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Live Happy Now

Bringing Back Summer Fun With Mike Rucker, PhD

Live Happy Now

Live Happy LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness:mental Health

4.7522 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Summer officially begins on June 20, and that’s the perfect time to bring back Live Happy’s Summer of Fun! We’ve teamed up with organizational psychologist Mike Rucker, PhD, to offer a free eight-week email course based on the principles of his book, The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life. In this episode, he explains how this course will help you learn to program your life for fun this summer — and beyond. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why making a commitment to have fun is so important to your mental health. How to make room for more fun in your life. What to expect when you commit to having a Summer of Fun.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thank you for joining us for episode 524 of Live Happy Now.

0:09.1

Summer officially begins on June 20th, so this is a great time to bring back the Live Happy Summer of Fun.

0:15.9

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week we're relaunching the popular Summer of Fun email series to help you

0:21.8

make the most of this summer. Today, you're going to hear from Mike Rucker, PhD, who partnered with

0:27.5

Live Happy to create this series. We're going to talk about how to commit to having a summer of fun,

0:33.0

why it's so important for your well-being, and how our eight-week email series can make sure that

0:38.2

you're having more fun over the next few weeks. Let's have a listen. Mike, thank you for coming back

0:43.2

on Live Happy Now. Oh my goodness. I love being here. So thanks for having me. Boys, you're so great

0:49.3

to talk to because you're one of the few people that I know who studies fun.

0:54.5

And what a great career pursuit that is.

0:57.2

You know, it's like, I'm going to study fun.

0:59.0

So I wanted to find out, I don't think I've ever asked you this question.

1:02.1

Like, what made you realize the importance of prioritizing fun?

1:08.6

Yeah, so my story really is being an early part of the International Positive

1:15.3

Psychology Association. When that started in 2000, right, she sent me high and Marty Segglement,

1:21.7

you know, brought all these folks together, was lucky enough to be, you know, one of those early

1:27.0

folks. And rightfully, we were all

1:29.1

looking at happiness, right? Because that at the start, I think as an ideal, trying to figure out

1:35.1

how we can make the world happier was a good goal. We ultimately called it thriving because

1:40.8

we added elements of subjective well-being, right? You know, like academics,

1:44.8

we have to make everything so calm. I'm working with some academics now with regards to fun,

1:50.0

and I feel like in the book, the fun habit, I made fun fairly easy. You know, we'll just get real

...

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