Background

Why a Fun Habit? Fun can be a direct neurological route to improving our well-being. However, most adults face three significant obstacles to using fun as a mechanism to live life more joyfully:
1. Conditioned by social norms, they have come to believe that trying to have fun is childish, even inappropriate.
2. They often undervalue the mental and physical benefits of fun.
3. The counterintuitive fact that fun for busy adults requires planning and discipline puts them off, and often obscures the value of having fun.  

Aim

The aim of this session is to present the compelling scientific evidence for the life-sustaining value and importance of fun, as well as evidence-based tactics and techniques for making fun a regular part of adult life n a way that feels comfortable and authentic, not forced or phony. 

Method

The presentation will primarily teach how one can create a personal “Fun Habit” by walking the audience through the SAVOR system—a set of tools consisting of five elements: story editing, activity bundling, variable hedonics, options, and relishing. Each tool in SAVOR is empirically grounded. The presentation will highlight how research in each area can successfully be put into practice to live a more joyful life.

Outcome 

In a needed reframe of the pursuit of happiness, the audience will walk away from this revealing presentation with a framework on how to build having fun into an actionable and effortless habit—rediscovering and redefining fun in a way that is uniquely and meaningfully personal. We can’t always make ourselves happy, but we all have the agency to find ways to live healthier, more joyful, and even more productive lives by developing our own Fun Habit.