Ben-Shahar speaks on stress, happiness at Hopkins

Billed as the country's preeminent "positive psychologist," Tal Ben-Shahar addressed a full auditorium in Shriver Hall on Tuesday as this year's G. Stanley Hall Lecturer in Clinical Research.

He stressed that the topic of his lecture, happiness,  was one particularly relevant to those in an academic pressure-cooker "like Hopkins."

"Stress is a pandemic, one that prevents us from being happy," he told the crowd, consisting largely of Homewood undergraduates in the midst of the midterm exam period.

Ben-Shahar holds a doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Harvard; his dissertation probed the topic of human self-esteem. He remained in Harvard after graduation to teach an undergraduate course on "positive psychology" — the academic pursuit of being happy — which grew from six students in its inaugural year to over 900 in its last, making it the most popular course in Harvard's history. A substantial amount of students attended his lecture.

"I needed a break from studying, and I figured I could use some happiness to get me through exams," freshman Julia DiMauro said.

For others, attending Ben-Shahar's lecture was out of academic interest. Students from Professor Stephen Drigotas' Introduction to Social Psychology course attended the speech to earn extra credit.

It is the Hopkins' chapter of Psi Chi, the international psychology honor society, job to appoint the psychiatric expert to present this year's G. Stanley Hall Lecture in Clinical Research, a Hopkins lecture series featuring "today's leaders in psychology," according to Phi Chi's website. G. Stanley Hall, whose academic work falls within the early canon of childhood development studies, taught at Hopkins from 1882 to 1888.

Choosing Ben-Shahar to headline this year's event corresponds with Phi Chi's initiatives this year to establish a precedent of well-being at Hopkins. In 2011, The Daily Beast placed Hopkins among the ranks of the country's "most stressful colleges," citing its high tuition, Baltimore's crime rates and the aura of academic competition. This was not the first time Hopkins has been featured on this list.

Ben-Shahar's lecture serves as the capstone of a university-wide campaign to foster happiness, manifesting Phi Chi's efforts in tandem with the Hopkins Counseling Center. The distribution of a thousand yellow "smiley-faced" pins on the Breezeway preceded Ben-Shahar's arrival in Baltimore; in the past week, a Facebook fan page, "Happier at JHU," has acquired hundreds of followers.

In the speech he delivered, Ben-Shahar declined to reference Hopkins directly, but utilized terms like "academic pressure-cooker" to lament environments in which stress (and, in many cases, depression) reigns. He also made a careful point to tell students that competition is not always the answer.

"Success will not always make you happy," he asserted to the crowd.

He went on to allude to an apparent deprivation of "humanness."

"What's the foundation of a happy life? Permission to be human," he said. "The last thing I want you to think is that I experience a constant emotional high. There are only two kinds of people who don't experience the full cycle of emotions: psychopaths and people who are dead."

The audience met his comment with laughter and, for some, introspection.

"I wasn't sure what to expect, but he made some valid points," freshman Alexis Gannaway, a student in Drigotas' Introduction to Social Psychology class, said following the lecture. "When we're teenagers, we think we have to close ourselves off to a lot of our emotions, and sometimes it feels like it comes back to bite us."

His lecture was not only about emotion, however. Ben-Shahar emphasized the psychological benefits of physiological activity, primarily exercise.

"Not exercising," he said, "is like taking a depressant."

He concluded his lecture by urging the audience, at the end of the day, to reminisce and highlight five "positive elements" of the preceding 12 hours.

"When I do that tonight, I know that having the honor of speaking to you all will be on my list," he finished, to the audience's applause.