives here on Earth and it has propositions
and images and beliefs and feelings and memories that we fold into this really complicated
narrative. Like a novel, it has chapters, it has settings, it has characters, it has
plot twists, turns, it has big themes, vivid experiences, turning points, and the like.
And what's interesting is McAdams notes that at the heart of this narrative that we tell
are kind of classic themes that we've talked about in this class together. The themes of
harm, suffering, and compassion. Themes about harming others and seeking forgiveness. Themes
of understanding, empathizing with other people, great acts of kindness, sort of expressing
ourselves, sort of finding who we are, kind of the classic life themes, the existential
themes make their way into these narratives we tell about who we are. And what the data
show, both in McAdams' work and elsewhere, is that these stories that we tell, that we
hope have been part of this class for you, are really important to our well-being. McAdams
himself finds people who tell more vivid, engaging narratives later in life as they
age are happier. They're feeling greater purpose and meaning in life. Hazel Marcus who is an
early pioneer in this work finds the more narrated selves that we have, these possible
selves she calls them, the more we're buffered against experiences of depression, sort of
having a rich sense of narrated self is good for our mental health. Laura King has really
brought this into practical exercises with her ideal self exercise. She has students
write about, narrate, who their best self would be, say 5 years from now, and that narrative
exercise actually increases health and well-being and happiness.