[MUSIC] We face enormous
challenges with COVID-19, and like many of you, I feel uncertain, I worry about the
loss that people are suffering and a lot of fear. Just a couple of weeks ago I
was teaching at UC Berkeley and now my daughters and I and my wife are at home
like many of you, sheltering and really facing this new disrupted
life during this time. I'm Dacher Keltner,
I'm a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, a faculty director of the
Greater Good Science Center. For the past 25 years, I've studied the evolution and the neuroscience of
what makes us happy. I've taught this new science of happiness to literally hundreds
of thousands of people. What we've learned is
that although there are profound things in our lives that we really can't control, there are actions
and practices that we can take that bring
us greater strength, greater closeness in our
relationships and even strengthen our immune systems
and the rest of our bodies. In the upcoming weeks, what I'd like to do is to
share videos with you, really short videos
that introduce you to the key ideas in the
science of happiness, and then the practices
that help us find greater closeness
in our relationships, better health, and
better well-being. We'll begin with a practice that really helps us be mindful. Being mindful or mindfulness
is really defined as an accepting
non-judgmental awareness of what's in your mind and what's happening
out in the world. It can bring you calmness
and resilience and strength as we face
challenges like this. I've really been impressed with the science of mindfulness and how people facing very
serious stress and trauma, people like firefighters and first-responders and
health care professionals, when they practice a bit of mindfulness like
we're going to do, they find calm and
strengthen and resilience. We're going to do a mindful
breathing exercise. It's just going
to take a minute. We'll do five breaths
together grounded in science. If your attention drifts a bit as you do this mindful
breathing exercise, just bring it back to your
sensations of the breath. What I'd like you to
do is to sit up right, relax your body, put your hands perhaps
on your knees, and if you like,
close your eyes. I'll now lead us
through five breaths. Just take a nice deep
breath in really expanding your belly and your chest as you feel
the air fill your lungs. As you breathe out down, feel your abdominal muscles pull in and the breath
leave your nose. Breathing in, feel the breath, expand your chest
and your lungs. Breathing out,
pulling your stomach. Follow the breath as it leaves
your lungs and your nose. On this breath in, expand your chest, and
just relax your shoulders. You may feel sensations
as you breathe out of, just a relaxation and a warmth. Breathing in, this
time relax your face, your brow, your jaw. Breathing out, just feel the
body getting more relaxed. On this final breath,
let's just think about breathing in in a
relaxed way together. Breathing out, you may find your body feeling a little bit more relaxed
as you open your eyes. That's it. That's
mindful breathing. There's a ton of science around all the ways in which this
helps us handle stress. I want to thank you. I hope that as you
go through your day, maybe you'll sense a little
bit more mindfulness when you're outside or
feeling the sun on your skin or going for a
social distance walk or doing the dishes next
to a family member. I also want to wish you the
best of health and happiness. I hope that the Greater
Good Science Center can be a companion for you as we
handle these stressful times. If you're interested
in more practices like the mindful breathing
exercise that we did, go to ggia.berkeley.edu, lots of free practices. If you want to read
up on this or watch videos about different
facets of happiness, go to greatergood.berkeley.edu.
Thank you.
