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What does evolutionary social psychology have to do with happiness? Do you remember in part 1 about certain brain processes occurring automatically to save on energy? Well, from our Spiderman-like ability to detect snakes to our overwhelming ability to get bored with new purchases, these evolutionary advantages happen ‘nonconsciously.’ This means that your brain can control your everyday emotions, actions, and decisions in a big way without you ever being aware of it.  What does this have to do with happiness? Well, the hard part about sustainable happiness is “Emotional Evanescence.” For a while, researchers never knew why or how but they observed over and over something phenomenal... That humans were extremely resilient and able bounce back quickly from adversity. As a sad example, if you were to become paralyzed in an automobile accident, studies show that you would be impacted greatly by it, but not half as long as you would intuitively imagine. You simply w...

The Evolution of Happiness Learn the affect evolution has on your happiness in 6 tiny lessons... We’ll cover a lot of evolutionary social psychology to dig up the underlying processes that hold humans back from finding sustainable happiness. So, for our first mini-lesson: what is evolutionary social psychology (ESP)?  ESP is a set of scientifically accepted assumptions that use the theory of evolution as a base. ESP posits that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have been shaped over many years of biological selection. [This simply means that, even today, we carry with us certain natural tendencies because they were once useful to survival over this long period of time.] ESP helps explain: 1) why we hold stereotypes, 2) why we get in autopilot mode on the way to work, and even 3) why we’re not still pumped up about our newest phone or gadget like the day we got it. We make sense of things in our environment and move on from them rapidly. This is because we...